The centerpiece of The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson is the autobiographical narrative of a 17th-century woman in an abusive and violent marriage. Composed at a time when marital disharmony was in vogue with readers and publishers, it stands out from comparable works, usually single broadsheets. In her own words, Mary recounts various dramatic and stressful episodes from her decades-long marriage to Robert Hampson and her strategies for dealing with it. The harrowing tale contains scenes of physical abuse, mob violence, abandonment, flight, and destitution. It also shows moments of personal courage and interventions on the author's behalf by friends and strangers, some of whom are subject to severe reprisals. Mary wrote her story to come to terms with her situation, to justify her actions, and to cast herself in a virtuous light. The accompanying discussion of her life, drawn from other sources, provides chilling evidence of the vulnerability of seventeenth-century women and the flawed legal mechanisms that were supposed to protect them. Readers are also invited to consider in what ways the self-portrait is accurate and what elements of it may be considered fabrication. Malay's archival efforts have thus rescued a compelling and complicated voice from the past.

England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.

No one shapes our heritage or affects our legacy like our mother. Most people know Leonard Sweet, one of the world’s most influential evangelicals, as a sharp cultural critic who helps us see how to get in front of the future rather than be bowled over by it. One of his greatest influences was his mother, a groundbreaking (and sometimes controversial) minister who defied convention while honoring tradition. In this exceptionally personal work, Len Sweet opens his mother’s memory box, and in the process he helps us all embrace the future with confidence while tethering us to a faith that transcends time. Through Len’s experience, we all will better understand and process how our own heritage affects our legacy. An ideal resource for mothers, adult children, and families seeking resources to set up their kids to flourish.

This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. Scholars of early modern English literature and history have increasingly found that an understanding of how people in the past thought about and used the law is key to understanding early modern familial and social relations as well as important aspects of the political revolution and the emergence of capitalism. Judicial or forensic rhetoric has been shown to foster new habits of literary composition (poetry and drama) and new processes of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. Accordingly, historians, critics, and legal historians come together in this Handbook to develop accounts of the past that are attentive to the legally purposeful or fictional shaping of events in the historical archive. They also contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the place of forensic modes of inquiry in the creation of imaginative fiction and drama. Chapters in the Handbook approach, from a diversity of perspectives, topics including forensic rhetoric, humanist and legal education, Inns of Court revels, drama, poetry, emblem books, marriage and divorce, witchcraft, contract, property, imagination, oaths, evidence, community, local government, legal reform, libel, censorship, authorship, torture, slavery, liberty, due process, the nation state, colonialism, and empire.

A comprehensive study of the pervasive misogyny that left women behind while British society moved toward the Age of Enlightenment. Although the worlds of science and philosophy took giant strides away from the medieval view of the world, attitudes to women did not change from those that had pertained for centuries. The social turbulence of the first half of the seventeenth century afforded women new opportunities and new religious freedoms, and women were attracted into the many new sects where they were afforded a voice in preaching and teaching. These new and unprecedented liberties thus gained by women were perceived as a threat by the leaders of society, and thus arose an unlikely masculine alliance against the new feminine assertions, across all sections of society from Puritan preachers to judges, from husbands to court rakes. This reaction often found expression in the violent and brutal treatment of women who were seen to have stepped out of line, whether legally, socially or domestically. Often beaten and abused at home by husbands exercising their legal right, they were whipped, branded, exiled and burnt alive by the courts, from which their sex had no recourse to protection, justice or restitution. This work records the many kinds of violent physical and verbal abuse perpetrated against women in Britain and her colonies, both domestically and under the law, during two centuries when huge strides in human knowledge and civilization were being made in every other sphere of human activity, but social and legal attitudes to women and their punishment remained firmly embedded in the medieval.

For centuries, historians have speculated about the life of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh. Dominant depictions show her either as a maternal figure to her younger brother Robert Boyle, one of the most significant scientists of his day, or as a patroness of the European correspondence network now known as the Hartlib circle—but neither portrait captures the depth of her intellect or the range of her knowledge and influence. Philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, and religious authorities sought her opinion on everything from decimalizing the currency to producing Hebrew grammars. She practiced medicine alongside distinguished male physicians, treating some of the most elite patients in London. Her medical recipes, political commentaries, and testimony concerning the philosophers’ stone gained international circulation. She was an important influence on Boyle and a formidable thinker in her own right. Drawing from a wealth of new archival sources, Michelle DiMeo fills out Lady Ranelagh’s legacy in the context of a historically sensitive and nuanced interpretation of gender, science, and religion. The book re-creates the intellectual life of one of the most respected and influential women in seventeenth-century Europe, revealing how she managed to gain the admiration of diverse contemporaries, effect social change, and shape contemporary science.

This concise and stimulating book explores the history of gender in England between 1500 and 1700. The second edition has been thoroughly revised to include new material on global connections, masculinity and recent historiography. Amid the upheavals of the Reformation and Civil Wars, gender was political. Sexual difference and women’s roles were matters of public debate, while social and economic changes were impacting on work, family and marriage. The rich archives of law, state and family testify to the complex configurations of patriarchal order and resistance to it. Gender in Early Modern England provides insight into gender relations in a time when a stark hierarchy of gender co-existed with a surprising degree of female capacity, great potential for challenge and confrontation, and a persistent sense of the mystery of the body. Documents include early feminist argument, law, midwives’ books, recipes, protest, sexual insults, cross-dressers, women escaping slavery, royal favourites and petitions. With a chronology, who’s who, glossary, guide to further reading and previously unpublished archival documents, Gender in Early Modern England is the perfect resource for all students interested in the history of women and gender in England between 1500 and 1700.