The Impact of Prohibited Periods on the Seasonality of Marriage: Denominational Differences and Cultural Continuities Among English Settlers in Nineteenth Century Tasmania.

Peter Gunn, Independent Scholar

Assessing the impact of prohibited periods on the seasonality of marriage has been an intractable problem when access is available only to aggregate data. This paper illustrates the utility of civil registration data to resolve the issue. It does this by using the exact dates for the prohibited periods of Lent, Rogation and Advent, the exact number of days in each prohibited period, and the exact number of marriages in each year and each liturgical period for the six decades between 1840 and 1899 in nineteenth-century Tasmania. In so doing it overcomes the difficulties of apportioning cases to liturgical periods using aggregate monthly data only and reports exact measures of the degree to which adherents of the various denominations timed their marriages in response to the requirements of the churches. It uses some 51,000 marriages among UK settlers in Tasmania and their descendants. The paper also addresses the durability of marriage norms and the degree to which the new settlers evidenced cultural continuity or innovation in a new and very different climatic and social setting.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 33. Marriage Patterns and Practices: New Historical Evidence