Human Empire: Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 by Ted McCormick

had to deal with petitions for separation and maintenance; Oliver Cromwell personally ordering alimony and also empowering Chancery to do so. Other Puritans attacked this course, saying that if dissolving a marriage were to become too easy, it would undermine the institution and the “subjugation” of wives. A chapter about the advent of private bills of divorce in Parliament after the monarch’s Restoration in 1660 concludes the book. Kesselring and Stretton’s monograph is now required reading on the English history of separation and divorce.