Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (review)

285 meet the heavy hand of divine justice in the plays. In the Chester cycle, for instance, The Harrowing of Hell and The Last Judgement depict minor characters drawn from daily life: a dishonest ale-wife, a corrupt merchant and judge, w h o are damned for their crimes against the commonweal. If the cycle plays represent not just the vision of social wholeness but also that vision undermined, the characters that are marginalised within the plot are the most likely to excite dissident readings of the plays and perhaps the most logical sites from which to substantiate this argument. This book provides an instructive and engaging take on late medieval texts and society. Even where evidence of actual dissident responses to cultural material is not available the analysis thoroughly establishes the potential for those responses. In the process it provides an ample argument for its inclusion in the library of all those interested in the social history and literature of this period and in theorising issues of performance, representation and reception. Denise Ryan Department of English and Theatre Studies Australian National University Stretton, Tim, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xv, 271; 2 maps, 1 figure, 5 tables; R.R.P. AUS$110.00. The title of this book promises more than it provides, since Dr Stret principally concerned only with a selection of petitions brought before the court of requests. H e makes it clear at the outset that his object is to 'explore women's experience of litigation' and to clarify the nature of disputes and the language and arguments of the pleadings. H e is well aware of the problems this involves since w o m e n , like men, routinely used legal counsel, w h o were all male, but he consciously adopts Natalie Zemon Davis's approach of shifting attention from the events to the manner of their description. Courts which employed English bill procedure are particularly useful for this, since although the rhetoric employed m a y not have been significantly different from the arguments 286 Reviews put orally by counsel in c o m m o n law courts, they are written and available. Moreover, although Requests had a limited area of jurisdiction, the fundamental concerns of its clients focused on issues basic in all courts—inheritance, maintenance and debt to which procreation, fornication and adultery were constant subtexts. Stretton is seeking new insights in a complex and difficult area by looking at the materials preserved in a court which has been neglected because of the problems it presents and he provides a valuable study which is in some ways groundbreaking. H e starts with a useful chapter on the background of women's legal rights and the current state of play in the historiography of the subject, looking at their position in various courts as they have been represented in recent work. H e acknowledges that individual litigants were likely to use whatever court or combination of courts was most likely to serve their purposes. This is followed by an interesting chapter on the way in which society viewed w o m e n w h o went to law—both in literary and polemical genres of writing and in the attitude of judges to their active appearance in court. H e then proceeds to an analysis of his selected cases. Here he runs into some problems. Each central law court tended to have a fairly specific defined role and particular business, but the Masters of Requests were primarily empowered by the crown to relieve the pressure of private suits for special assistance from the crown, which gave the Masters a limited latitude. Stretton does not notice that this administrative role of diverting individual suits from the monarch was reiterated by proclamation in 159495 , when it was ordered that 'no suitors should come to the court for any private suit except their petitions be indorsed by a master of requests', an aspect of their work Stretton ignores. Requests was clearly to some extent a Court, like the Exchequer of Pleas, where access depended on the individual's...