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Women, Status and the Popular Culture of Dishonour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Laura Gowing
Laura Gowing
Affiliation:
The University of Cambridge
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Extract

The history of honour in early modern English society has tended of necessity to focus on dishonour. The ways in which women and men were defamed, shamed and dishonoured have seemed to offer a vivid insight into how what we call ‘honour’ worked in early modern society. And yet honour and dishonour were not exactly correspondent points on the same axis of values: what was dishonouring was not necessarily the opposite of what constituted honour. This was especially true where sex was concerned; sexual conduct could be dishonouring in all sorts of ways, but rarely if ever did it confer honour. Sexual dishonour was a concept and a process with a disrupting power of its own, applied most powerfully to women.

Type
Honour and Reputation in Early-Modern England
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 6 , December 1996 , pp. 225 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1996

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References

1 On defamation see Sharpe, J. A., Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York, Borthwick Papers V (York, 1980)Google Scholar; Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 10Google Scholar; I discuss the language of slander and honour in chapters 3–4 of Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar.

2 See here Garthine Walker's and Cynthia Herrup's papers in this volume.

3 Barnes, Thomas G., ‘Star Chamber Litigants and their Counsel, 1596–1641’, in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. Baker, J. H. (1978), 9–10Google Scholar. Women suing cases as femes soles were even more often of gentry and noble status.

4 Ingram, Martin, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England ed. Reay, Barry (London and Sydney, 1985)Google Scholar; Fox, Adam, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past and Present, no. 145 (1994), 47–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 King v. Lawrence (1609), Public Record Office STAC 8 190/07, m. 14,15.

6 Robbins v. Corniche (1610), STAC 8 254/29 m. 2.

7 Abraham v. Tyckell (1609), STAC 8 036/06.

8 Fox, Adam, ‘Aspects of Oral Culture and its Development in Early Modern England’ (D.Phil, thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992), 233–4Google Scholar.

9 Nightingale v. Rotton (1611), STAC 8 220/31, m. 15.

10 Gordon & Frances v. Auncell (1623), STAC 8 153/29, m. 2.

11 PRO SP 12/269, no. 22.

12 Eliot v. Deering (1609), STAC 8 138/05. Both John and his accusers gave themselves the rank of gentlemen in court.

13 Venables v. Knight (1603), STAC 8 288/12, m. 51.

14 Taylor v. Cowane (1609), STAC 8 285/27.

15 On which ideas see Paster, Gail Kern, ‘Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy’, Renaissance Drama, n.s., XVIII (1987), 43–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stallybrass, Peter, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ferguson, Margaret, Quilligan, Maureen and Vickers, Nancy (Chicago, 1986), 123–42Google Scholar; Bennett, Judith, ‘Misogyny, Popular Culture, and Women's Work’, History Workshop Journal, XXXI (1991), 166–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miles, Margaret, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston, 1989), ch. 5Google Scholar. It is perhaps worth noting here that Elizabethan popular fantasies about the highest woman in the land, the Queen, focused not on the openness of her body but its supposed closure—her alleged incapacity for sexual intercourse: Levin, Carole, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994), 83Google Scholar.

16 Lawrey v. Dier (1616), STAC 8 202/30, m. 3.

17 Stallybrass, , ‘Patriarchal Territories’, 133Google Scholar.

18 For an analysis of the material power of misogyny in the world of work, see Bennett, ‘Misogyny’.

19 I would like to thank Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Cynthia Herrup and Sarah Waters for their comments on this paper.