Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought is an interesting and thought-provoking book on a topic that has been ripe for the picking ever since historians began thinking about connections between household structure and political philosophy. Ideally, a satisfying treatment of the topic should entail the mastery of a spectrum of disciplines, from anthropology through gender studies to the history of political philosophy, as well as an exhaustive knowledge of printed and manuscript sources for the period. This is admittedly a tall order, although the exhaustive multidisciplinary approach has produced some modern masterpieces, including Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), Carole Levin's Heart and Stomach of a King (1994), and, more recently, Mihoko Suzuki's Subordinate Subjects (2003). None of these works is listed in Peters's bibliography, one of several indications that her aims in this book are far less ambitious. The book also shows signs of its origins as a doctoral thesis in its relatively narrow scope, its conservative methodology, and the limited selection of primary and secondary sources.

Peters's thesis is straightforward: whereas the marriage contract served as a rich and fruitful metaphor for the relationship between ruler and subjects at the beginning of the seventeenth century, political writers of all shades had abandoned this metaphor by the end of the century. For royalists and Tory pamphleteers, the relationship of husbands to wives was replaced by that of fathers to sons, while Parliamentarians and Whigs rejected familial metaphors altogether in favor of a hypothetical civil contract between male heads of households. This thesis is developed in three parts, titled “Marriage Contract as Political Contract,” “Subjection in Oeconomy and Polity,” and, finally, “Tyranny, Chastity, and Liberty.”

The first part surveys the theme of marriage as political metaphor, beginning with James I's attempts to achieve union between England and Scotland and ending with Algernon Sidney's defense of classical republicanism. For this reader, the first part was the most rewarding of the three sections. Through a close reading of lesser-known writers such as Henry Parker and James Tyrrell, Peters has produced some fascinating insights into the logic of seventeenth-century political thought. My favorite example is James Tyrrell's argument against French theorist Jean Bodin's assertion that the production of children gave fathers an absolute power over their offspring in a state of nature. Tyrrell pointed out that if this were true, it followed that women who murdered their bastard children “would have a good time on’t, because having no Husbands, they have full power over the life of their Children” (cited in Peters [64]).

The second section analyzes the marital relationship itself and women's subordinate status therein. Here Peters breaks with chronology, or rather begins again in 1485, to focus on gender. It is not clear what purpose this departure from (or reprise of) chronology serves, since it forces Peters to reiterate points about several authors she has discussed in part 1. And while the second section purports to deal with gender, this is gender presented almost entirely from the male viewpoint, without the aid of insights offered by the best recent works on gender such as those of Laura Gowing. Aside from a brief nod to Mary Astell from time to time, a little coda devoted to Lady Anne Fanshawe's memoirs at the end of part 2, and a discussion of Civil War prophetess Elizabeth Poole in part 3, the attempts to include a female perspective are few and far between. For example, although Peters discusses male Levelers’ views on the household franchise in several different contexts, we hear nothing about female Levelers like Katharine Chidley, whose 1653 petition to parliament has a direct bearing on philosophical and practical questions of the political rights of unmarried females.

The failure to include a female perspective is most obvious in part 3. As Peters explains in her introduction, she limited her research to three types of printed sources: political tracts, domestic literature, and drama. Accordingly, she gives full treatment to Robert Filmer and John Locke, William Gouge and Robert Cleaver, Richard Brome and John Dryden, and several obscure authors and playwrights. This reader was therefore astonished to discover that Aphra Behn is nowhere mentioned, let alone discussed, in the book. Behn was obsessed with marriage and even more obsessed with politics, and she habitually used the one to talk about the other. Her absence is one of several curious omissions of primary and secondary sources that might have illuminated the book's theme. Perhaps Behn's absence is not so much a matter of slighting women authors but of highlighting the obscure at the expense of the Great and the Good, especially among playwrights. Peters ignores Shakespeare's King Lear yet devotes two pages to Nahum Tate's Restoration remake. Like his colleague Aphra Behn, William Wycherly is nowhere mentioned, despite the wonderful marriage contract scene in Way of the World, a dialogue that reminds us that even if male political theorists were deaf to women's voices, Restoration playwrights of both sexes were certainly listening.

What of Peters's thesis? For this reader, the Whiggish half of Peters's scenario looks more persuasive than the Tory half. How could Whigs like John Tyrrell and John Locke deal with women as political beings, except by sweeping them under the rug, as liberal theorists were to do for the next two-hundred-odd years. The contention that Tory writers replaced husbands and wives with fathers and sons by the end of the century is more problematic. Fathers and sons, or rather parents and children, were always important, at the beginning of the century as at its end. We have only to think of King Lear—in Shakespeare's version, that is.