3.498 divorce, etc. (49)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Tue, 26 Sep 89 21:10:04 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 498. Tuesday, 26 Sep 1989.
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 89 08:18:41 EDT
From: N.J.Morgan@VME.GLASGOW.AC.UK
Subject: Divorce, PhDs and jokes
Divorce was carried out either in ecclesiastical courts (which did not
permit remarriage) or by private Act of Parliament (which did, but which were
slow and very expensive) prior to 1857, and the passing of the
Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed for proceedings by judicial process.
The grounds for divorce were adultery, desertion or cruelty - 'a husband
could obtain divorce for adultery, but a wife only for adultery with
cruelty or desertion'.
This all cribbed from D M Walker's Oxford Companion to Law (have you
not a copy in North America ?)
More to the point the availability or otherwise of legal process would
have been secondary to social considerations - the characters were well aware
of the law, even if this one class of students were not.
Olsen is quite right on PhDs, and as I understand it (he was in Glasgow
at the weekend) did not mean that computers were a 'bad thing', nor
that consulting available texts or datasets was a 'bad thing', but
that for the student who is working from scratch, learning principles
of database design (or whatever) in addition to computational techniques
places an undue burden on their research. One additional observation
based on experience here is that it is hard to find an examiner
who is prepared to see what merit such work has added to the thesis.
And finally on displaced hearts etc. - do I take it that the draconian
section of Humanist's readership are now banning jokes ?
% Nicholas J Morgan %
% Department of Scottish History %
% University of Glasgow % Where's the rest ???
% Glasgow %
% G12 8QH %