We seek expressions of interest in participating in a one-day workshop on the theme of ‘crime and conjugality’ in European history prior to c. 1800, with the aim of producing an edited collection of essays on the topic thereafter. 

Context: Marriage is a social institution with complex functions and meanings that are neither transparent nor unchanging. It does much to determine many women’s legal capacity, social agency, and rights; it has shaped and been shaped by deeply gendered, patriarchal relations of power between and among women and men. As such, it has long been a site and source of conflicts both personal and political. The conversations at our one-day workshop will contribute to the historical analysis of this culturally significant pattern of social action by exploring its relationship with criminal law in the pre-modern past.  

The long history of marriage in Europe has been described as a shift from sacrament to contract but criminal law played parts in its regulation throughout. Even when canon law was the primary regulatory framework for ‘sacramental’ unions within Europe, the criminal laws of secular authorities also shaped marriage and the ways in which it served as an instrument in a wide field of power relations, well before state control and civil marriages came to dominate. We want to draw together a group of scholars whose work will afford new perspectives on marriage and its relationship with other social and political structures by looking comparatively at how criminal law helped define the institution before and during its early, haphazard ‘secularization’.  

The ultimate aim is a volume of essays in which individual chapters will examine how criminal law policed who could marry and how: which close personal relationships counted as conjugal? Other chapters will study how marriage altered criminal responsibility for acts otherwise understood when committed by the unmarried: what did marriage make lawful or unlawful? We aim to have chapters that explore the criminal law’s role in marriage both before and after the sixteenth-century religious reformation, in both civil and common law jurisdictions, and into the encounters that defined the colonial era, through to the emergence of civil marriage regimes. The collaborative, comparative format of a collection of essays by experts in the histories of different times and places seems the best way to examine the varied histories of this subject. Collectively, the papers will highlight some of the ways criminal law helped construct normative, functional distinctions between conjugal and non-conjugal relationships in pre-modern Europe. 

Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to the following: 

Abduction/forced marriage 

Adultery 

Bigamy 

Child Marriage 

Concubinage 

Legitimacy/bastardy 

Restrictions on unions that crossed legal, national, racial, religious, sexual, social or other boundaries in ways deemed criminal  

Polygamy/plural marriage  

Spousal/intimate partner violence 

Spousal homicide 

Marital status and criminal responsibility: behaviours made lawful or unlawful or differently categorised depending on the status of the actors (e.g., for men, theft from or the sexual or physical assault of women, and for women, spousal homicide and infanticide). 

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, with an eye to a possible contribution to the intended essay collection, please send a working title and a brief abstract (c. 300 words) to both organisers by 15 September 2025. 

While the workshop will be free to attend, we are unfortunately unable to cover travel or accommodation costs for participants.   

Contact addresses for the organisers: Gwen Seabourne (g.c.seabourne@bristol.ac.uk) and Krista Kesselring (krista.kesselring@dal.ca) 

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