An engaging mishmash of general history and personal histories of marriage, by the Canadian author of A History of Celibacy (1999) and A History of Mistresses (2003).
Pick any page from this study of mostly North American rituals of courting, nuptials, marriage, sex, child-raising and divorce, and you could a wide range of intriguing nuggets: relative ages at which various societies from Chinese to Mormon married off their girls; details of the satisfying marriage of Martin Luther and former nun Katharina von Bora; the ruptured family units of Native American children removed to residential schools; the popularity of so-called Boston marriages (depicted nicely by Henry James in The Bostonians) between like-minded women who resisted conventional marriage but weren't necessarily lesbian; the scarcity of sponges used for contraception by Northern women during the Civil War because of the cut-off in supply from Florida.
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