How did the Sinitic empires of the Qin and Han interact with their neighbours before the adoption of the concept of international law from the West, following the establishment of the nation state with fixed frontiers in the late seventeenth century? The dominant model is the concept of ‘tribute’ first outlined by John K. Fairbank based on the foreign-relations practices of the late imperial Qing empire. This chapter argues that is incorrect. Apart from engaging in military action, the early East Asian empires followed the ways in which states had related to each other for centuries prior to the establishment of the empires, i.e. by accepting hostages, which developed into the giving of pledges (both used the same term, zhi), and in establishing marriage relations. The earlier ritual of ‘covenant making’ was replaced by a new legal instrument, the binding yue ‘agreement,’ a form of contract. Although local and regional authorities gave ‘prestations’ to the central court in imperial times, it is argued that ‘tribute’ (gong) was not significant until the later Han, when, on the basis of the mention of tribute in two canonical texts, it was incorporated into Confucian world view.

This chapter explores how considerations of private international law affected marriage and gender relations during the Mongol occupation of China, in the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). I first address matters of jurisdiction and choice of law that arose in Yuan China and border areas when lawsuits involved non-Chinese. It demonstrates the willingness of Mongol Yuan officials to consider non-Chinese law in adjudication and how this process could be complicated by facts on the ground. The section reveals under Mongol rule a form of ‘transnational everyday life’, as other scholars have termed it, and the disadvantages that often accrued to women in these circumstances. Then I demonstrate how the Chinese encounter with Mongol rule and the resulting ‘foreign’ elements introduced into legal practice brought about changes in traditional, codified, Chinese marriage law. Finally, I address the Mongol use of strategic marriages in their interpolity relations both during the united world empire and in the Yuan dynasty. These interpolity marriage relations were crucial to Mongol successes during their conquests and in their efforts to maintain sovereignty over conquered peoples.

Maconchy’s elder daughter Anna Dunlop, née LeFanu, provides detailed personal recollections. Maconchy’s childhood, studies, marriage to William LeFanu and early success is covered by memories that she shared with her daughter, including the struggle with tuberculosis.

From the Second World War onwards, Dunlop’s own reminiscences demonstrate that alongside her professional life, Maconchy was an affectionate, caring and maternal figure. She was skilled domestically: cooking and preserving, dress making and gardening. Wartime and evacuation were isolating. However her marriage and family life was a happy and fulfilling one and from the nineteen fifties she once again balanced this successfully with an increasingly busy professional life. Dunlop writes that her mother seldom took a break, but with her husband returned to Ireland for holidays whenever they could.

Dunlop left home for university in 1957, where her reminiscences end. Her conclusion notes that Maconchy was full of energy in all she undertook, for her family and for other composers.

This essay situates Bowen’s fiction in relation to various early and mid-twentieth-century currents of thought about human sexuality. These include emergent ideas about sexuality and consciousness derived from sexology, Freud, and Nietzsche, along with evolving perspectives on homosexuality and heterosexuality, especially marriage, in intellectual and popular culture. In contemporary literary culture, these ideas were refracted through debates about censorship and modernist arguments for the potential of ‘serious’ literature to enact transformative and even revolutionary changes in consciousness. Bowen’s fiction exhibits an engaged but sceptical perspective on these developments, and this essay maps the various modes through which her novels, with their distinctive style, queer modern sexuality.

Roman imperial and non-Roman royal women seized the opportunities provided by frequent warfare and by the politics of court society to advance their interests and goals in novel ways in the fifth and sixth centuries. Admittedly, not all of their efforts succeeded. Nonetheless, some Roman imperial women did realize some of their goals, providing models for royal women in the wars that unfolded in the post-Roman Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy. This chapter discusses four women as case studies: two fifth-century imperial women, Justa Grata Honoria and Licinia Eudoxia, and two Ostrogothic royal women, Amalasuintha and Amalafrida. These women used the opportunities presented to them by war and the negotiations that precipitated fighting to assert political influence, demonstrating womanly agency in Late Antiquity.

Research concerning the variety of close relationships adults maintain, initiate, cease, and lose during middle and later adulthood has been fast growing in recent decades. Much of the theoretical and empirical work in this field has aimed to overcome views of older age as a time of loss and decline, both individually and socially. Moreover, recent trends have focused on the increasingly diverse experiences of the aging population. This includes not only extended life expectancy – and, importantly, extended healthy life expectancy – but also demographic changes, including larger proportions of racial/ethnic minorities attaining older age; new cohorts of openly LGBTQ adults entering mid and later life, many of whom represent the first generation of same-sex married couples; and the phenomenon of “gray divorce” and romantic repartnering in the years beyond age 50. This chapter will cover both the history and foundations of research on close relationships in middle and later life, as well as these recent trends in the field, finishing with an eye toward future directions as both the aging population and our perceptions of it continue to change.

Lancelot is the sole Arthurian romance by Chrétien de Troyes not to have been directly adapted in German. However, the integration of elements of Lancelot material bears witness to an indirect reaction on the part of German Arthurian romance to the provocative and virulent narrative tradition surrounding the Knight of the Cart. From reminiscences of the abduction of the queen in the early narratives, this chapter turns to the radical reinvention of Lancelot as a serial monogamist who works to uphold social order and consolidate Arthurian rule in Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet. It further discusses the remodelling of the fairy upbringing motif in Lanzelet and the anonymous Wigamur. Finally, the remarkable treatment of Guinevere’s abduction in Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône is considered in connection with the problematic relationship of the German Arthurian tradition with the otherworld.

According to Dazai Shundai, establishing institutions to handle various affairs is the foremost task of government. These should be fixed in place for a long period of time and be strictly upheld. In earlier times, Japan had proper institutions based on models learned from China, but with the advent of government by warriors, such institutions fell into disuse and have been replaced by provisional measures. Tokugawa Japan lacks proper institutions for a wide range of matters, a key example of which is the absence of institutions to regulate kinship relations.

Describes academic and other activities, 1933–36.

This chapter draws biographies of women out of sources chiefly concerned with their male relatives, beginning with analysis of the parallel lives of Diognete (Lysias 32) and Nikarete (Demosthenes 57). The diachronic, biographical approach illustrates how factors including age, wealth, and social status shaped these women’s relationships and their experiences of marriage, separation, widowhood, and remarriage. Bringing further women into the picture demonstrates women’s ability to construct, maintain, and make use of networks spanning the households in which they had lived, including the ability to maintain relationships with ex-husbands’ relatives after remarriage and to form help-networks including non-relatives. It shows how out of necessity, women’s social strategies differed from men’s, tending to diversification rather than consolidation. The chapter argues that a woman’s social identity was not exclusively tied to her immediate circumstances or her kyrios, but could be rich and cumulative, reflecting a lifetime of experiences and relationships.

This chapter takes as its starting point a comparison of the trajectories of two women from different generations and different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Both were to a considerable degree ‘self-made’ women, and one question raised by their narratives is how is marriage relevant to their success? The stories that these women tell are replete with ethical judgements and reflections on their own and their parents’ marriages as well as those about others. The apparently tangential significance of marriage in these stories is suggestive. Seemingly, a necessary part of a normative life course even in an unconventional scenario, marriage here takes forms that are at once accepted and also ‘transgressive’. Both women had married foreign husbands; in one case, this ended in divorce; in the other, what seemed a successful partnership endured. We see how marriage allows the expansion of convention but, paradoxically, also reinforces social norms. Indeed, at the boundaries of difference and what is acceptable, marriage has the capacity to be re-enfolded into what is normative through its conventionality. In this way, it holds a promise of transformation for individuals and families, and for wider communities and nations.

The conclusion draws together the themes of the chapters, returning to the analogy between marriage and anthropology as encounters with difference. Weaving together the stories of two protagonists encountered in the Introduction with the themes of ethical imagination and temporality, it draws out the broader significance of the everyday labour of moral imagination in kinship relations, and of marriage as a crucible of long-term social transformation. The discussion reflects on the importance of attending anthropologically to seemingly insignificant, everyday, domestic encounters and judgements, and to their cumulative effects.

Emerson describes a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies; conversational brilliance and expansion; a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived; a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak; the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend; the disappointment of a friend outgrown. His account shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others – but an equally intense awareness of what he calls in “Experience” “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” The chapter’s coda charts the opposition in “Love” between love as the experience of being “swept away” and a skeptical vision of marriage as a prison, from which sex, person, and partiality have vanished.

The arguments of the book are laid out, beginning with questions that probe the apparent obviousness of marriage as an institution. What does marriage do? How can we account for both its historical persistence and its cultural and historical variability as an institution? Rather than see it as an essentially conservative and normative institution, this book argues that marriage is, on the contrary, a crucible of transformation – of personal, familial and wider political relations. This is partly a result of the unique position it holds as an intimate relation but also a political, legal and religious one. The conventionality of marriage provides a deceptive cloak of conformity masking the elasticity of what may be acceptable to spouses, families and communities. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of marriage in contemporary Penang but draws on a range of comparative materials from anthropology, literature, films and other sources. The main themes of the book are introduced: marriage as continuity of patterns in earlier generations and, simultaneously, as divergence from these; an overview of the anthropology of marriage and its lacunae; marriage as ethical labour in and on time; and marriage as an everyday work of moral imagination. The chapters are outlined.

This chapter introduces an unexpected analogy between marriage and anthropology, both being encounters with difference that have transformative capacities – themes that are returned to throughout the book. Research on marriage in Penang recalls the author’s earlier fieldwork on kinship and domestic relations on the island of Langkawi in Malaysia in the 1980s. The chapter reflects on the author’s decades-long anthropological engagement with Malaysia and traces some of the major changes that have occurred there. It considers the very different contexts of research – rural and urban – over these years and the concomitants of a long-term anthropological commitment.

The concept of permissive law comes into play in several key passages of Kant’s writings in legal philosophy. Many scholars argue that Kant conceives of permissive laws as suspending moral demands, thus ‘permitting’ in the sense of tolerating morally wrong actions. In opposition to this view, this chapter submits that Kant takes permissive law to be a kind of moral licence. It lays the foundation of this interpretation through a reading of Kant’s discussion of permissive law in Perpetual Peace. As it argues, Kant follows Achenwall and Baumgarten in taking permissive law to be a species of prohibitive law, developing the concept of a law that specifies under which conditions certain actions are allowed. The function of the permissive law in Kant’s legal philosophy is neither to tolerate transgressions of prohibitions nor to regulate as such morally indifferent matters. As it shows, permissive laws are norms that specify under which conditions certain actions are allowed that would otherwise be forbidden. A permissive law licenses certain actions with respect to certain conditions. In the sphere of this licence, the actions are not merely tolerated, but genuinely permitted.

It is a powerful question, that of the English writer Mary Astell in 1700: ‘If all Men are born free’, she asks, ‘how is it that all Women are born slaves’? What seems at first glance to be a striking statement of women's rights, however, Astell's words turn out to be a full-on attack on the liberal political theory of the rights-theorist, John Locke. Her presumption is that no person is ‘born free’; indeed, all are born under a condition of subjection to God. As Astell knew full well, in England, marriage stripped a woman of rights, those to property and those to her own person, to her sexuality and to control over her labor. Since this chapter is interested in the history of women's rights, it is best to consider what sorts of rights might be considered. Political rights, after all, are only one kind of right. And the category of women also presents challenges: a woman's marital position determined her rights.

Maior dignitas est in sexu virilis - the male sex has more dignity: this aphorism from Justinian’s Digest seems to be the reason why ‘in many parts of our law the condition of women is worse than that of men’, as we can read in a different passage. Affirming the inferior position of women in the law, these passages are often taken as the ‘official, generally consented stance’ of early modern gendered rights discourse. They seem to show that the respective legal conditions of men and women relate to the specific, innate characters of the sexes or, perhaps, their nature. It then might seem to us today that for early modern legal thinkers justifying sexual differentiations of rights was a straightforward undertaking; we might assume that early modern law and rights worked as male instruments of female subjugation that asserted and cemented a ‘natural’ hierarchisation of the sexes, which modernity slowly came to equalise.