Women, Agency and the Law, 1300–1700 ed. by Bronach Kane and Fiona Williamson (review)

The editors acknowledge a 2009 conference entitled ‘Women’s Voices: The Power of Words in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’ for stimulating the dialogue which has resulted in this exciting collection of ten essays. The desire to recover the female voice is a thread that runs throughout the volume. The preface and introduction combine to set the scene for what is a very rewarding reading experience.

In Part I, ‘Shaping Women’s Testimony’, Cordelia Beattie draws on theories of subject positions to analyse the structure and language of late medieval chancery bills and the petitioning subject, demonstrating that both writers and petitioners shaped women’s testimonies. Jeremy Goldberg’s reading of late medieval York church court records reveals female agency as he explores the idea of ‘ventriloquized’ voices, while also identifying a change in the crafting of witness statements across this period. Goldberg also discusses memory and remembrance, themes crucial to Bronach Kane’s essay, which widens the focus from York to include examples from Canterbury. Analysing women’s depositions, Kane explores the role of collective memory in representing personal memory, opening up another category of remembrance through which women could exercise authority and agency as they testified.

Part II, ‘Encountering the Law’, begins with Rosemary Horrox’s reading of a late medieval gentry widow’s will as an ‘informal’, and ultimately unsuccessful, encounter with the law. Horrox recognises a larger story of shifting allegiances and changing political fortunes within such encounters, an aspect also acknowledged in the following essay by Deborah Youngs. With an evocative title quote (‘She hym fresshely folowed and pursued’), Youngs captures both the movement across space and the agency of women who travelled from Wales to London to seek justice in Star Chamber in the early Tudor period. Young’s two case studies demonstrate how women overcame the restrictions that could prevent their pursuit of justice through the legal system. Next, Janka Rodziewicz considers women and the hue and cry in late fourteenth-century Yarmouth, arguing that it provided positive involvement in community regulation, legal systems, and a means of protection for women and their families.

Part III, ‘Women’s Voices and Women’s Spaces’ opens with Amanda Flather’s careful reading of examples of iconoclastic violence by women in early modern England, through the categories of gender and sacred space. Flather highlights how women asserted agency through speech and the treatment of material religious objects, actions that also demonstrate an active involvement in religious change. Also writing on seventeenth-century England, Bernard Capp focuses on a narrative published nearly a century after the events that it describes. Religious conviction in the face of dissent and a young woman’s desire to achieve autonomy are found in this powerful narrative that lends itself well to a reading of women’s voices and spaces. Fiona Williamson’s analysis of parish politics, the streets and thresholds of a community, and women’s voices in seventeenth-century Norwich focuses on a defamation suit between two Norwich families to read how insult was used to damage social status and sexual reputation in community disputes. To conclude, Nicole Whyte analyses how identity and agency were expressed in seventeenth-century Welsh households through a study of the boundaries of household space. Reading Star Chamber cases of forcible entry and disseisin, Whyte highlights the contested nature of the household through the categories of entries, boundaries, and the idea of a moral landscape.

Stereotypes of women’s roles were established and perpetuated within legal systems but these essays show that they could sometimes be overcome through careful negotiation, resulting in examples of female agency. Chapter notes are at the end of the volume, along with a good index. There is no bibliography. The volume should appeal to a wide readership but, most especially, to those interested in women’s studies, gender studies, and legal history. [End...