Tumblr crosspost (9 March 2021)

[anghraine]

themalhambird responded to this post:

#this is interesting #although if you look at early modern english drama - Shakespeare's stuff #Johnson's #Middleton and others #i feel like the idea of marriage being at least in part about romantic ties is pretty clear

I replied:

Re: your tags—yeah, the idea that romantic marriage was not really a concept until The Rise of the Companionate Marriage™ is very easy to disprove in literature and even history, which is one of the problems with it. But I think it’s pretty clear that the concept as it manifested in, say, the mid-nineteenth century was shaped by quite different cultural norms and assumptions than in the late sixteenth/early seventeenth, and that romantic marriage as the dominating force of all family life was something that, while never unknown, grew very much more prevalent over time.

themalhambird responded:

#neat! #thanks for the clarification :D