Spicksley, Judith Mary Doctoral Thesis, Department of Economic
and Social History, The University of Hull, June (2001)
Marriage, during the Tudor and Stuart periods, has been, and
continues to be, the subject of a vast amount of literature.
Celibacy, on the other hand, has drawn relatively little
historical attention. In many ways, such a bias is
understandable. Marriage formed the basic economic, social and
political unit of early modem society, the estate through which
goods were produced and consumed, children educated and nurtured
and young people trained and supervised appropriate to their
gender and status. Moreover, a reading of the contemporary
literature suggests that the institution of marriage enjoyed
quasi-universal acceptance: only a minority of individuals
apparently lived out their days without ever having entered its
boundaries. Since the 1980s, however, it has been apparent that
rates of marriage fluctuated dramatically over the course of the
early modern period in general, and over the Tudor