Doing the paperwork: the emotional world of wedding certificates

Love—or emotion more generally—is not just a biological feeling or instinct, but a cultural practice produced through the intersection of material conditions and discursive contexts, enabling its interrogation across time and place. Marriage lines—or wedding certificates—were a key ‘emotional object’ for eighteenth-century Scots that enabled the production of romantic love. This article explores how material conditions and objects, like marriage lines, enabled love’s varied historical forms. In the context of eighteenth-century Scotland, it helped constitute a romantic love that was outward-looking and community-orientated, whilst reinscribing gendered and social hierarchies.