When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (review)

Reviews 185 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Shakespeare’s plays form the heart of Bicks’argument because ‘they provide us with the most nuanced treatments of the early modern midwife’, in large part, she suspects, because actual midwives never appear on stage in his works. Unlike other playwrights who portrayed the midwife as a bawdy, materialistic and often drunken woman, Shakespeare mentions the incompetent midwife only once in passing, in Twelfth Night. Thus, Shakespeare’s midwives can be considered only in terms of how they are perceived by the characters, not as characters themselves. Because of the paucity of actual midwives in Shakespeare’s plays, Bicks is forced to draw out references to them in interesting ways. When Puck lurks in the gossips’ bowl (filled with caudle, the drink of the birthing room) Bicks sees him as a spying masculine presence in an all female gathering, and his muffling of the wise old aunt’s speech as a fantasy of male intrusion and censorship in this female space. Paulina, in The Winter’s Tale, becomes ‘the play’s “midwife”’, not only because she is mockingly referred to as such by Leontes, but because she knows and reveals the truth about Perdita’s birth, even though she was not present at it. In Richard III, Elizabeth expresses to Rivers and Grey her fear that ‘if the King miscarry’ Richard will become protector; Bicks then makes reference to Richard as being ‘like a murderous midwife’, who wreaks acts of violence upon royal bodies with ‘powers of deforming midwifery’. Perhaps some of her examples are rather forced, but the book is an interesting exploration of the role of midwives as set out in contemporary texts. Deborah Williams Faculty of Law/Discipline of History The University of Western Australia Capp, Bernard, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003; cloth; pp. ix, 398; RRP £60; ISBN 0199255989. Professor Bernard Capp’s aim in this book is to explore ‘some of the myriad ways in which women negotiated the constraints embedded in the patriarchal society of early modern England’ (p. v). He has concentrated on those he terms ‘ordinary women’, ‘humble women’, women below the elite. His study draws upon prescriptive writings and personal records, but depends heavily on two main bodies of source material: early modern vernacular literature and court records. What has Capp’s new reading to offer us? Only in the preface does he explicitly 186 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) discuss his sources, what they might reveal, and their lacunae. The use of written records for the lives of the ‘ordinary’ women, most of whom were illiterate, raises interesting methodological issues which Natalie Zemon Davis pinpointed many years ago: how might we understand the surviving records, and how read them against the grain of the predominantly male perspective? Specific studies have explored the representations of women in popular culture. Narratives about criminal women, for instance, have been illuminatingly analysed by Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars (Ithaca, 1994). Popular literature is, of course, a subject with which Capp is thoroughly familiar. Indeed, he has made it his own through his pioneering study of almanack books, and his study of John Taylor the water poet. But this popular literature of chap books, ballads, and almanacks is a difficult source for the lives of ‘ordinary women’, for it is heavily misogynistic, and tells more of men’s attitudes to women than of women themselves. Capp’s title When Gossips Meet focuses his study on a concept of women dear to popular writers: married women endlessly gadding about the city, making merry with their friends and spreading scurrilous tales. Capp’s second main source is court records. He has analysed ecclesiastical and secular court records, and other archival materials from six counties offering many fresh and interesting stories. Like other historians, he has found that the church court records provide a rich body of evidence for the study of gender relations. Martin Ingram pioneered the use of the church court records in his important doctoral dissertation and subsequent monograph, and SusanAmussen’s insightful study, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988...