Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England

Voorkant
Margaret W. Ferguson, A. R. Buck, Nancy E. Wright
University of Toronto Press, 1 jan 2004 - 316 pagina's

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England examines the competing narratives of property told by and about women in the early modern period. Through letters, legal treatises, case law, wills, and works of literature, the contributors explore women's complex roles as subjects and agents in commercial and domestic economies, and as objects shaped by a network of social and legal relationships. By constructing conversations across the disciplinary boundaries of legal and social history, sociology and literary criticism, the collection explores a diverse range of women's property relationships.

Recent research has revealed fissures in our knowledge about women's property relationships within a regime characterized by competing jurisdictions, diverse systems of tenure, and multiple concepts of property. Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England turns to these points of departure for the study of women's legal status and property relationships in the early modern period. This interdisciplinary analysis of women and property is written in an accessible manner and will become a valuable resource for scholars and students of Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, early modern social and legal history, and women's studies.

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Inhoudsopgave

Temporal Gestation Legal Contracts and the Promissory Economies of The Winters Tale
15
Putting Women in Their Place Female Litigants at Whitehaven 16601760
40
Womens Property Popular Cultures and the Consistory Court of London in the Eighteenth Century
56
The Whores Estate Sally Salisbury Prostitution and Property in EighteenthCentury London
85
Primogeniture Patrilineage and the Displacement of Women
111
Isabellas Rule Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure
127
Marriage Identity and the Pursuit of Property in SeventeenthCentury England The Cases of Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Wiseman
152
Cordelias Estate Women and the Law of Property from Shakespeare to Nahum Tate
173
Writing Home Hannah Wolley the Oxinden Letters and Household Epistolary Practice
191
Womens Wills in Early Modern England
209
Spiritual Property The English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and the Dispute over the Baker Manuscripts
227
The Titular Claims of Female Surnames in EighteenthCentury Fiction
246
Early Modern Aristocratic Women and Textual Property
271
Afterword
286
Index
299
Copyright

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Over de auteur (2004)

Nancy E. Wright is the director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Property Rights at the University of Newcastle. Margaret W. Ferguson teaches in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. A.R. Buck teaches in the Division of Law at Macquarie University.

Bibliografische gegevens