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Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice in Britain, 1300–1700: An Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2019

Alexandra Shepard  and
Tim Stretton
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Abstract

This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional boundaries that shaped litigation strategies, the constraints surrounding women's appearance as witnesses in court, the gendered differentiation of rights determined by primogeniture and marital property law, and the boundaries between legal and extralegal activity. Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced approach, it rejects the construction of women's litigation simply as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms and also urges caution against overestimating or oversimplifying the choices available to women in legal disputes or their latitude to operate as autonomous individuals. Gender intersected in British courts with locality, resources, jurisdiction, social status, and familial, religious, and political affiliations to inform different women's access to justice, which involved negotiations between unequal actors within various constraints and in complex alignment with multiple and often competing interests.

Type
Introduction
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 58 , Special Issue 4: Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice in Britain, 1300–1700 , October 2019 , pp. 677 - 683
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

The editors thank Garthine Walker and Patricia Skinner for their contributions to the Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice workshop that gave rise to this special issue.

References

1 This collection of articles originated in a workshop held at Cardiff University in April 2016, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice: Britain and Ireland, c. 1100–c. 1750 (AH/L013568/1).

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9 Stretton, Tim, “Coverture and Unity of Person in Blackstone's Commentaries,” in Blackstone and His Commentaries: Biography, Law, History, ed. Prest, Wilfrid (Oxford, 2009), 111–27Google Scholar; Stretton, Tim and Kesselring, Krista J., eds., Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World (Montreal, 2013)Google Scholar.

10 Churches, Christine, “‘The Most Unconvincing Testimony’: The Genesis and Historical Usefulness of the Country Depositions in Chancery,” Seventeenth Century 17, no. 2 (September 1996): 209–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13 Braddick, Michael J. and Walter, John, “Introduction: Grids of Power: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society,” in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Braddick, Michael J. and Walter, John (Cambridge, 2001), 1–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Amussen, Susan Dwyer, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar.

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15 Churches, “Women and Property,” 179.

16 Dolan, Frances E., True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bailey, Joanne, “Voices in Court: Lawyers’ or Litigants’?,” Historical Research 74, no. 186 (November 2001): 392–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Medieval scholars of women, by contrast, have paid local courts considerable attention; see, for example, Miriam Muller, “Peasant Women, Agency and Status in Mid-Thirteenth- to Late Fourteenth-Century England: Some Reconsiderations,” in Beattie and Stevens, Married Women and the Law, 91–113; Bardsley, “Peasant Women and Inheritance of Land.”

18 Stretton, Tim, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998), 180–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.