In early modern England, the laws of coverture limited married women's entitlement to own property and to make wills. Yet important scholarship by Amy Erickson and Barbara Harris has complicated our understanding of women, the law and property during this period. The book under review follows in the footsteps of this research. Exploring a huge repository of 1,200 wills written by women across the Tudor period from the reigns of Henry vii to Elizabeth i, James sets out to identify women's priorities and activities concerning property, community and identity, exploring how these changed over time. Cutting across the late medieval and early modern periods by studying women's wills throughout the Tudor monarchy, this book interrogates the impact of sixteenth-century religious upheaval and economic change on women's will-making practices.
James's methodology is to construct a vivid picture of women's experiences, treating testaments as ‘word portraits of women’ (p. 67). Underpinning the book is an assumption that will-making was an empowering process for a woman. In compiling her will, James argues, a woman had sole authority to dispose of her goods according to her own wishes. She claims that wills recorded the ‘voices’ of female testatrixes, ‘unfiltered by the male-dominated processes that compiled and registered tax and court records’ (p. 95) and it is these voices that she hopes to uncover. We can be sure that many women's desires and hopes were expressed in their wills and a real strength of the book lies in James's careful unpicking of the detail recorded in these documents. However, the process of making a will was not without mediation; surrounding the deathbed were many individuals with their own agendas and abilities to influence. Moreover, many women, particularly those of lower status, were illiterate and relied on male relatives, friends or clergymen to write their wills. Men were important in the will-making process and this is a point that needed greater attention.
The book is divided into six chapters that consider various aspects of women's wills. The first two chapters are concerned with the conditions under which wills were made and the opportunities that making a will could provide for women in establishing an enduring legacy and identity. James finds evidence of women at all social levels providing for members of their communities and taking measures to ensure that they themselves remained in living memory. Chapter iii surveys evidence of the range of work that women undertook, highlighting the variation in women's working lives recorded in wills that scholarship is often reluctant to acknowledge. The final three chapters consider women's disposal of assets, investigating the strategies that women employed to navigate legal strictures in bequeathing land, money and goods. In particular, James provides rich evidence of women's active participation in Tudor England's credit-driven economy. Evidence from the wills highlights how women loaned money and pawned material goods alongside men. It is here that she is also able to reconstruct the material world of the female testatrix, considering not only the economic worth of her possessions but also this human or personal value.
The sample of wills studied includes those made by women from across England, living in rural and urban settlements and from rich and poor backgrounds. Although women of higher status had more property to dispose of, James argues that women across the socio-economic spectrum made wills, including servants, tradeswomen and dairy farmers who all had property to bequeath in some form. Most of her evidence is none the less drawn from the wills of elite women, although she advocates parallel experiences based on gender rather than social status or geographical location. So, the £3 6s. 3d. that the London silk merchant Jane Geste bequeathed in 1559 for a feast to be held for mourners after her death is assimilated with the 3s. provision for bread and beds for the poor that a single female servant named Eden Bounde bequeathed in 1597 (p. 32). And the foundation of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, recorded in the will of Frances Sidney is equated with a bequest from a poorer woman of £5 ‘to the poor Scollers of Oxford and Cambridge’ (p. 3).
Throughout the book, James’ gendered analysis would have benefitted from direct comparison with male wills, although I think she is right to point out that men and women navigated and negotiated inheritance in different ways. She argues that in deciding how to dispose of their estates upon death, women, more often than men, viewed families as ‘collateral collectives’ rather than in lines of descent (p. 179). James is also careful to consider a woman's position within the context of the life cycle and her work illustrates how marriage and remarriage affected not only a woman's personal identity but also her decisions in determining the recipients of her assets upon death. These are interesting points that raise important questions about the impact of gender upon inheritance practices and patterns.
James also overlooks a methodological opportunity. While her qualitative analysis makes important interventions in the scholarship of gender, law and property, the book suffers from a lack of statistical grounding. Her references to ‘a significant percentage of women’ (p. 68) and ‘many wills’ (pp. 239, 254) make it difficult to assess the scale on which particular practices and strategies appeared in women's wills. In chapter iv she departs altogether from her expansive qualitative methodology and focuses on just three case studies of elite women, leaving the reader to wonder whether these women were representative. Quantitative analysis of different geographical areas, life-cycle stages and social statuses would have strengthened James's arguments and enabled her to make a stronger case for changing practices over the course of the sixteenth century.
None the less, this is an important contribution that analyses an impressive body of data. James's investigation of women's wills sheds light on the concerns, preoccupations and activities of women in Tudor England and raises important new questions about gender and inheritance.
