Definition
A Latin term from Roman law meaning "to turn aside," "to go away from," or "to leave." In its primary legal application, divertere described the act of a woman departing from her husband — the unilateral physical separation that constituted or initiated dissolution of the Roman marriage. The term is most significant as the etymological and conceptual root of divortium, the Roman law of divorce.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not a current English word; survives only in technical, historical, and legal Latin contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English entry; treated as a Latin term belonging to legal and classical scholarship.
The word's Latin root — meaning simply to turn aside or divert — carries no inherent legal freight in ordinary usage. Its legal significance is entirely a product of Roman domestic law, where the physical act of a wife leaving the marital home was formalized into a term of art describing the dissolution of the matrimonial bond.
Common Confusion
Divertere should not be confused with its derivative divortium. Divertere describes the act — the departure itself — while divortium refers to the legal institution and status of divorce that developed from that act. Researchers encountering divertere in primary Roman law sources should resist reading back into the term the elaborate procedural and property consequences that attached to divortium as Roman law matured. The two terms operate at different levels of abstraction.
Why It Matters in Research
Divertere is primarily a source-reading term rather than an operative legal concept. Researchers will encounter it when working with Digest sources — particularly Dig. 5.1.42 and Dig. 9.2.27.30 — and in treatises or commentaries that trace the Roman law foundations of divorce and marital dissolution.
The key navigational point: divertere appears in Roman law texts as descriptive of the wife's act specifically. Roman dissolution of marriage could operate in multiple ways depending on the form of marriage, but Burrill's usage confirms that classical sources associated divertere with the wife's departure in particular. Researchers should be alert to this gendered asymmetry when reading sources that use the term without explanation.
For researchers tracing the genealogy of Anglo-American divorce law, divertere is a gateway term. Common law and ecclesiastical divorce doctrine drew selectively on Roman law concepts, and understanding what divortium meant — and how it derived from the simpler act described by divertere — helps explain why English ecclesiastical courts framed separation and divorce in the procedural terms they did.
Researchers working in comparative family law, canon law history, or the history of women's legal status will find divertere appearing in contexts that illuminate how Roman law conceptualized female agency in marital dissolution. The term is evidence that Roman law recognized, at minimum at a descriptive level, that a wife could effect separation through her own physical act of departure — a point with doctrinal significance when tracing how later legal systems assigned agency in divorce proceedings.
Do not expect to find divertere used as a live term in English-language case law or statutes. Its appearance is confined to historical, comparative, and Roman law scholarship.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry. His treatment is compact but precise: he identifies divertere as Roman law terminology, glosses it accurately as "to turn aside; to go away from; to leave," confirms its specific application to a wife's departure from her husband, cites Digest authority, and flags the variant form divortere as the etymological bridge to divortium.
What Burrill provides well: the definitional core, the Digest citations, and the etymological connection to divortium. What Burrill does not develop: the legal consequences that attached to the act in Roman law, the distinction between different forms of Roman marriage and how divertere operated within each, or the term's relationship to the husband's corresponding capacity to effect dissolution. Researchers who need that context should move from Burrill's entry directly to divortium and to primary Roman law sources.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus covers this term. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a starting point and supplement it with Romanist scholarship on divorce in classical and late Roman law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: DIVORTIUM