Gender and Space in Early Modern England (review)

This is a fascinating book that demonstrates how 'space in early modern England was gendered in complex ways, reflecting and reproducing varied and changing articulations of gendered power, depending on the context. Space had a range of gendered meanings that were fluid rather than fixed (pp. 15-16)'. The book title claims 'England' but the focus is firmly on Essex, because from an early modern archival perspective 'Essex' is, as John Norden said in another context, the 'English Goshen'.

This book appears twenty years after Susan Amussen published her ground breaking work, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. In Amanda Flather's book, prescriptive literature is contrasted with archival evidence of the domestic, moral, and social realities of early modern life for the vast majority. This is not another book about nobility and space, grandeur and excess, but rather about the exceptional as well as the everyday for men and women in rural and urban Essex. This book is a reworking of her University of Essex PhD thesis 'The gendering of space in early modern Essex c.1580-1720' (2002). Flather's work centres on the experiences of space from c.1580 until 1720 for the period that Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford have termed 'the long seventeenth century'.

There is a wealth of detail here and the copious examples are testimony to Flather's tenacity in the archives. The archives consist of 'narrative descriptions of the ways people used and experienced their houses, churches, markets, streets and fields,' that are 'provided by presentments, depositions, informations, examinations and confessions from the ecclesiastical and secular courts, supplemented in places by evidence derived from chapbooks, ballads and diaries' (p. 10). But as Flather warns (p. 11) much of her evidence is 'in some way edited and re-worked versions of the original oral testimony'. Individual experiences of spaces in the landscape appear before us, and are, for the most, skilfully unpacked for the evidence they provide of a hierarchical and ordered society within the parishes of the Church of England. But this is not a book about non-conformists, such as Quakers, or Catholics.

In addition to an introduction and conclusion, Flather's book is divided into five main thematic chapters: Prescriptive space; Domestic space; The spatial division of labour; Social space; and Sacred space. Flather acknowledges the influence of the unpublished work of J.D. Melville on domestic space in early modern London, as well as theoretical models from fields outside of history, including cultural geography, sociology and architecture. Influential works such as Doreen Massey's Space, Place and Gender (1994), Anthony Giddens' Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice (1979), as well as the more recent works on early modern England including Mike Braddick and John Walter's Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (2001) and Alex Shepard's Meanings of Manhood (2003), underpin Flather's own theoretical model. With some success, she applies her theoretical approach to early modern spatial history. The theoretical underpinnings throughout the book are useful but at times they do get in the way of Flather's thick description.

The book is driven by 'dual themes', with 'on the one hand the theories about gender and space that formed part of the ideological framework for men's and women's lives', and 'on the other the way people experienced space and imposed their meanings upon it' (p. 1). The crux of the book is to explore (p. 174) 'how individual women and men interpreted patriarchal notions of gendered space in the course of daily life', and to show 'that space was vitally important for the marking out and maintaining of the hierarchy that sustained social and gender order in early modern England.' The final two chapters divide the early modern world into first a social, and then a sacred landscape. But here I would question...