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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.4 (2000) 662-663



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Book Review

Women in Early Modern England 1550-1720


Women in Early Modern England 1550-1720. By Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 480 pp. $35.00.

It is difficult to imagine a field of historical inquiry more wrought with shibboleths, developed during the past several centuries, than the history of women. Even as scholars working in the twentieth century have labored to recover, contextualize, and interpret historical women's experiences, many truisms remain. Mendelson and Crawford in writing this book as the record of their "struggle to understand the whole of early modern English history in a new way" (5)--an ambitious aim in itself--set new standards and reorient early modern women's history toward new goals.

Mendelson and Crawford's methodology gives the book a credence almost unassailable. In exposing the historical "experiences" of women (rather than constructing a female historical identity), they rely on a plethora of contemporary evidence read with a critical eye for symmetry [End Page 662] and corroboration. Women's voices emerge as a clear harmony of common experience. The authors bring the evidential weight of quantity and of variety to expose the usual and unusual happenings of early modern Englishwomen and seal them with abundant footnote citation. By juxtaposing ballads, literature, court testimony, personal letters, and economic data, the authors describe women's spheres of influence and actions in the contemporaries' own words.

The range of observation allowed by Mendelson and Crawford's technique is vast. For example, inventories informed by court records and letters expose a material culture of cloth, the dominant use of which by women in weaving, sewing, and embroidering helped to create and sustain feminine social networks, as well as shape a common female experience. The authors are able to tie the hard content of primary sources to women's environments and to their reactions within it. Almost every page suggests heretofore overlooked relationships and unstudied connections.

The authors deal with the vast range produced by dividing their discussions into four major histories, each of which they follow chronologically between 1550 and 1720. Prefaced by a synthetic discussion of notions about women in "learned" texts, Mendelson and Crawford treat the female life cycle, female culture, economic and social roles, and politics. Supported by their massive evidence, they expose the complexity of early modern Englishwomen's lives through the analytical prisms of gender, class, occupation, material culture, getting and spending, and politics.

In the end, Mendelson and Crawford find that the fabric of women's lives changed little during the "long seventeenth century." That is, though larger changes did transpire during the period, women's lives changed only to the limited degree necessary to maintain extant relationships with larger society. Only with the broad acceptance of notions of polity, as expressed by John Locke, when political theorists began to construct civil rights as exclusively male, did women see a significant change. Undoubtedly, some will quarrel with specific conclusions presented by the authors; but to do so successfully, they will have to face the authors' evidentiary base and the interpretive methodology that informs it.

This splendid book, well written with sparkling prose, shows how a methodology rigorously applied can destroy old presumptions--in this case, the professed lack of historical sources about early modern women's lives. It also shows how methodology can open up new avenues of research. Thus armed, Mendelson and Crawford have achieved their ambitious aim and taught us much about the historian's craft.

Robert L. Woods, Jr.
Pomona College

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