How have ideas of marriage evolved in Western culture? How has its influence changed, and been shaped by its social and cultural conditions?

In a work that spans 2,500 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 52 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. The volumes describe the role of marriage, its contributions to society, and how it engages with matters of religion, law, society and love.

Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.

The six volumes cover: 1. – Antiquity (500 BCE - 500 CE); 2. – Medieval Age (500 - 1450); 3. – Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1400 - 1650) ; 4. – Age of Enlightenment (1650 - 1800); 5. – Age of Empire (1800 - 1920); 6. – Modern Age (1920 – 2000+).

Themes (and chapter titles) are: Courtship and Rite; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.

The page extent is approximately 1,728pp with c. 240 illustrations. Each volume opens with a series preface and an introduction, and concludes with Notes, Bibliography, List of Contributors and an Index.

Joanne M. Ferraro is Albert W. Johnson Distinguished Professor of History at San Diego State University, USA. She is the author of Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (2001), which won both the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Book Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Prize. She is also the author of Venice: History of the Floating City (2012), Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557- 1789 (2008) and Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650 (1993).