The Council of Trent defended matrimony as a sacrament, reaffirming traditional Catholic teachings, butalso putting an end to future clandestinemarriages by imposing conditions for the marriage contract to be valid, assuring the free consent of the spouses, making it public, bringing the rite under the control of the clergy, and keeping an official record of the ceremony. It forbade divorce while not condemning the practices of the Orthodox.

The conception and design of the Marriage Act 1836 was shaped by the various unsuccessful proposals for reform that were advanced between 1819 and 1835. Protestant Dissenters were deeply divided on the question of what shape reforms should take. Some proposals for reform applied only to specific religious groups, while others were general in scope. Some focused on regulating marriages in places of worship, while others proposed a new secular alternative. The challenge for lawmakers was to establish a process that was sufficiently rigorous to assuage any concerns about a new law being used as a cloak for clandestinity and sufficiently independent of the existing Anglican structures to satisfy Dissenters. The solution was found in the machinery of the New Poor Law, which provided the basis for a new system of civil registration. Yet the 1836 Act’s reliance on this machinery was to pose problems, the most pressing being that it was not yet in place in most parts of the country. The implementation of the New Poor Law had to be speeded up, generating considerable opposition, and various makeshift provisions had to be put in place for the parishes that remained outside its ambit.

Chapter 1 describes the considerable confusion that existed in relation to marriage law in Ireland. In Ireland there were not only differing views between the state and individual churches but also within religious denominations. For instance, until 1827, the Catholic church was divided into areas where the marriage definition of the Council of Trent of a valid marriage was implemented and others where it was not. Within Presbyterianism, there were groups who placed more emphasis on the scriptural definition of marriage as essentially the private vows between a man and a woman than the church leadership approved. Prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, the laity can be documented frequently defying clerical censure to marry in a manner that conformed more to social rather than religious requirements.Throughout the eighteenth century all of the main churches struggled to implement their regulations in relation to marriage. Men and women planning to marry in Ireland in the period from 1660 through to 1844 could choose from a complex array of formal and informal services.By the last decades of the eighteenth century, there are indications that all the church authorities were beginning to supervise the implementation of their respective regulations concerning marriage more stringently.

Marriage in Chaucer’s time – how it was defined, created, and who could get married – was significantly different from what it is today. Chaucer clearly knew the canon law of marriage, promulgated through preaching and enforced via the church courts. It was incredibly easy to get married (even, perhaps, unintentionally), through words or deeds, such as exchanging rings like Troilus and Criseyde, or having sex while engaged. However, divorce, in the modern sense of voluntarily ending a valid marriage, did not exist. Joan of Kent’s marriage history illustrates how a clandestine marriage, although strictly prohibited, would still be held up in court and could overturn a subsequent, properly publicised, marriage. Second marriages, to the dismay of the Wife of Bath, were regarded as lesser, as their religious symbolism was flawed. The Church wanted exogamy (marrying outside the wider kinship group) but the main concern for many people was maintaining and increasing their social status.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.