Abstract
Abstract Marriage is generally regarded as a decisive moment in the life course of individuals. As the social, but also the legal status of women and men changes as soon as they enter marriage and – by extension – their preceding wedding engagement, registers are and were being kept to record this life event in most societies. The difficulty in studying the long-term development of marriage patterns is the need for, among other things, detailed information about the marriage formation process. Most of the research on marriage patterns is based on a limited amount of data. Data either cover only a limited period (at most several consecutive decades), a limited number of variables, a relatively small number of marriages, and/or a relatively small town or region. The Amsterdam marriage banns registers are an exception to the above, in terms of content, focus area, and volume. In this article, we present the dataset results of the Citizen Science project ‘Ja, ik wil!’ [‘Yes, I do!’], involving over 500 participants retrieving a wide range of socio-economic data on over 94,000 couples from the rich source of the historical Amsterdam marriage banns registers, covering every fifth year between 1580 and 1810.
Highlights
Marriage, including present-day partnership registration and samesex marriage, has, throughout history, generally been regarded as a decisive moment in the life course of individuals, as is demonstrated by the recent multivolume series A Cultural History of Marriages (Behrend Martínez, 2019; Ferraro, 2019; Ferraro & Pedersen, 2019; Klaiber Hersch, 2019; Puschmann, 2019; Simmons, 2019). the popularity of marriage in the EU has clearly been declining over the past two centuries, in the regions around the North Sea changes in marriage behavior already occurred much earlier
In the Netherlands, a specific subtype of marriage pattern, the Western European Pattern, can be discerned. This subtype is characterized by 1) higher ages at first marriage than in other parts of Europe and the world, 2) a comparatively small age gap between bride and groom for first-married couples, 3) a considerable number of men and women staying unmarried and 4) neolocality of the newlyweds, which was most pronounced in the North Sea area (Low Countries and England)
The empirical basis of research into marriage behavior in the early modern Low Countries can be expanded through a dataset based on the vast collection of marriage banns registrations
Summary
Marriage, including present-day (formal) partnership registration and samesex marriage, has, throughout history, generally been regarded as a decisive moment in the life course of individuals, as is demonstrated by the recent multivolume series A Cultural History of Marriages (Behrend Martínez, 2019; Ferraro, 2019; Ferraro & Pedersen, 2019; Klaiber Hersch, 2019; Puschmann, 2019; Simmons, 2019). In the Netherlands, a specific subtype of marriage pattern, the Western European Pattern, can be discerned. This subtype is characterized by 1) higher ages at first marriage (especially for women) than in other parts of Europe and the world, 2) a comparatively small age gap between bride and groom for first-married couples, 3) a considerable number of men and women staying unmarried and 4) neolocality (the formation of an own household, independent of the couple’s parents) of the newlyweds, which was most pronounced in the North Sea area (Low Countries and England).
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