A Living Law: Divorce Contracts in Early Modern Russia

Résumé En

The study of divorce and remarriage practices throughout the medieval and early modern Christian world encounters serious difficulties due to the lack of sources. Deeply influenced by the church doctrine of indissolubility of marriage, Catholic societies, and even Protestant ones, do not constitute propitious contexts for the study of these practices, for when they existed, people tended to hide them. Eastern Slavic Christendom presents a somewhat different case. Here a relatively liberal Byzantine marriage law prevailed for a very long time. In certain countries it continued to function well into the 19th century. In Russia, the authorities started to develop an uncompromising church doctrine and powerful law enforcement mechanisms in the 1720s, and progressively transformed their divorce and remarriage policy into one of the most draconian in Europe. But prior to this shift, the tsar's subjects, in contrast to Western Christians, did not have an especially strong incentive either to repress a need for divorce and remarriage or to conceal these practices. While early Russian sources of this kind are astonishingly scanty, the cause for this silence should be imputed more to the historically unfavorable conditions in the creation and preservation of family archives than to the rarity of the practice. New sources presented in this article make it possible to reassess the knowledge about divorce and remarriage practices in early modern Russia.