Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684-1830.

Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684-1830. By Leah Leneman (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. vi plus 354pp.).

Despite the methodological richness and variety spawned by social history, new and old, archival research remains the predominant model for historical scholarship. A previously unexplored cache of papers thus continues to represent an exciting opportunity. Just such an opportunity forms the basis for Leah Leneman's Alienated Affections. The vagaries of the legal record in Scotland left intact full documentation of 904 divorce and 175 separation actions brought before the commissary court between 1684 and 1830, virtually the entire population of such cases. Leneman explores these documents for what they can tell us about, in the words of her subtitle: "The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation." Her book makes an important addition to a growing body of work on the history divorce based on evidence gleaned from the judicial records of individual cases.

The attraction of these materials lies in their rich detail about the lives of men and women embroiled in marital litigation. The preservation of transcripts of legal arguments and testimony, as well as letters and other kinds of evidence, appeals to the narrative responsibilities and propensities of historians. Lememan dedicates the bulk of Alienated Affections to delineating the salient characteristics of Scottish divorce and separation cases in terms of the central elements of legal procedure and the social identity of the litigants. The chapters take up the role of witnesses in proving adultery as well as the deployment of other types of evidence, such as letters. Leneman contrasts contested cases with uncontested cases and those suits that achieved success with those that did not. She devotes separate chapters to nullity and separation, paying particular attention to the role of domestic violence in marital separation. She also considers the special situation of English couples seeking redress in Scotti sh courts. The discussion of the divorce cases themselves, which formed by far the largest number of cases, groups them by the social identity of the litigants (aristocratic, gentry, 'common'). Chapters focusing on particular types of cases, conducted at a higher level of generalization but replete with numerous examples, alternate with chapters that give a more extended treatment to individual cases.

Leneman exercises a justifiable caution about making too large claims for the divorce and separation cases heard by Scottish courts. The author points out the dangers of using the evidence of divorce litigation as a basis for making inferences about the state of marriage in the society at large. These marital failures, after all, comprised only a small group of the far larger universe of Scottish married couples, even unhappily married couples, who lived their lives out of sight of the historical record. The relationship between the experiences of these couples, documented in such detail, and the experiences of all these other couples must remain uncertain. Eschewing speculation, Leneman draws the most unexceptional of conclusions: that, for instance, suits for divorce on the grounds of adultery could be motivated by "a strong sense of betrayal" or that "the desire to remarry" (p. 328) motivated most divorce suits.

Nevertheless, Leneman has brought before us virtually the universe of Scottish divorce cases during this period. The behavior of errant spouses paraded before the bench would reveal the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable relations between husbands and wives in the eyes of witnesses, judges and the spouses themselves. As a public forum for private failures, the courtroom record would illuminate the boundary between the two in law and legal practice. The chapters do treat these issues briefly and with circumspection, but Leneman could have been bolder in pushing her analysis in this direction.

This account of Scottish divorce outlines the unique divorce procedures of Scotland and presents numerous examples of unhappily married couples who pass before the reader, telling their own story with copious quotations drawn from the documentary record. This approach, which appears to link the reader through the intermediary of the author and her access to the archives directly to the historical actors, can create a nice sense of immediacy, but it confines us to the conceptual world in which they lived. Victor Bailey's recent book on suicide, 'This Rash Act': Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (1998), shows the rich possibilities of employing an analytical framework not rooted in the raw materials of the narratives preserved by judicial records. Leneman does not place her contribution to a growing body of historical literature on divorce in the context of the work done by others studying the topic in different times and places. For instance, her discussion of marital cruelty does not refer to A. James Hammerton's Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (1991) or to David Peterson Del Mar's What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence Against Wives (1996).

Social history, and the history of the family in particular, has tended to produce its greatest successes with either the magisterial overview or the exquisitely nuanced microhistory. On the one hand we have Roderick Phillips' Putting Asunder (1988) and Lawrence Stone's Road to Divorce (1992). On the other hand, we have the examples of Natalie Davis, Carlo Ginsberg, Steven Ozmenr, and Edward Berenson. The individual case, recorded in a detailed narrative, has an undeniable human interest appeal as well. Lawrence Stone, of course, has tried to have it both ways with his publication of two volumes of individual cases, Broken Lives (1993) and Uncertain Unions (1992), to accompany and to extend the analysis he offered in Road to Divorce. But standing the general and the particular side-by-side does not, by itself, constitute an analytical technique. A growing body of empirical studies, to which we can now add Leneman's study of Scottish divorce, increases the need to find ways to interweave the two. Exploiting t he archival riches of the judicial record in such a way as to produce analytical insight and at the same time to preserve the narrative integrity and power of individual cases that form the evidential basis for the analysis remains the central challenge of the history of divorce.