Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, and: Early Modern Women's Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (review)

These two collections of essays consolidate and extend two important developments in early modern studies: the interdisciplinary study of law, history, and literature; and the attention to the production and circulation of manuscripts. These developments are of special interest to the rethinking of the situation of women in the early modern period: the study of women and property complicates the monolithic view of women as in general unable to hold property, and the examination of women's participation in manuscript culture leads us to revise the view of this activity as strictly private and limited to the domestic sphere.

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law, with contributors whose disciplinary affiliations range from literature and law to history, begins with an informative introduction by Nancy E. Wright and Margaret Ferguson that announces the volume as "challeng[ing] the assumption that canonical legal theory or rules of property law adequately describe women's lived experience in the property regime" (10). To this end, the editors extend the conception of property to include various types of texts, as well as to focus on the contradiction between theory and practice: between, for example, the legal doctrines of coverture and primogeniture on the one hand, and on the other, women's actual exercise of legal prerogative through litigation (in Christine Churches's essay) and wills in which they designated female heirs (in Lloyd Davis's essay). As Margareta de Grazia indicates in her afterword, the most valuable contribution of these essays may be their demonstration of "how women were able to participate in property relationships before they enjoyed the full right to private property" (299). In an illuminating account of the implications of legal understandings for early women's identity, Mary Chan and Nancy E. Wright deploy two case studies, those of Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Wiseman, to argue for the contradiction between the rights of the office of property owner and the obligations of a married woman.

Literature has always been a fruitful site of inquiry for scholarship on legal history, and Shakespeare perhaps its most privileged example. Patricia Parker deciphers the legal register of language in The Winter's Tale describing pregnancy and gestation as indicating an interest in contracts, thereby revealing another, material dimension to the play's concern with temporal fulfillment. Natasha Korda focuses in Measure for Measure on the role of the single woman as the purveyor of property, and the disruptions entailed when women refuse to marry; and A. R. Buck studies the changing conception of women and property as registered in King Lear and Nahum Tate's adaptation of the play later in the seventeenth century.

Buck sees a disempowerment of women in the course of the seventeenth century, as exemplified in Tate's Cordelia, who devolves into a vehicle of inheritance; a number of the essays also trace historical changes in women's relation to property. Mary Murray studies the decrease, from the sixteenth century onward, of female heirs and property owners as the medieval inheritance practices favoring daughters over collateral males no longer prevailed, and the political implications of such a shift for the emergence of the centralized patriarchal state. Focusing on the opposite end of the social spectrum, however, Laura Rosenthal argues that during the eighteenth century, some at the margins of the law, such as the prostitute Sally Salisbury, refused emergent notions of "gendered divisions between the owners and the owned" (106); she claimed ownership in her body and hence a self-possession unavailable to other women. Eleanor...