Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603

by Dr Susan E. James

2015 · Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Contributing an original dimension to the study of women in 16th-century England, this pioneering work examines the largest corpus of women’s private writings available: their wills. Through an intensive analysis of more than 1200 wills, women from all parts of the country and all strata of society are revealed as articulate, opportunistic, and capable individuals who, despite legal and cultural limitations, exercised authority over their own lives and influenced the lives of their heirs after their death.

Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England

by Dr Adrian Wilson

2013 · Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

This book places childbirth in early-modern England within a wider network of social institutions and relationships. Starting with illegitimacy - the violation of the marital norm - it proceeds through marriage to the wider gender-order and so to the ‘ceremony of childbirth’, the popular ritual through which women collectively controlled this, the pivotal event in their lives. Focussing on the seventeenth century, but ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, this study offers a new viewpoint on such themes as the patriarchal family, the significance of illegitimacy, and the structuring of gender-relations in the period.