[a. F. émancipation, f. L. ēmancipātiōn-em, n. of action f. ēmancipāre to EMANCIPATE.]
1. Roman Law. The action or process of setting children free from the patria potestas.
1651. W. G., trans. Cowel’s Inst., 29. Paternall Jurisdiction is dissolved also by Emancipation.
1696. Phillips, Emancipation hath the same reference to Children, as manumission to Servants.
1880. Muirhead, Gaius Dig., 486.
2. a. The action or process of setting free or delivering from slavery; and hence, generally, from restraints imposed by superior physical force or legal obligation; liberation. Often used with reference to the freeing of Roman Catholics from the civil disabilities imposed on them by English law. Catholic Emancipation Act: the popular designation of the Act 10 Geo. IV. c. 7 (1829), by which those disabilities were removed.
1797. Burke, Affairs Irel., Wks. (1812), IX. 454. The Opposition … connects the emancipation of the Catholicks with these schemes of reformation.
1835. Thirlwall, Greece, I. viii. 312. Emancipation of Helots was not unfrequent.
1860. Motley, Netherl. (1868), I. i. 6. A harvest of civil and religious emancipation.
1872. Yeats, Growth Comm., 254. The royal monopoly … was for the age an emancipation rather than a restriction of labour.
b. transf. and fig. Setting free, delivering from intellectual, moral or spiritual fetters.
a. 1631. Donne, Serm. (1640), iii. 27. Redeeming, Emancipation, delivering from the chaines of Satan.
1774. T. Warton, Hist. Eng. Poetry (1840), III. 403. A certain freedom and activity of mind … followed the national emancipation from superstition.
1841–4. Emerson, Ess. Poet, Wks. (Bohn), I. 166. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men.
1855. Macaulay, Hist. Eng., IV. 607. From the day on which the emancipation of our literature was accomplished, the purification of our literature began.
1874. Morley, Compromise (1886), 105. The great spiritual emancipation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
