Context
The immediate spark for Milton's writing of the tracts was his desertion by his newly married wife, Mary Powell. In addition to the testimony of early biographers, critics have detected Milton's personal psychosexual situation in passages of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. However, Milton's commonplace book reveals that he had been thinking about divorce beforehand, a fact that qualifies the biographical explanation.
The broader context lay in the hope that Parliament would reform England's virtually nonexistent divorce laws, which was unusual for a Protestant country. Having inherited Catholic canon law, England had no formal mechanisms for divorce (as in Catholicism, marriages could be annulled on the basis of preexisting impediments, like consanguinity or impotence, or separations could be obtained). However, divorce may have been unofficially condoned in cases of desertion or adultery. On the whole, England remained "the worst of all worlds, largely lacking either formal controls over marriage or satisfactory legal means of breaking it".
Read more about this topic: Milton's Divorce Tracts
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