A delicate topic: inability of one of the spouses to pursue a conjugal life

Abstract

The article covers a topic related to family history – impotence and divorce, insufficiently treated in historiography. In this study based on concrete examples from Bessarabia, it will be presented the daily reality in the problem of divorce granted for or the inability of a spouse to conjugal life and how the canons of the church were respected in the first half of the nineteenth century. As sources of research were used documents from the funds of the State Archives of Republic of Moldova.

Keywords

• family
• conjugal life
• inability
• impotence
• divorce
• canonic law
• Bessarabia
• Russian Empire