Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England

by Wright, Nancy E.; Ferguson, Margaret W.; Buck, A. R.

• ISBN13: 9780802087577
• ISBN10: 0802087574
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern Englandexamines the competing narratives of property told by and about women in the early modern period. Through letters, legal treatises, case law, wills, and works of literature, the contributors explore women's complex roles as subjects and agents in commercial and domestic economies, and as objects shaped by a network of social and legal relationships. By constructing conversations across the disciplinary boundaries of legal and social history, sociology and literary criticism, the collection explores a diverse range of women's property relationships. Recent research has revealed fissures in our knowledge about women's property relationships within a regime characterized by competing jurisdictions, diverse systems of tenure, and multiple concepts of property. Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern Englandturns to these points of departure for the study of women's legal status and property relationships in the early modern period. This interdisciplinary analysis of women and property is written in an accessible manner and will become a valuable resource for scholars and students of Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, early modern social and legal history, and women's studies.

Author Biography

Nancy E. Wright is the director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Property Rights at the University of Newcastle. Margaret W. Ferguson teaches in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. A.R. Buck teaches in the Division of Law at Macquarie University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	3	(22)
NANCY E. WRIGHT WITH MARGARET W. FERGUSON
Part One: Credit, Commerce, and Women's Property Relationships
1 Temporal Gestation, Legal Contracts, and the Promissory Economies of The Winter's Tale	25	(25)
PATRICIA PARKER
2 Putting Women in Their Place: Female Litigants at Whitehaven, 1660-1760	50	(16)
CHRISTINE CHURCHES
3 Women's Property, Popular Cultures, and the Consistory Court of London in the Eighteenth Century	66	(29)
DAVID LEMMINGS
4 The Whore's Estate: Sally Salisbury, Prostitution, and Property in Eighteenth-Century London	95	(26)
LAURA J. ROSENTHAL
Part Two: Women, Social Reproduction, and Patrilineal Inheritance
5 Primogeniture, Patrilineage, and the Displacement of Women	121	(16)
MARY MURRAY
6 Isabella's Rule: Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure	137	(25)
NATASHA KORDA
7 Marriage, Identity, and the Pursuit of Property in Seventeenth-Century England: The Cases of Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Wiseman	162	(21)
MARY CHAN AND NANCY E. WRIGHT
8 Cordelia's Estate: Women and the Law of Property from Shakespeare to Nahum Tate	183	(18)
A.K. BUCK
Part Three: Women's Authorship and Ownership: Matrices for Emergent Ideas of Intellectual Property
9 Writing Home: Hannah Wolley, the Oxinden Letters, and Household Epistolary Practice	201	(18)
JENNIFER SUMMIT
10 Women's Wills in Early Modern England	219	(18)
LLOYD DAVIS
11 Spiritual Property: The English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and the Dispute over the Baker Manuscripts	237	(19)
CLAIRE WALKER
12 The Titular Claims of Female Surnames in Eighteenth-Century Fiction	256	(25)
ELEANOR F. SHEVLIN
13 Early Modern (Aristocratic) Women and Textual Property	281	(15)
PAUL SALZMAN
Afterword	296	(9)
MARGRETA DE GRAZIA
Contributors	305	(4)
Index	309