This is an original, accessible, and comprehensive survey of life as it was experienced by most Englishwomen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The authors examine virtually all aspects of women's lives: female life-stages from birth to death; the separate culture of women, including female friendship and feminist consciousness; the diverse roles of women in the religious and political movements of the day; and the effect of prevailing perceptions of gender differences. Comparisons are made between the makeshift economy of poor women and the occupational identities, and preoccupations, of the middling and elite classes. This fascinating and well-illustrated book reconstructs the mental and material world of Tudor and Stuart women. It will become the standard text on the subject.
These late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts describe female servants' experiences of work in early modern London. This volume exposes the contractual underpinnings of domestic service, suggesting female servants were an important support of emergent capitalism in the early modern metropolis. The depositions in this volume show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour rather than a pre-marital life phase. Voices of the non-literate in this volume are clear and distinct as they present their working and personal circumstances.
This collection of essays examines women's involvement in politics in early modern England, as writers, as members of kinship and patronage networks, and as petitioners, intermediaries and patrons. It challenges conventional conceptualizations of female power and influence, defining 'politics' broadly in order to incorporate women excluded from formal, male-dominated state institutions. The chapters embrace a range of interdisciplinary approaches: historical, literary, palaeographic, linguistic and gender based. They deal with a variety of issues related to female intervention within political spheres, including women's rhetorical, persuasive and communicative skills; the production by women of a range of texts that can be termed 'political'; the politicization of marital, family and kinship networks; and female involvement in patronage and court politics. Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450-700 also looks at ways in which images of female power and authority were represented within canonical texts, such as Shakespeare's plays and Milton's epic poetry. The volume extends the range of areas and texts for the study of women, gender and politics, and locates women's political, social and cultural activities within the contexts of the family, locality and wider national stage. It argues for a blurring of the boundaries between the traditional categories of the 'public' and the 'private,' the 'domestic' and the 'political'; and enhances our understanding of the ways in which women exerted political force through informal, intimate and personal, as well as more official, and formal channels of power. As a whole the book makes an important contribution to the reassessment of early modern politics from the perspective of women.
This concise introduction provides an overview of the state of research on women's history in the early modern period. It emcompasses a guide to the historiography, an assessment of the major debates, and information about the varied sources available for women's history in this period. Arranged around familiar themes - the family, work, religion, education - the book presents a comprehensive survey of the social, economic and political position of women in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women’s reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women’s Bookscapesin Early Modern Britain brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women’s figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women’s readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women’s libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume’s three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence—lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example—as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship. Interdisciplinary, timely, cohesive, and concise, this collection’s fresh, revisionary approaches represent substantial contributions to scholarship in early modern material culture; book history and print culture; women’s literary and cultural history; library studies; and reading and collecting practices more generally.
This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.
This ground-breaking book reveals the economic reality of ordinary women between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. Drawing on little-known sources, Amy Louise Erickson reconstructs day-to-day lives, showing how women owned, managed and inherited property on a scale previously unrecognised. Her complex and fascinating research, which contrasts the written laws with the actual practice, completely revises the traditional picture of women's economic status in pre-industrial England. Women and Property is essential reading for anyone interested in women, law and the past.
Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals.
