MRP: Love, sex, & family
Contents
Love sex & family bibliography
This bibliography is extremely selective from the vast potential literature. It focuses on books largely from the last twenty years or so (post 1991) which have direct relevance to an interpretation of the agency of Elizabeth Dallison, her positioning within her gentry and mercantile family, and the constraints in which she operated, especially in the areas of law, commerce, and estate management
Aristocracy
- In Harris' introduction she refers to Stretton (1998) and Erickson (1993), who she describes as exploring the lives of women from "the middling ranks" in the late C16th and early C17th, but suggests that her own work is unique in its focus on women from knightly and noble families, "whose activities had political, as well as familial significance."
- This jars with her subsequent reference to the rich literature of the last thirty years dealing with elite medieval and early modern English women, and the positioning of herself between two methodological and interpretive poles - at the one end, scholars focusing on aristocratic womens' contributions to their families and involvement in political, religious and social life (e.g., Nancy Roelker, Retha Warnicke, John King, Caroline Hibbard, Jennifer Ward, Magdalena Sanchez), with biographies and biographical essays contributing to this approach; and at the other end, scholars emphasising "the intensity of female subordination and the narrow scope of women's experience" (e.g., Sarah Hanley, Christine Klapisch-Zuber) (Harris, 2002:14).
- Harris positions herself between these two poles as she describes them, emphasising agency but also patriachal structural constraints (Harris, 2002:15). Her methodology is based upon a large scale statistical and qualitative analysis, using over a 1,000 PRC wills, over 1,000 letters, 551 cases in Chancery, Star Chamber, and the Court of Requests, and smaller numbers of marriage contracts, household and estate accounts, crown grants, private bills, and inventories. In addition she created a genealogical database of 1200 aristocratic couples and children (Harris, 2002:16).
Art
O'Day, Rosemary, 'Family Galleries: Women and Art in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries' in Huntington Library Quarterly, Autumn 2008
Gender
Fraser, Antonia, The weaker vessel (London, 1984)
Shoemaker, Robert, Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (1998)
Letter writing
Daybell, James, Women letter-writers in Tudor England (Oxford, 2006)
- Based on a study of 3,000 manuscript letters
- Daybell is good on the context, purpose, and degree of singularity or multiplicity of target readers of the letter writers he studies (see for example his discussion of the Countess of Shrewsbury's corpus of letters (Daybell, 2006:2)
- He challenges the strawman that C16th letters written by aristocratic, gentry and mercantile women were "domestic, parochial, and non-political" (Daybell, 2006:3)
Love
Rickman, Johanna, Love, lust, and license in early modern England: illicit sex and the nobility (Aldershot, 2008)
- See Ch. 4 'Love and letters: Mary Wroth and William Herbert', pp.141-172
Wright, Nancy E., Women, property, and the letters of the law in early modern England (Toronto, 2004)
Lettmaier, Saskia, Broken engagements (XXXX, XXXX)
Sex
Property & women
Brewer, John and Susan Staves (ed.), Early modern conceptions of property (London, 1995)
Staves, Susan, Married women's separate property in England, 1660-1833 (Harvard, 1990)
Law & women
Erickson, Amy, Women and property in Early Modern England (London, 1993)
Stretton, Tim, Women waging law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998)
Women's agency
O'Day, Rosemary, Women's Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies (Harlow, 2007)
