Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603

Authority, Influence and Material Culture

Susan E. James (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

332 Seiten

2015
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-4724-5382-2 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

Contributing an original dimension to the significant body of published scholarship on women in 16th-century England, this study examines the largest corpus of women’s private writings available to historians: their wills. In these, female voices speak out, commenting on their daily lives, on identity, gender, status, familial relationships and social engagement. Wills show women to have been active participants in a civil society, well aware of their personal authority and potential influence, whose committed actions during life and charitable strategies after death could and did impact the health of that society. From an intensive analysis of more than 1200 wills, this pioneering work focuses on women from all parts of the country and all strata of society, revealing an entire population of articulate, opportunistic, and capable individuals who found the spaces between the lines of the law and used those spaces to achieve personal goals. Author Susan James demonstrates how wills describe strategies for end-of-life care, create platforms of remembrance, and offer insights into the myriad occupational endeavors in which women were engaged. James illuminates how these documents were not simply instruments of bequest and inheritance, but were statements of power and control, catalogues of material culture from which we are able to gauge a woman’s understanding of her own reality and the context that formed her environment. Wills were tools and the way in which women wielded these tools offers new ways to look at England in the 16th century and reveals the seminal role women played in its development.

Susan E. James is an historian and independent researcher. She received her PhD from Cambridge University and is the author of Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Ashgate, 1999), The Feminine Dynamic in English Art (Ashgate, 2008), and a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

Introduction; 1: The Performance of Death; 2: Identity and Remembrance; 3: Women's Work; 4: The Dispersal of Assets; 5: The Dispersal of Assets; 6: The Dispersal of Assets; Conclusion

Erscheint lt. Verlag	8.5.2015
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	748 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
	Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	1-4724-5382-4 / 1472453824
ISBN-13	978-1-4724-5382-2 / 9781472453822
Zustand	Neuware