The social reality of the merchant community of King’s Lynn played an integral role in the formation of Margery Kempe’s self-image throughout her life. In her young-formative years, Lynn’s merchant elite imparted personal, commercial, ethical, and religious values. As the daughter of John Brunham, one of the most influential members of Lynn’s elite, the merchant community also provided Margery with status, security, comfort, and self-worth. Even in her later years as Margery formulated her holy self-image as she questioned, and eventually rejected, the role imposed on her by Lynn’s merchant culture as the daughter of Brunham and wife of John Kempe, she continued to identify herself through that culture. When asked by the mayor of Leicester in 1416 or 1417 to identify herself, Margery confidently replied, “Sir, I am of Lynn of Norfolk, a good man’s daughter of the same Lynn, who had been mayor five time of that worshipful borough and alderman also many years, and I have a good man, also a burgess of the said town, Lynn, as my husband.”

Elizabeth Poole, “the Abingdon prophetess,” makes a brief appearance, often as a footnote, in several standard political histories of the seventeenth century. However, only two attempts seem to have been made to evaluate fully her significance in the politics and religion of the period, one by Professor Firth in his edition of the Clarke Papers and one by the American scholar Dorothy Ludlow in a thesis published in 1978. Firth’s attempt was uncharacteristically superficial, and he limited himself to retailing Royalist propaganda on the subject; while Ludlow, although she brought together much of the available information, was more concerned with Poole as a woman than as a political activist. This article attempts to put her life and public activities into a wider context. It argues that her example shows that it was not impossible for women of the time to function at the highest political levels. What was significant about Poole was her failure to achieve political aims that were not in themselves unrealistic or lacking in influential support. Finally, this article postulates that female political activity at the decision-making levels was limited to a mode that could support or oppose general political strategies but was ill-suited to the furtherance of specific policies or actions.

In his Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 Clive Emsley notes that “for England the subject of the middle-class woman ‘kleptomaniac,’ as opposed to the working-class woman ‘thief,’ awaits an historian,” and casts doubt on the significance of the respectable shoplifter in England. However, not only is there ample evidence that middle-class shoplifting was a rising concern in Victorian England, it is a key example of the way in which gender ideology and medical science were constructed to solve a commercial and legal problem. Early in the nineteenth century, a respectable woman accused of shoplifting only had the option of denying her crime and blaming the shopkeeper; however, as the number of middle-class women committing retail crimes such as shoplifting and fraud increased, the issue of representation in the nineteenth century became more complicated. Woman’s role as aggressive consumer and her role in retail crime clashed with her home-centered image. In trials, canting ballads, and scathing articles, critics presented an image of the retail female criminal as greedy, fraudulent, and middle-class. Women fought against this image by denying their crimes or by participating in the creation of the developing representation of criminal women as ill rather than greedy.