Early Modern Women’s Life-Writing and English Law / Lotte Fikkers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fikkers, Lotte, Author.

Series:

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture : ECSRC

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (240 p.) : 5 black and white illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2025]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Despite the plethora of early modern life-writing (diaries, (auto)biographies, memoirs), it remains difficult to reconstruct a picture of everyday female experience - as women chose to tell it - from this extant corpus. The vast majority of examples are penned by men; only a handful of texts by early modern women are immediately recognisable as autobiographies and diaries, such as Anne Clifford’s Diaries (1616-19) and Anne Halkett’s ‘True accountt’ (c. 1677/8). Moreover, the few examples we do have are not representative of women’s life stories in general, as there are no known diaries or autobiographies by women below the level of the middle ranks. Early Modern Women’s Life-Writing and English Law shows how legal records form an alternative type of life-writing, especially for women, and that thousands of lives are yet to be uncovered from the legal archives.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgements

Series Editors’ Preface

Notes and Conventions

Introduction: Tracing Early Modern Women’s Lives

Chapter 1 Constraints of the Courtroom and its Records

Chapter 2 Courtship and Marriage

Chapter 3 Sex and Slander

Chapter 4 Widows

Chapter 5 Afterlives: Case Studies in the Production of Alternative Truths

Conclusion: Shared Strategies in Women’s Self-Representation

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 20. Mar 2025)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781399538152

1399538152

OCLC:

1506549667