Portrait of John Milton from Paradise Lost (1667), British Library, Public Domain.
The government’s current consultation (closing on 10 December) about making ‘no fault’ divorce quicker and easier might have drawn a robust contribution from the famous seventeenth-century poet and polemicist John Milton, if he were alive today. From 1643 to 1645, in the midst of the English Civil War, Milton published a series of works urgently pleading for the introduction of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. The nature of marriage was evidently an abiding concern for him, as the complex relationship between Adam and Eve is also at the core of his masterpiece Paradise Lost, first published in 1667.
The case which has inspired the current debate about divorce reform is that of Tini Owens, whose husband is refusing a divorce even though the couple are separated. Since she was unable to prove unreasonable behaviour on his part, she will have to wait until they have been separated for five years for the divorce to go through. Even when both parties do agree to divorce, under the 1973 Matrimonial Causes Act they have to wait for two years if they want to avoid attributing fault to either partner. Tini Owens’ plight has given ammunition to those arguing for a less damaging and acrimonious way for marriages to end.
Magic, Medicine, Miracles: How Reading Abbey Helped to Invent Halloween
by Professor Anne Lawrence-Mathers
By Bill Nicholls, CC BY-SA 2.0. From Wikimedia Commons.
On Saturday 27 October, I had the privilege of giving a public lecture for the Friends of Reading Abbey, in the presence of the Mayor of Reading, Councillor Debs Edwards. The event took place in St James’ Church, sited amongst the ruins of the medieval abbey.
By Ron Baxter, from Corpus of Romanesque Scuplture.
The lecture explored the relationships between medicine, magic, and miracles in medieval culture, using examples from surviving books and records from Reading Abbey. For my grand finale, I suggested that the abbey played an important role in spreading the Feast of All Souls in England, and in creating the later-medieval ‘season’ of Hallowmass (leading towards Halloween). It was exciting to talk about all this while standing beside an elaborately carved stone, which was probably part of the abbey church itself.
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