Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640: Turning the World Upside Down by Susan D. Amussen, David E. Underdown (review)

This very welcome book has an unusual genesis. David Underdown had been working for some years on a project to explore inversion as a theme that brought together the social, political, cultural, and literary. When he died in 2009, some sections were well advanced, others far less so, with big gaps. So this book represents far more than the completion of an unfinished text. Susan Amussen, his widow and fellow-scholar, has substantially remodelled it to incorporate her own ideas and areas of interest and expertise. A chapter on “failed patriarchs,” as the counterpart to unruly women, originated with her, while she abandoned a chapter that Underdown had planned on the 1640s. The book that has emerged is a scholarly and thoughtful volume, attractively written, and admirably concise. Its constituent parts hang together well, and there is much of value for both students coming new to its themes and established scholars.

The book’s aims are spelled out clearly in its title and subtitle. The authors seek to integrate the history of gender with broader issues of cultural, political, and social history, in a period that was experiencing major stresses in each of these spheres. The notion of a world turned upside down was indeed “a foundational concept” in early modern society (159). The authors set out to explore the sources of instability, the particular forms in which anxiety was expressed, and the mechanisms by which patriarchal equilibrium was maintained, focusing on the latter two issues. A world turned upside down signified the disruption of a legitimate order, and the first two chapters explore the gendered dimensions of this under the headings of “Unruly Women” and “Failed Patriarchs.” A great deal has been written in recent decades on gender tensions, much of it drawing on the rich material in ecclesiastical and other court records. As the authors note, a patriarchal order is by definition unstable, and they point to “a prevailing uneasiness about gender relations” (7). That feels like a better formulation than a reference on the same page to signs of “a collapsing patriarchal order,” even if the phrase was meant to refer only to contemporary perceptions. The authors note briefly some debate about the chronology and scale of the ducking of scolds, on which the recent work of Martin Ingram throws important new light. To what degree was anxiety over gender simply more visible than in earlier periods, thanks to better court records and more personal and literary sources? If it was, indeed, greater, how might this reflect the political and religious upheavals of the age and the strains resulting from the demographic crisis? Such issues are not extensively pursued. What is distinctive and valuable in these chapters is the links they make between anxieties over gender and tensions within the elite world, including the royal court. This period was different, the authors write, because concerns over the disruption of patriarchal order were now “connected to, even central to, politics and culture” (76). That argument is generally persuasive, and the case is well made, though the downfall of Queen Catherine Howard in 1541, for example, linked the unruly wife, failed patriarch, and world of court politics even more dramatically than the Jacobean scandals they explore here.

Unruly women and failed patriarchs generally work well as conceptual tools for the exploration of gender conventions and tensions, though not all challenges to order fit easily within them. When elite contemporaries railed at “the many-headed monster” and “giddy multitude,” they were not thinking primarily of gender order. And when the authors tell us that in conventional discourses of gender, men were viewed as “by definition rational, virtuous, prudent” and so on (22), we should recall that contemporaries were also well aware of the counter-culture of disorderly young and labouring men studied by Paul Griffiths and Alexandra...