Tag Archives: Medieval divorce

The Rest of the Story on Those Seven Honest Women (Medieval Mondays #5d redux)

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Janna G. Noelle

They’re not who you think they are

It remains to this day the most incredible piece of medieval research I’ve turned up, even if I’ve since learned it’s not completely true.

In previously Medieval Mondays posts, I’ve written at length about medieval marriage.  This in turn led me to write about medieval divorce.

Divorce (technically annulment of the marriage in its strictest sense) was a matter at the sole discretion of the Church, whose preference was almost always to keep marriages together.  As such, the Church generally only granted divorces for six specific reasons.

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On the Say of Seven Honest Women (Medieval Mondays #5d)

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Janna G. Noelle

Duty calls

Marriage is tough; this is the case no matter what period in history one considers.

Medieval marriages, though, as discussed in my three previous posts on this topic, were all the more difficult for the numerous challenges that arose at every stage of their formation.

Yet another difficulty of medieval marriage was hard it was to go about ending one.  This was neither easily nor readily done given that, according to Eileen Power, author of Women in the Middle Ages, “Divorce in the modern sense did not exist in the Middle Ages.” (p. 33).

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