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Gender Construction in Early Modern England and the Conduct Books of William Whately (1583–1639)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Jacqueline Eales
Jacqueline Eales*
Affiliation:
Christ Church College, Canterbury.
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Extract

Conduct books, or household manuals offering advice about marriage and the ordering of domestic relationships, attained their greatest popularity in early modern England between the late sixteenth century and the Civil War. Many of these works, including William Whately’s popular A Bride-Bush, which ran into three editions between 1617 and 1623, and William Gouge’s influential Of Domesticall Duties, which first appeared in 1622, originated as sermons and were written by puritan preachers. They are also a valuable source of information about the construction of ideal masculine and feminine behaviour in the early modern period. At the start of A Bride-Bush, which was based on a marriage sermon, Whately asserted ‘I will make the ground of all my speech, those words of the Apostle Paul, Ephes. 5. 23. where hee saith, The Husband is the Wives head.’ Towards the end of the book he noted that the male sex is ‘preferred before the female in degree of place & dignity, as all men will yeeld that read what the Scriptures speake in that behalfe’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 34: Gender and Christian Religion , 1998 , pp. 163 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998

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References

1 Whately, William, A Bride-Bush, or a Wedding Sermon: compendiously describing the Duties of Married Persons: by performing whereof, Marriage shall be to them a great Helpe, which now finde it a Little Hell (London, 1617), pp. 1, 40 Google Scholar. I would like to thank Mrs S. Crabtree, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Kent, Mrs Sheila Hingley, Canterbury Cathedral Librarian, and the Cathedral Library staff for their help in the preparation of this paper, which was written with the aid of a research grant from Christ Church College, Canterbury.

2 Schochet, G. J., Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar; Sommerville, J. P., Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Amussen, Susan Dwyer, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; eadem, , ‘Gender, family and the social order, 1560–1725’, in Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John, eds, Order and Disorder in Early Modem England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 196–217 Google Scholar. For conduct books more generally see Doriani, Daniel M., ‘The Godly Household in Puritan Theology, 1560–1640’ (Westminster Theological Seminary [USA], Ph. D. thesis, 1986)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Prof. Conrad Russell for drawing this thesis to my attention.

3 Whately, Bride-Bush (1617), pp. 36–7, 43.

4 Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven and London, 1995)Google Scholar; Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modem London (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar; Pollock, Linda, ‘“Teach her to live under obedience”: the making of women in the upper ranks of early modern England’, Continuity and Change, 4 (1989), pp. 231–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wall, Alison, “Elizabethan precept and feminine practice: the Thynne family of Longleat’, History, 75 (1990), pp. 23–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Willen, Diane, ‘Godly women in early modern England: puritanism and gender’, JEH, 43 (1992), pp. 56r–80.Google Scholar

5 Davies, Kathleen M., ‘The sacred condition of equality – how original were puritan doctrines of marriage?’, Social History, 5 (1977), p. 578 Google Scholar; Fletcher, Anthony, ‘The Protestant idea of marriage in early modern England’, in Fletcher, A. J. and Roberts, Peter, eds, Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modem Britain (Cambridge, 1994), p. 180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For the medieval inheritance on the subjects of sex and marriage see firundage, James A., Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the changes contingent on the Reformation in England see Carlson, Eric Josef, Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994).Google Scholar

7 To the King’s Most Excellent Majestic, The Humble Petition of the Ministers of the Church of England, Desiring Reformation of Certain Ceremonies and Abuses of the Church (London, 1641), BL Thomason Tracts E170 (4), which asks for ‘King Edwards statute for the lawfulness of ministers marriage to be revived’, p. 3.

8 O’Day, Rosemary, The English Clergy, the Emergence and Consolidation of a Profession, 1158–1642 (Leicester, 1979), p. 162.Google Scholar

9 Schücking, Levin L., The Puritan Family (London, 1969)Google Scholar; , W. and Haller, M., ‘The puritan art of love’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 5 (1941–2), pp. 235–72.Google Scholar

10 Hill, Christopher, Society and Puritanism in Pre-revolutionary England (London, 1964), pp. 450–1.Google Scholar

11 Davies, ‘Sacred condition of equality’, see also the revised version, ‘Continuity and change in literary advice on marriage’, in R. B. Outhwaite, ed., Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London, 1981), pp. 58–80; Margo Todd, ‘Humanists, puritans and the spiritualized household’, ChH, 49 (1980), pp. 18-34; Margaret Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modem Society (London, 1995).

12 Fletcher, ‘Protestant idea of marriage’, p. 179.

13 DNB, William Whately.

14 William Whately, A Care-Cloth: Or a Treatise of the Cumbers and Troubles of Marriage (1624), p. 23.

15 Ibid, pp. 43. 44.

16 Ibid., pp. 77–8.

17 Ibid, p. 22.

18 Whately, Bride-Bush (1619), sig. Air. Whately refers here to ‘certaine larger notes, which I had lying by me of that subiect’.

19 Ozment, Steven, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 80–99 Google Scholar; Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 146.Google Scholar

20 PRO, SP14/121/7; Whately, Bride-Bush (1623), sig. A3r-v.

21 Whately, Bride-Bush (1617), p. 22.

22 Doriani, ‘Godly Household’, pp. 304–13; Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, pp. 93–6, which points out (at p. 95) that continental Catholic casuists permitted ‘moderate’ beating of wives and that this is ‘one of the few areas of marital relations in which a Catholic- Protestant divide can be detected’. For church court cases involving wife-beating see Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, p. 144, and A. J. Willis, Church Life in Kent, being Church Court Records of the Canterbury Diocese, 1559–1565 (London, 1975), p. 61.

23 Whately, Bride-Bush (1619), pp. 106–9, 123–5, 169–73, 198, 210–16.

24 Whately, Bride-Bush (1617), pp. 2–3.

25 Whately, William, Prototypes, or the Primarie Precedent Presidents out of Genesis (London, 1640)Google Scholar, sig. A2r [Life of Whately by Henry Scudder].

26 Whately, Bride-Bush (1617), pp. 7–9, 33-

27 Whately, Bride-Bush (1619), pp. 184–8; PRO, Prob. n/180, fols 298v-299r.

28 Whately, Bride-Bush (1617), pp. 36, 6.

29 Ibid., pp. 29, 19, 39, 41, 39.

30 Whately, Bride-Bush (1619), pp. 191–2.

31 Davies, ‘Sacred condition of equality’, p. 577.

32 Heinrich Bullinger’s The Christen State of Matrimonye, which was translated into English by Coverdale in 1541, provided the starting-point for later marriage treatises in England and it contained an entire chapter (12) centred on the argument that ‘the pope in forbyddinge/the spiritualitie to mary/hath done agaynst God/agaynst honestie and agaynst right’.

33 Whately, Bride-Bush (1619), sigs A1r-A2v.

34 Joceline, Elizabeth, The Mothers Legacie to her unborne Childe (London, 1624)Google Scholar, sig. A1r-v.

35 Guy, Nicholas, Pieties Pillar: Or a Sermon Preached at the Funerall of Mistresse Elizabeth Gouge (London, 1626), pp. 39, 41.Google Scholar

36 Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism (Philadelphia, PA, 1972; reprint of 1938 edn), p. 56 Google Scholar; DNB, Thomas Gataker.

37 Cited in Amussen, An Ordered Society, pp. 44–5.

38 This last point may explain why Whately was so concerned for the provision of widows.

39 Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation, p. 59.

40 Taylor, Thomas, A Good Husband and a Good Wife (London, 1625), p. 16.Google Scholar

41 Wall, ‘Elizabethan precept and feminine practice’, pp. 37–8.

42 See for example, Hall, Joseph, The Honour of the Married Clergy, Maintained Against the Malicious Challenges of C. E. Mass-Priest (London, 1628).Google Scholar