Women's Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook

Women's Worlds is broadly inclusive and appropriate for a wide variety of readers. The text justly claims the subtitle "sourcebook" in that the material includes carefully selected and eminently readable material from almost every area of women's lives. Scholars should find the quantity of previously unpublished archival materials useful as well as fascinating. The text is in fact so accessible that it would make an enjoyable read for the non-specialist and even the simply curious. For instructors, the readability and relevance of the selections also make the work either an excellent complete text for course study or an insightful supplementary one.

The text is divided into ten main sections of primary material with an introduction for each section and shorter critical introductions for each primary source. Of these ten main sections, the fourth, "Poverty and Property" is particularly interesting in its emphasis on apparel as a valuable commodity - one worth the hazards of stealing as well as going to court over. This section also demonstrates how women's sexuality and reproductive potential made any workplace hazardous, leaving women vulnerable for exploitation, harassment, slander, and rape, as well as the downward mobility and poverty that resulted from such abuse. However, despite oppression, women householders often held considerable if not officially recognized power.

The fifth section, "Sexual Experiences," provides sound scholarship but with a PG-13 rating. This section again takes up the theme of women's vulnerability to sexual assault in the workplace, and suggests that those who pressed charges against their assailants were unusual. " 'A simple body': Agnes Clement, 1609" and "Resistance with all her strength: Joan Brown, c. 1601" are the court records of two women who did press charges. However, despite the intermediary of the court recorder, much of women's vulnerability (as well as the vicarious salacious interest of the male court) remains palpable. I include an excerpt from the latter preceding:

...that on a certain Sunday on holy day happening about St. James tide now last past ...the articulate Thomas Heller came unto this deponent as she was in the backside of her master the articulate Thomas Quarman's house ...going to fetch a tankard of water, and took away the tankard from her, and thrust her by violence into the entry of the said house, and closing the door thereof with his heels, he by main force threw her down upon the ground, lay down upon her, and told her that he would occupy her, and earnestly entreated her to do so, and finding her in no wise consenting to his lascivious and filthy lust, he took up her clothes near as high as her girdle not withstanding any resistance she could make, which she did with all the strength she had ...and in the end seeing that this jurate at no hand would consent to his attempted devilish purpose he left her and went his way. (159-160)

Despite the fascination of all of the ten sections in Women's Worlds, the last, "Mental Worlds" is particularly engaging because of the gulf it discloses between early modern women and their twenty first century counterparts. These predominantly first- person selections demonstrate vividly how seventeenth century views on madness and the relation of the mind to the body are different from our own. These selections also demonstrate the strong part that religious guilt and fear played in mental disturbances. Many of these women experience mental illness as a lapse in religious faith and a temptation of the devil. Crawford and Gowing also astutely point out the role that fear of mortality, particularly as it related to childbirth, played in what is now classified as "mental illness." Of the several examples here, "Melancholy and spiritual trails: Dionys Fitzherbert, 1608" is a first person account striking both in terms of the intensity of "a range of delusions and eccentric behaviour" (273) also in terms of her seeming full return to a normal state of health. Fitzherbert's case is also unusual by today's standards in the seemingly innocuous prompt for distress - Fitzherbert's anxiety over not having bought her hostess, the Countess of Huntington, a New Year's present. However, even more unusual when compared to twenty first century attitudes towards mental illness is the lack of stigma attached to Fitzherbert's behavior and seeming ready incorporation back into her family as a cured and healthy member once her delusions subsided.

If I were to find a flaw in this wonderful book, it would have to be in the omission of a section on women's responses to literature and theater. However, this criticism is perhaps largely unjust as scholars consider such primary material to be virtually non-existent. One explanation for this lack of women's commentary can be found in the social stigma attached to women who read works other than conduct literature and the Bible. Those who attended the theater faced even greater attacks on their honor and chastity, as prostitution and the theater were intimately tied in the minds of many. Fortunately, Allison Findlay has begun to address this lack through a skillful interpretation of women's writing not directly related to the theater in A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (1999). A more direct approach also seems possible, one that collects the aside comments that women make about literature and the theater and then places these comments in social-historical context. One could even begin with a text included in Women's World's, "Soul and body: Mary Carey, 1650," which compares theater going with other "sinful delights":

It was the Lord's pleasure to smite me with a sore sickness (in my apprehension it was unto death) when I was about 18 years old, in the midst of jollity, when I was taking my fill of worldly contentments, and restrained my heart from nothing it fancied to follow, delighting myself, and spending my time in carding, dice, dancing, masquing, dressing, vain company, going to plays, following fashions, and the like . . . . (emphasis mine, 270 -1)

Using women's own words to describe their reactions to the theater highlights several aspects of the social-historical environment of the period that deserve more attention. First, theater during the Renaissance was not necessarily considered the "high culture" it is today. Furthermore, women both rebelled against and conformed to patriarchal authority, with the primary means of control coming (as Karl Marx argued) from the sanctity of organized religion. Nevertheless, as Women's Worlds also demonstrates, participation in organized religion could also afford women greater autonomy and voice - a complexity that renders the subject of seventeenth-century women's religious lives even richer for the mining of future scholars.