Notes
Notes Introduction 1. Fifteenth-century will cited in the OED to illustrate the usage of household in the sense of "houshold goods, chattels, or furniture"; Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Testaments and Last Wils (London, 1611), fols. 3i3r-v. 2. Household inventories and contemporary observers describe the increasing delicacy of bedding, eating and drinking vessels (once earthenware or wood, but now glass, brass, and pewter), furniture (chairs in addition to joint-stools), hangings , and so forth among the lower and middling sorts. See Percy Macquoid, "The Home: Furniture and Plate," in Shakespeare's England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age, ed. Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh, Sir Sidney Lee, and Charles Talbot Onions, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), pp. 119-33, and Chapter i below. 3. Swinburne, Testaments, sigs. Bir-Bir. 4. I use the nonhyphenated form of the term because it was the form most commonly used during the early modern period. The first hyphenated usage listed in the OED is from the late seventeenth century; although I have found earlier instances of this spelling, it was not nearly as common as the nonhyphenated form. The hyphenated form presumes the term to be a compound noun; however, the word householdhad been used adjectivallysince the fourteenth century to mean "Of or belonging to a household, domestic." 5. Swinburne, Testaments, fols. 3O2r-v, 3O4V. 6. Goods, for example, are "sometimes" understood within the Civil Law to refer "not onely [to] those things whereof a man is owner, or whereof he is justly possessed, as Lands, Leases, and other personall or corporall goods, but also those things which belong unto him, eyther corporall or incorporall, for the which hee may have a lawfull action, as debts due unto him by contract or Obligation," and sometimes "no more but onely a mans cleare goods, his debts deducted." Within "the Lawes of this Realme," however, "the word Goods is otherwise understood, comprehending such things as be eyther with, or without life, as a horse or a bed, &c. but neither such things as be of the nature of free-hold, nor leases for yeares, much lesse for lives, nor things in action, as a debt upon a promise or Obligation." Swinburne, Testaments, fols. 305r-v. 7. Swinburne, Testaments, fol. 313V. By the late sixteenth century, the possession of plate had become de rigueur among even the lower and middling sort, so that it was not uncommon for even farmers and tradesmen to own small articles of silver such as spoons or drinking-bowls, as reflected in household inventories. See Macquoid, "The Home," pp. 131-32. For an extensive account of the consumption of 214 Notes to Pages 3-8 and trade in plate during the period, see also Juana Green, "Properties of Marriage: Proprietary Conflict and the Calculus of Gender in Epicoene? in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 8. Swinburne, Testaments, fol. 314*. 9. Ibid., fol. 3iov. 10. Ibid., fols. 286r-288r. 11.Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 25,17-18. 12. Randle Holme, An Academy of Armory, or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon (1649),vol. 2, ed. I. H. Jeayes (London: Roxburghe Club, 1905),p. 18.See also British Museum Harl. MSS 2026-35. 13. Lena Cowen Orlin, PrivateMatters and PublicCulture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 257-58. 14. Ibid., p. 258. 15. Holme, Academy of Armory, p. 5. 16. Ibid., pp. 2,13. 17. Joan Thirsk, "Foreword," in Women in English Society, 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 2. Other recent histories of early modern women attuned to the distinction between ideology and material practice include Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500-1760 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) and Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 18. I borrow these terms from Penelope D. Johnson's essay,"The Cloistering of Medieval Nuns: Release or Repression, Reality or Fantasy?" in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women s History, ed. Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1987),p. 29. 19. See, for example, S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds., Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, 1996); Susan Westfall, Patrons and Performers: Early Tudor Household Revels (Oxford: Oxford University...
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