Washington’s abrupt cancellation of Lend-Lease after World War II accentuated Britain’s chronic indebtedness to the United States. Redressing Britain’s balance of payments deficit required the orientation of much domestic production for export. Textiles lay at the heart of this export drive. But workers in the cotton and woollen industries, as in the garment sector, were lacking. This chapter analyses the campaign to encourage women to enter the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, exploring why women resisted official entreaties. With tens of thousands of Britons emigrating annually, the government turned to displaced persons (DPs) in occupied Germany and Austria. In 1947, the Ministry of Labour launched ‘Operation Westward Ho’ to recruit DPs as so-called ‘European Volunteer Workers’. The majority of female recruits were channelled into textile work. The chapter concludes by exploring the tensions surrounding these female migrants, including a perception that they received too many perks and anxieties over women’s reproductive agency. Unmarried pregnant ‘volunteers’ risked deportation if they sought terminations, or invasive attempts to compel them to marry.

No single garment attracted more attention in the late 1940s than the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth, who married Philip Mountbatten in November 1947. This chapter places royal bridal attire at the centre of its analysis of postwar marriage and transatlantic conjugal connections. The Royal Wedding occurred against a backdrop of acute austerity, sparking debate on the ethics of regal pageantry during a severe cost of living crisis. Mass Observation exposed Britons’ conflicted responses to the wedding and the myth of royal ordinariness in terms of rationing and coupons constructed by the Palace. Austerity and monarchy proved difficult to reconcile. American observers took especial interest in Britain’s royal wedding, which underscored how relations between the wartime allies had been reconfigured by tens of thousands of marriages between GIs and British women. The chapter concludes by exploring the experiences of ‘GI brides’ and Americans’ preoccupation with what they wore, first as brides, then as newly arrived migrants. Judgements about dowdy, threadbare British women underscored altered power dynamics between two great powers following different postwar trajectories.

This chapter examines the relationship between Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It follows them through a wide range of domestic settings in England, Switzerland, and Italy and emphasises their collaborative literary relationship, discussing both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, conceived during the inclement summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, their jointly authored History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, and several of Percy Shelley’s poems, including Epipsychidion and The Cenci. The chapter discusses Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s essential role in editing and transmitting Percy Shelley’s works to literary history after the poet’s death.

Since its first codification in the early twentieth century, Iranian family law has followed the Shiʿi (Jaʿfarī) school of jurisprudence. In other parts of the Shiʿi world, the question of codifying Shiʿi family law has emerged more recently. This chapter argues that codification enhances the formal rule of law. In the past, family law codification was considered to conflict with a fundamental element of Shiʿi legal thought and religious practice, namely ijtihād, independent legal reasoning by qualified scholars, which makes for a living law. Based on a comparative analysis of Iranian family law and recent Shiʿi (draft) laws put forward in Afghanistan, Bahrain, and Iraq, this chapter discusses where modern Shiʿi family law is located between the “opposite” poles of the formal rule of law (where law is general, prospective, clear, and certain) and ijtihād. The findings indicate that, today, the two are not viewed as contradicting each other. Yet, while Iranian family law only serves as a limited model for other parts of the Shiʿi world, the comparison shows that Iran subjects Shiʿi family law to the formal rule of law more comprehensively than is the case in the other three analyzed countries.

Katerina Nordin utilizes both specialized legal scholarship and vernacular Islamic literature to explore the nuanced debates surrounding veiling and restrictions on sexual freedom in Islam. The chapter discusses how many Muslim women adhere to these rulings by conscious choice, while also highlighting Islam’s encouragement of sexual pleasure for both genders within marriage and emphasizing that the extent of gender segregation remains negotiable.

This chapter examines the role of the papacy in the history of marriage regulation in a long-term perspective. The core theme of corporeality is investigated between doctrine and practice. On the one hand, the body is a central good whose rights of use are mutually exchanged by the spouses within the framework of the marriage contract; on the other hand, it is a deadly burden, the place where the flesh manifests itself with its law that contradicts reason. In the light of this tension, the position of papal authority – in particular the power to bind and dissolve – is addressed by examining its pronouncements, especially the Decretales, conciliar legislation, and the publication of encyclicals and apostolic exhortations up to the most recent on the subject: Amoris laetitia, by Pope Francis I. Finally, some cases that have been dealt with by courts such as the Penitentiary, the Holy Office, and the Rota are examined.

In the late Roman empire, the papacy’s endorsement of marriage as a divine institution was already explicita. From the mid-fifth century, fundamental importance was attached to the signification by marriage of Christ’s union of the Church, a value shaping the social practice of marriage, underpinning the creation in Roman Catholicism of a marriage system unique in the history of literate societies, one which banned both polygamy and divorce. More flexible laws limited marriage within the “forbidden degrees” of relationship. The aim was to foster social cohesion. These rules could be changed, or dispensed with, in individual cases. Marriage was made by consent, and only from the Council of Trent was the presence of a priest required. Christianity in general and papal law in particular slowly transformed the relationship between slavery and marriage.

Chapter 8 employs Welby’s Meaning Triad to examine the boundary separating girlhood and womanhood under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and its repercussions on the protection of the girl child. It examines the definition of ‘woman’ in international law and the English language, and the life-cycle approach. It notes that the CEDAW fails to provide a parameter for the beginning of womanhood, thus it is not clear whether girls of all ages – young girls and adolescent girls – are covered by this treaty. It observes that female human beings located at the intersection of girlhood and womanhood may fall short of the protection of both the CRC and many provisions of the CEDAW. It applies semioethics theory and considers revising the CEDAW to undoubtedly ensure that girls are covered under this treaty, save for provisions allocating ‘adult rights’.

This chapter explores sacramental fees in respect of baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other life cycle events. One of the most significant aspects of clerical income, these fees were equally a substantial, but vital, financial outlay for the laity, which had meanings that were social, cultural, religious, and personal. This chapter argues that those on either side of the transaction could often value the money involved very differently, a finding that has an important bearing on our understanding of where the balance of power lay between Church and people. This chapter will also emphasise, through its varied examples, that sacramental fees were highly regionalised and could operate very differently depending on the parish or diocese involved.

Numerous unpublished Greek manuscripts contain the rituals of marriage as performed in diverse regions of the Byzantine world. This chapter both discusses the universal practices of weddings known across Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean and discerns unique traditions local to specific regions, like Byzantine Southern Italy or Palestine. The prayers of the marriage rite are analyzed, and attention is given to such gestures as crowning and veiling couples and to traditions previously unknown to Byzantinists, like the practice of breaking a glass at weddings, popularly understood today as a Jewish custom, as well as specific aspects of ritualized bridal costume and the roles of witnesses, or paranymphs.

This chapter analyzes the history of marriage customs in late Roman and Byzantine law and various forms of literature. Themes include laws on the age of betrothal and marriage, the rise of the legal importance of the church marriage service, and imperial weddings attested in the works of Byzantine historians and the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies.

This chapter reviews the ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish evidence to discern the marriage practices the early Christians would have known. It lays the foundation for tracing the antiquity of customs attested in the later Byzantine sources. In addition to ancient texts, this chapter examines Roman artistic depiction of marriage in frescoes and funerary art.