Stimulated by a conference at the University of East Anglia in 2009, this volume unites ten essays dealing with women's experiences under the law in the late medieval and early modern eras. Given that the title emphasizes agency and that the contributors either work or were trained in British universities, one might expect a partial rehashing of the infamous “Golden Age” debate about women's status after the Black Death. But this is not the case. The volume's editors, Bronach Kane and Fiona Williamson, neatly step around the “Golden Age” issue in their thorough and thoughtful introduction and justify their use of the concept of agency. Agency, in the sense used in this volume, is not so much a way to emphasize women's power as a nuanced and careful way to delineate the places in which women could and did exploit wriggle room. The editors and contributors alike recognize the multiple constraints and opportunities stemming not only from gender but also from social and marital status, jurisdiction, age, region, religion, and space.
The first three chapters focus on women's testimony in late medieval church and Chancery courts. Cordelia Beattie's essay “Your Oratrice: Women's Petitions to the Late Medieval Court of Chancery” opens the collection by suggesting that Chancery bills reveal ideologies of gender by representing narratives of properly fulfilled gender roles. Thus the “chaste wife” subject position adopted in one of the cases Beattie investigates may or may not tell us much about the individual who occupied it, but it tells us a good deal about how women were expected to occupy the “chaste wife” role. In “Echoes, Whispers, Ventriloquisms: On Recovering Women's Voices from the Court of York in the Later Middle Ages,” Jeremy Goldberg grapples with the difficulties of accessing direct speech through witness depositions in church courts. Despite multiple layers of translation and modulation in light of expected discourses, he concludes, women's depositions nonetheless reflect occasions of agency within their lives. Kane's essay, “Women, Memory and Agency in the Medieval English Church Courts,” looks beyond traditional associations between women's memories and passivity, orality, and unreliability to find instances in which social practice valued female testimony. As she shows, women were especially likely to serve as deponents in cases involving marriage, age, defamation, and breach of promise, although their memories might also be valued in matters deemed traditionally male, such as parish customs and tithes.
The second group of three essays emphasizes women's encounters with the law. Using the case study of Jane Stapleton, Rosemary Horrox examines an occasion on which a mother, tricked out of lands by her son, chose not to pursue a legal claim. Instead, as Horrox shows in “‘Utterly and Untruly He Hath Deceived Me’: Women's Inheritance in Late Medieval England,” she exercised her limited agency by recording her version of events in her will. Deborah Youngs, author of “‘She Hym Fresshely Folowed and Pursued’: Women and Star Chamber in Early Tudor Wales,” similarly uses well-documented case studies in considering the discursive strategies of Welsh women before the Star Chamber. Even when women seemed most like victims—as in cases of rape or of their husbands' murder—they nonetheless knew how to exercise agency in presenting their cases to the court. Janka Rodziewicz concludes this section with “Women and the Hue and Cry in Late Fourteenth-Century Great Yarmouth,” examining the use of the hue and cry system that enabled both men and women to interrupt a crime in progress and seek the immediate assistance of neighbors. Rodziewicz's data bear out other studies showing that women used the hue almost as often as men and that hue-raising served as a means of agency insofar as it allowed women to get cases into court.
The collection concludes with four essays examining women's voices and spaces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In “Gender and the Control of Sacred Space in Early Modern England,” Amanda Flather focuses upon female iconoclasts who resisted practices they considered superstitious and popish by disrupting churching, baptism, and burial services, by destroying surplices, and by harassing and attacking ministers. Flather finds that most of these women were older, married, and well regarded, and that they represented the common voices of their communities by defending local understandings of parish space and faith. Bernard Capp's essay, “The Travails of Agnes Beaumont,” examines a seventeenth-century Nonconformist whose family turned against her. Beaumont's story is well preserved in her autobiographical narrative, and Capp demonstrates the ways in which this narrative, counter to convention for spiritual autobiographies of the period, depicts both her vulnerabilities and opportunities for agency. Williamson analyses the ways in which a defamation case highlights the gendered power of words in “Parish Politics, Urban Spaces and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Norwich.” Williamson makes the case that the parish played a vital role in creating female agency and maintaining both gender and social status in the urban setting. Like Youngs, Nicola Whyte draws upon Welsh cases heard by the Star Chamber, albeit from a later period. Her essay “‘With a Sword Drawne in Her Hande’: Defending the Boundaries of Household Space in Seventeenth-Century Wales'” insists that we recognize the broader definitions of space for rural women and the role that women played in both defending and sometimes breaking household boundaries.
Throughout the volume, contributors do an excellent job of engaging with existing scholarship. While one or two essays stray from the concept of agency, most forge effective links to the volume's central theme. This collection will be of interest primarily to those studying medieval and early modern women, but it should also be read by those concerned with agency, space and place, speech and reputation, and legal records generally.
