George IV's "Great Matter"

Erin L. Sheley, George Washington University School of Law, is publishing Adultery, Criminality, and the Myth of English Sovereignty in volume 11 of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

This article argues that in Britain over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the understanding of adultery as a tort was complicated by an accompanying discourse of what I will call “quasi-criminality.” Specifically — while formally trivialized — adultery remained linked to a threat to British kingship. The tension between the weight of relevant monarchical history and the absence of contemporary criminal enforcement created a new cultural narrative about adultery which attempted, itself, to serve a penal function. Examining the development of this discourse alongside the relevant law illuminates the complex social process through which public and private wrongs become distinguished — or conflated.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.