Women's Worlds in England presents a unique collection of source materials on women's lives in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The book introduces a wonderfully diverse group of women and a series of voices that have rarely been heard in history, from Deborah Brackley, a poor Devon servant, to Katharine Whitstone, Oliver Cromwell's sister, and Queen Anne. Drawing on unpublished, archival materials, Women's Worlds explores the everyday lives of ordinary early modern women, including their: * experiences of work, sex, marriage and motherhood * beliefs and spirituality * political activities * relationships * mental worlds In a time when few women could write, this book reveals the multitude of ways in which their voices and experiences leave traces in the written record, and deepens and challenges our understanding of womens lives in the past.

This second edition has been full updated to include the latest research, particularly on women's work, masculinity, sexual violence and global perspectives. Providing students with an up to date overview of gender relations in early modern England. In this new edition the shorter documents have been replaced with longer excepts including ones on black Londoners, Quaker women's travel, and on gendered cross-cultural encounters. Providing lecturers with meatier examples to discuss in class and students with a broader range of interesting topics to inform their seminars. Also including a chronology, who's who of key figures, guide to further reading and images it supports students in their studies at all levels of their undergraduate degree.

Womens Worlds in England presents a unique collection of source materials on womens lives in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The book introduces a wonderfully diverse group of women and a series of voices that have rarely been heard in history, from Deborah Brackley, a poor Devon servant, to Katharine Whitstone, Oliver Cromwells sister, and Queen Anne. Drawing on unpublished, archival materials, Womens Worlds explores the everyday lives of ordinary early modern women, including their:
* experiences of work, sex, marriage and motherhood
* beliefs and spirituality
* political activities
* relationships
* mental worlds
In a time when few women could write, this book reveals the multitude of ways in which their voices and experiences leave traces in the written record, and deepens and challenges our understanding of womens lives in the past.

This second edition has been full updated to include the latest research, particularly on women's work, masculinity, sexual violence and global perspectives. Providing students with an up to date overview of gender relations in early modern England. In this new edition the shorter documents have been replaced with longer excepts including ones on black Londoners, Quaker women's travel, and on gendered cross-cultural encounters. Providing lecturers with meatier examples to discuss in class and students with a broader range of interesting topics to inform their seminars. Also including a chronology, who's who of key figures, guide to further reading and images it supports students in their studies at all levels of their undergraduate degree.

Womens Worlds in England presents a unique collection of source materials on womens lives in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The book introduces a wonderfully diverse group of women and a series of voices that have rarely been heard in history, Drawing on unpublished, archival materials, the book explores women's: * experiences of work, sex, marriage and motherhood * beliefs and spirituality * political activities * relationships * mental worlds. In a time when few women could write, this book reveals the multitude of ways in which their voices have left traces in the written record, and deepens our understanding of womens lives in the past.

This volume presents a collection of source materials on women's lives in 16th and 17th century England. The book introduces a diverse group of women and a series of voices that have rarely been heard in history, from Deborah Brackley, a poor Devon servant, to Katharine Whitstone, Oliver Cromwell's sister, and Queen Anne. Drawing on archival materials, the text explores the everyday lives of ordinary early modern women, including their: experiences of work, sex, marriage and motherhood; beliefs and spirituality; political activities; relationships; and mental worlds. In a time when few women could write, the book seeks to reveal the multitude of ways in which their voices and experiences leave traces in the written record, and deepen and challenge our understanding of women's lives in the past.

`What else is woman but a foe to friendship ... a domestic danger.' These words, taken from a biblical commentary by St John Chrysostom, are frequently quoted in early modern literature, showing that sexual morality was central to the patriarchal society of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In this fascinating and original book, Laura Gowing considers what gender difference meant in the practice of daily life, examining the working of gender relations in sex, courtship, marriage conflict, and verbal disputes.

What else is woman but a foe to friendship ...a domestic danger.' These words, taken from a biblical commentary by St John Chrysostom, are frequently quoted in early modern literature, showing that sexual morality was central to the patriarchal society of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In this fascinating and original book, Laura Gowing considers what gender difference meant in the practice of daily life, examining the working of gender relations in sex, courtship, marriage conflict, and verbal disputes. Her focus is the richly detailed and previously unused records of litigation over sexual insult, contracts of marriage, and marital separation in London, c. 1560-1640. Gowing takes a new approach to these legal testimonies, reading them as texts with complicated layers of meanings in order to reveal precisely how culture, language, stories, and experience connected. Arguing that women's and men's sexual honour had such different meanings as to make them incommensurable, she reveals how, in every area of sex and marriage, women were perceived as acting differently, and with different results, from men. This book is intended for scholars and students of social and gend

Ingenious Trade recovers the intricate stories of the young women who came to London in the late seventeenth century to earn their own living, most often with the needle, and the mistresses who set up shops and supervised their apprenticeships. Tracking women through city archives, it reveals the extent and complexity of their contracts, training and skills, from adolescence to old age. In contrast to the informal, unstructured and marginalised aspects of women's work, this book uses legal records and guild archives to reconstruct women's negotiations with city regulations and bureaucracy. It shows single women, wives and widows establishing themselves in guilds both alongside and separate to men, in a network that extended from elites to paupers and around the country. Through an intensive and creative archival reconstruction, Laura Gowing recovers the significance of apprenticeship in the lives of girls and women, and puts women's work at the heart of the revolution in worldly goods.

This pioneering book explores for the first time how ordinary women of the early modern period in England understood and experienced their bodies. Using letters, popular literature, and detailed legal records from courts that were obsessively concerned with regulating morals, the book recaptures seventeenth-century popular understandings of sex and reproduction. This history of the female body is at once intimate and wide-ranging, with sometimes startling insights into how early modern women maintained, or forfeited, control over their own bodies. Laura Gowing explores the ways social and economic pressures of daily life shaped the lived experiences of bodies: the cost of having a child, the vulnerability of being a servant, the difficulty of prosecuting rape, the social ambiguities of widowhood. She explains how the female body was governed most of all by other women - wives and midwives. Gowing casts new light on beliefs and practices concerning women's bodies of the time and provides an original perspective on the history of women and gender. Laura Gowing is lecturer in history at King's College, London.She is the author of 'Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London' (1996), and, with Patricia Crawford, 'Women's Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England' (1999). She is an editor of 'History Workshop Journal'.