City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London by Eleanor Hubbard (review)
- City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London by Eleanor Hubbard
Hubbard's monograph exposes the neighborly networks of rivalry, support, solidarity, and vindictiveness that shaped the early modern city. Based on close reading of several thousand scribal depositions, against an array of popular and prescriptive printed sources, she offers an intimate engagement with metropolitan life from the age of Elizabeth I to the eve of England's civil war. Written with grace and authority, this scholarly achievement makes major contributions to urban history, gender history, and the history of social interaction.
The principal primary sources for this study derive from the voluminous records of English ecclesiastical administration, especially the consistory court books of the bishop of London from 1572 to 1640. They touch on such topics as domestic arrangements and household employments, markets and manufactures, courtship, marriage, childbirth, sexual behavior and reputation, and the circumstances of aging and death. Humble deponents testified about the culture of the alehouse, conditions of service, the predations of adultery, the limits of patriarchy, and the perils of urban living. Previous scholars have used these records to explore literacy levels and defamatory language, but in this book they reveal economic challenges and social aspirations that defy conventional stereotypes. Hubbard argues that female status and reputation hinged as much on "economic worth, hard work and skill, fertility, cleanliness, looks, health, and a host of other measures" as on sexual probity (175), warning readers "not to make the mistake of investigating women's lives through a narrow lens that excludes everything but gender" (274).
Successive chapters deal with migration and maidservants, match making and money, unwanted pregnancies, wifehood and authority, sociability and its irritants, work (both honest and disreputable), and the vulnerabilities of old age. Each chapter blends archival extracts with textual citation to compare case histories with the commentary of sermons, conduct books, and popular ballads. Fourteen tables and seven graphs nod knowledgably toward historical demography and economic history, providing a numerical framework for scores of micro-narratives. Hubbard tells the stories of, for example, the hopeful migrant Magdalen Lasley, the sexually abused Isabel Burroughs, and the penniless widow Anne Willet with economy and empathy. The evidence persuades her [End Page 118] that "desire to maintain social and economic order" took "precedence over sexual anxieties" among these early modern Londoners (189).
While successfully negotiating complex sources, Hubbard also maintains dialog with the scholarship of other historians, particularly that of Gowing and Capp on women, and Archer and Griffiths on London.1 Though tackling similar topics, and sometimes similar sources, she makes no use of Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (New York, 1997) or Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension (New York, 2000). That lapse apart, this welcome work bodes well for the future of early modern social history.
Footnotes
1. See, for example, Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 2012); idem, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in 17th Century England (New York, 2003); idem, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (New York, 1999); Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (New York, 2004); Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Early Modern London (New York, 2003); Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550-1660 (New York, 2010).
