Rebecca Probert is a Professor at the School of Law, University of Exeter, and Specialist Consultant to the Law Commission's Weddings Project. She is author of Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (2009) and The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation: From Fornicators to Family, 1600-2010 (2012).

1. Introduction; 2. Conception, design and implementation, 1819-1837; 3. Reactions to the Act, 1837-1854; 4. Amendments enacted and reform deferred, 1855-1872; 5. Differences, divisions, and dispensing with the registrar, 1873-1899; 6. Competing conceptions of marriage, 1900-1919; 7. Consolidating complexity, 1920-1949; 8. Convergence? 1950-1993; 9. The rise of the wedding, 1994-2020; 10. The legacy of the past and lessons for the future.

Analyses marriage law's development since 1836--its complexity, failures to respond to societal change, and constraints on different beliefs.