I

In order to understand the concepts of public and private in the early modern period, we must of course be clear about our own understandings of those concepts. In her study of political philosophy, Daniella Gobetti argues for the “terminological and even lexical stability” of both “public” and “private,” but notes in a footnote that “the concepts are stable in that their notational range is the same over time. Private refers to what is singular or hidden, public to what is shared or visible.” This stable notational level, she admits, is “formal and general,” while the empirical content of the terms—what Quentin Skinner refers to as the frequently unstable use of such terms—can vary widely in context.Footnote ³

The Oxford English Dictionary's (OED's) definitions of public and private suggest that the potential meanings of these words are so varied and unstable that both terms signify not a particular signified but rather a lack of unified agreement as to what is signified.Footnote ⁴ Ernesto Laclau described such words as “empty signifiers” because they point toward the limits of signification by signifying a lack within the society (Laclau gives the example of a call for order in a radically disordered society). Such empty signifiers, in Laclau's schema, are a prerequisite for democratic political debate, because they serve as placeholders for concepts that society neither fully understands nor agrees upon.Footnote ⁵ The flexibility of such words is apparent in the OED's general definition of public: “The varieties of sense are numerous and pass into each other by many intermediate shades of meaning. The exact shade often depends upon the substantive qualified, and in some expressions more than one sense is vaguely present.” Similarly, a note to the definition of private suggests the ways in which meanings frequently overlap or converge.Footnote ⁶

The legal theorist Lloyd Weinreb points out that “not the least of the difficulties about privacy is that it is so elusive. Just about anything may be private: persons, places, things, actions, words, thoughts, emotions—‘whatever,’ as Seinfeld likes to say.”Footnote ⁷ Perhaps tellingly, the meaning of public has been much less contested and also has evolved much less over time than private. In very general terms, most of the key definitions of public in the OED pertain to both the seventeenth century and the twenty-first. Although we might disagree among ourselves over the boundaries of the public, we tend to agree—as did early modern people—that that which is public is that which has national or community relevance.Footnote ⁸

The term private has changed more radically and is the subject of more debate in our own times. Before 1700, private was essentially a negative term: whatever did not pertain to the nation or community. This sense is apparent in a number of the meanings in the OED that are obsolete or have become rare, including phrases such as private city (not a seat of government) and private playhouse or the more general to be private, that is, to be alone.Footnote ⁹ The related word privacy has changed almost beyond recognition. Most of the definitions used in the seventeenth century refer to things—places, information, even body parts—that are accessible only to a few people, such as “private or retired places,” “a private matter,” and “the private parts.”Footnote ¹⁰ These definitions tend to confirm that for seventeenth-century individuals, private and privacy are more simply the negative of public: secrecy or separation from that which is open, available, or pertaining to the community or nation as a whole.

However, the definition of privacy that arouses the most debate for us, “the state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right,” did not come into use until 1814.Footnote ¹¹ That new definition signaled a change in the paradigm of public and private. Two related philosophical developments gradually replaced the neutral opposites of the seventeenth century with usages that encourage people to value either privacy or public life, depending on the circumstances referred to. The first development is suggested by the definition of privacy as “freedom from interference or intrusion.”Footnote ¹² In 1890, Boston lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis defined a “right to privacy” as a right to control access to information about oneself, and it is this understanding of privacy that has fueled current debates about data protection, the role of the press, antiterrorism laws, and even birth control.Footnote ¹³ That which is private is to be controlled and contained and protected from public access. As the later sections of this article contend, it is an association that has little meaning for early modern individuals.

In our own times, Warren and Brandeis's concept of privacy as control of access to information has been confused and conflated with another strand of thought that equates privacy and private life with the family. Feminist political theorists have described how the link between privacy and family life developed out of liberal political philosophy, particularly the work of John Locke. Although in some ways Locke advocated greater autonomy for women, he nevertheless understood “the Power that every husband hath to order the things of private Concernment in his Family” as “Conjugal Power, not Political.”Footnote ¹⁴ The line Locke and other liberal thinkers drew between political power and family power opens up the possibility for men to assert their rights of privacy at the expense of the women and children in their families.Footnote ¹⁵ Although numerous feminists have critiqued the way in which this definition of privacy either excludes women or depends upon their unpaid labor in the home, the equation of privacy with family life is enshrined in Western law.Footnote ¹⁶ The European Convention on Human Rights, for example, asserts that “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”Footnote ¹⁷

These two trends in theorizing the private have filled a previously neutral or negative category with conflicting values. On the one hand, when privacy means control of information, the private and privacy are of utmost value and to be carefully protected. This tendency to value privacy is evident in attempts to locate the emergence of the modern self and the historical search for a past “private life,” for example, in studies of the early modern closet. In one influential article, Alan Stewart proposed that the closet used by early modern men—a small room used for study, storage, prayer, or other activities that might require a locked door—was “a secret nonpublic transactive space between two men behind a locked door.” The early modern closet was thus in some way a precursor both to the modern metaphor of the closet as the location of secret homosexual activity and to modern notions of autonomous personal privacy.Footnote ¹⁸ However, Lena Orlin has demonstrated that Stewart wrongly asserts that women did not enter men's closets and that the two desks in the inventory for a closet in Loseley Hall imply that two men used the room. In fact Orlin's research suggests that closets were used for a wide variety of unrelated purposes—study, prayer, storage, preparation of medicines, social gathering, and sleeping—and were only united by the fact that they could be locked.Footnote ¹⁹ Orlin has shown how research like Stewart's has been used to substantiate the wider claim that “the early modern closet was a space in which privacy was habitually sought, and privacy was uniquely found.”Footnote ²⁰ It is that location of privacy in the early modern past, I would argue, that accounts for the widespread influence of research on the closet—research that implicitly values a privacy that resembles our own carefully protected right to “freedom from interference or intrusion.”

However, when privacy is associated with the family, scholars often consider the private to be of lesser value and impact than the public, which in this context is often equated with the political. The texts that had the most impact and influence on the contemporary world and later history are often the most interesting to literary scholars and historians, and some scholars equate these influential texts with those that are clearly public in modern terms—widely distributed print texts, often with a specifically political content. This sense of the public as more influential may also derive from the influence of Habermas's concept of the public sphere.Footnote ²¹ Habermas's theory has encouraged us to consider new and unusual spaces and media as sites of debate insulated from the control of the state, although these sites often were no more available to women or the less privileged than were parliament or the Privy Council. Whether or not we concede the historicity of Habermas's construct, its seductive power has led to an increasing effort to define texts or historical actions as public because public is perceived as more valuable.Footnote ²² Scholarship on women's writing, for example, is particularly susceptible to this seduction because such scholarship attempts to reverse the traditional marginalization of women's texts.Footnote ²³

It is tempting to assume that we can counter that marginalization by proving that women's writing and other texts on the boundary between public and private had public influence or impact. Yet, as Quentin Skinner reminded a previous generation of intellectual historians, the fact that a writer from the past employs a concept that is familiar to modern thinkers does not mean that the concept is relatively stable through time.Footnote ²⁴ A more historicist approach would ask what it meant for such texts to be public in the early modern period and whether public texts were in fact more valued. A historicist approach would also openly interrogate our own values as scholars: why is privacy deserving of attention when it can be seen as a precursor to modern autonomy but devalued when it can be seen as confined to the family (or, for some scholars, religion) and separated from political discourse?Footnote ²⁵ The remainder of this article contests these two models—privacy as a valued right and Lockean private family life as separate from public political debate—using evidence relating to the early modern household, the space around which so many of these modern debates coalesce. In some ways, the boundaries around the early modern household are as porous as those around modern and early modern notions of public and private, and the range of sources used below reflects the variety of life experiences shaped by household relationships. While it is of course impossible to give a full account here of life in early seventeenth-century households, it is possible to consider a range of areas of household life that are considered private—some valued, some devalued—in our modern society and in much scholarship on the early modern, such as religious devotion, sexual relations, and relationships among members of households, including domestic violence.Footnote ²⁶ Using both prescriptive and exemplary texts and household manuscripts such as letters and diaries, this article considers two related questions: Was there such a thing as private life for individuals in the early modern period? And how was privacy in the household gendered in the early modern period? The following discussion draws on the insights of social historians into the actual lived experience of seventeenth-century individuals but is primarily interested in how people conceived of their lives.

II

Was there a private life in the early seventeenth century? The evidence tends to support David Cressy's assertion that all life—I would probably amend that to nearly all life—“had public, social, or communal dimensions” in early modern England.Footnote ²⁷ Cressy's sources for this claim are church court records and other social historical sources that tend to document experience, but prescriptive and manuscript literature suggests that the same continuum existed in individuals’ perceptions of their lives. This continuum is most apparent in discourses about religious life; in devotional handbooks, spiritual journals, and funeral sermons, private and public prayer are intimately connected activities.

Daniel Featley, for example, observed in his Ancilla pietatis; or, the hand-maid to priuate devotion (1626): “Premeditation is the Preparation to priuate prayer; priuate to publike; priuate, and publike to the hearing of the Word; priuate, and publike prayer, together with the hearing of the word to the worthie participation of the holy Sacrament. For the Sacrament receiues strength and vigour from the word; the word preached from publik prayer; publike prayer from priuate Deuotion; and that from premeditation.”Footnote ²⁸ Private devotion was not something separate from or to be protected from public worship; rather, it was a necessary part of the whole of worship that prepared the individual to be with the community. This perceived connection between private prayer and public worship was not merely a matter of prescription. For example, in his prolific journals, the godly London joiner Nehemiah Wallington frequently commented on his diligence in worship. In almost every case, Wallington lists private prayer with his family alongside public services or sermons and clearly perceives these as two halves of the same whole.Footnote ²⁹

A similar paradigm of public and private on a continuum is apparent in the prescriptive literature on the household. Perhaps surprisingly, the term private was not often used in these texts, although the sense of it is sometimes implied. William Gouge, for example, pointed out that women, who had no “publike function in Church or commonwealth,” nevertheless have a calling in their duties in the home, but he did not name this calling as private.Footnote ³⁰ Rather, he reached for the commonplace that the household was “a little commonwealth” in which public vocations were tried or tested.Footnote ³¹ For Gouge, the family was categorically similar to private prayer; both were smaller units that prepared individuals for public service. The authors of A godlie forme of hovseholde government (1612) similarly asserted that through good government of the family “the commonwealth which standeth of seuerall families [may be] benefited.”Footnote ³² The family was simply the smallest unit in which human beings associated and differed from other human communities primarily in scale.Footnote ³³

Even if members of early modern households perceived their personal and communal lives as intimately related, we might still ask the question of whether those people experienced anything we might call a private life. The answer to the question hinges on our own understanding of private life and the histories we have written of that concept. For many historians and theorists of our own time, private life is intimately connected with debates around the rise of interiority in Protestant culture and the subsequent development of the self. Cecile Jagodzinski, for example, links the rise of interiority in reading to three phenomena: “the right to personal autonomy,” awareness of the distinction between the self known to oneself and the self known to the world, and “the right to conceal or keep secret the workings of this inner self.” Such reasoning conflates the development of “individual private worlds,” as Jagodzinski calls them, with a growing consciousness of a right to protect those worlds.Footnote ³⁴ I have no wish to argue, as some have, that there was no individuality or interiority in this period, and I do not wish to enter here into the protracted debates about the possibility of writing a history of the self, other than to underline Katherine Maus's observation that interiority and privacy should be considered separately.Footnote ³⁵ What I would argue, however, is that there were two separate developments: the growth of Protestant interiority (which may or may not have been a new kind of self ) and the emergence of the individual as autonomous and protected from state interference.Footnote ³⁶ These changes did not happen simultaneously. Rather, the second change followed on from the first, in part as a result of the growing primacy of individual conscience in religious decision making. From the 1640s onward, the notion that the conscience rather than the state should govern religious decision making introduced the idea that this area of individual life was to be rightly protected from the state.Footnote ³⁷ A private life that encompassed both interiority and freedom from the state was slowly brought to birth.

In the early seventeenth century, however, only one of these transformations had taken place. The women and men of the early seventeenth century certainly had models of an interior private life: they spent time alone if possible, they read silently and responded to their reading in journal writing, they practiced meditation, and they prayed alone. However, they did not always refer to these aspects of life as private or conceive of them as something wholly separate from their communal existence, nor did they see them as an area of life protected from state control or community interference. In fact, many of the aspects of society that we might now understand as part of our right to privacy, such as religious belief, sexual partners, and family relationships, were generally deemed in the seventeenth century to be rightly available to the community. One could write multiple articles on each of these aspects of household relations, but a few examples will suffice here to suggest that each was frequently viewed within the context of its place in the community.

In prescriptive and exemplary religious texts, the continual linkage of private and public prayer underlines the perceived interconnection between the two. One unnamed woman was praised in her funeral sermon for her model of piety: “In publike, She was a religious frequenter of the ordinances on the Lords day, and on the weeke dayes, a diligent hearer and attender, an excellent rememberer: one of the best Remembrancers that I have heard of. And in private, she was excellent for duties there, both for the discharge of her owne dutie, by giving ensample to others, and many times by good and godly exhortations and instructions, and daily by private reading and prayer, shee set apart some time for her selfe, for private meditation.”Footnote ³⁸ There is clearly something here that we would recognize as a cultivating of the private self. This woman withdrew from her family each day to pray, and that prayer is named as private. However, it is understood within or at least alongside a public context; implicitly, this woman's practice of prayer feeds her interaction with her family and her participation in public. It serves as an example to others. While it was generally encouraged that such “private” prayer take place in silence or in seclusion (if possible), the value is evidenced in the way that it fits the individual for life in the community, the body of Christ.

Of course, for many early modern people silence and seclusion for personal prayer would have been difficult to obtain. The London joiner Nehemiah Wallington had a closet but could only use it for prayer by rising very early in the morning.Footnote ³⁹ The gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham, however, had a closet—which in this case seems to have been both a pantry and a space for reading—and the leisure to use it from a young age. Isham records in her autobiography that her mother allowed her a closet of her own after she had discovered that her keys would open her mother's closet. At first Isham used the space for secret misbehavior, sneaking fruit away for herself, her parents “not knowing what I did in secret, but my conscience hath often reproued me.” However, her elder self remembered the lessons of devotion learned in that space: “yet Lord thou gauest me the feare of thee in these times, for I remember y^e Bookes which I had in my closet reading & praying to thee in secret thinking my selfe safe in so doeing.”Footnote ⁴⁰ What is perhaps most intriguing in this account is that the child in her closet was as safe sneaking fruit as she was in prayer. Although it is clear how the closed door of the closet might contribute to secret misbehavior—and potentially to explorations of conscience—it is less clear why the safe space was necessary for her pious reading and prayer, as Isham's parents actively encouraged her spiritual development. It is tempting to view Elizabeth Isham's childhood experience of the closet—and her mother's willingness to provide her with her own space—as evidence that such secret spaces and activities were understood to contribute to the development of the moral self.Footnote ⁴¹ It does seem that the possibility of locking herself away from the rest of the household allowed Elizabeth Isham to experiment with both misbehavior and prayer and thus to learn, through experience, responsibility for her own actions and a mature relationship with God. In spite of the presence of the locked door and the introspection of prayer, we must be wary of labeling Elizabeth Isham's experience as one of privacy as we understand that concept. In the first place, Isham's adult memory of the experience suggests how a secluded experience of prayer was viewed as part of the growth of the individual as a Christian fit for service in the community; individual prayer remained only one step removed from the community. Even more significantly, Isham's language does not in any way reflect a sense of a right to privacy; in fact, her seclusion is explicitly an undeserved privilege.

Such an understanding of private devotion is also apparent in Nehemiah Wallington's writing books. Many aspects of Wallington's last book are clearly “private” in the modern sense of revealing something of the inner self. Wallington records how he woke repeatedly at three or four in the morning “troubled with distracted cares for my Selfe and my children & knowing that such thoughts are sin.”Footnote ⁴² Wallington's almost obsessive detailing of “Experienced Marcys in Returne of prayers” came to occupy so much of his time that it damaged his fragile business. Eventually he resolved to heed the advice that “so much time thus spent did hinder my calling that I could not thriue in the world, So that I did bethinke my Selfe that family dutys I will Continue still (& some in priuat) and striue to walke close with God in holynesse of Life, but not heere so much nor spend so much time in writing.”Footnote ⁴³

Although he did perceive a potential conflict between employment in his shop and time spent on religious activities, at the same time Wallington implicitly drew a connection between praying with his family and praying alone, between hearing sermons with others and solitary religious writing. In addition, although writing was his most solitary activity, it was framed in a context that expected a reader. At the beginning of the book, he explains to the “Christian Reader the Cause of writing of this Book,” and after his death the book was passed among family and friends.Footnote ⁴⁴ Like so many spiritual journals, the book and its deeply personal musings were meant to be used by the community.Footnote ⁴⁵ At the end of the book, Wallington debates whether he should give up writing because he feared he enjoyed it too much: “it is some trouble to mee not to write,” he admits, “for if the worke be good why will I or how dare I to Leaue off if it be not good why did I or how dare I to persist to goe on so Long I Answer things may be good yet not Expedient.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Wallington's answer suggests some of the limits of Calvinist interiority; focus on the self may be good because it encourages true penitence, but it may not be expedient if it does not serve as an example or instruction for other Christians. To be truly holy, it seems, even private actions must be both good and expedient.

In addition to devotion, only one other aspect of life that the twenty-first century considers private was considered in the early modern period to be both good and expedient—and therefore legitimately secret: married sexual activity. Like the prayer closet, the marriage bed was one of the few places where people were encouraged to enjoy a “private life” separate from the rest of the household. William Perkins, for example, asserted that “the mariage-bed signifieth that solitarie and secret societie, that is betweene man and wife alone.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Although for Protestants like Perkins marriage was emphatically not a sacrament, it was linked to the mystery of Christ's relationship to the church. “This communion of married persons,” asserted Perkins in a euphemism for intercourse, “is also a figure of the coniunction that is betweene [Christ], and the faithfull.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Perhaps because of this sacred connection, it was acceptable and even expected among prescriptive writers that no one would discuss what happened between husband and wife in their marriage bed. The controversy surrounding the publication of Charles I's intimate letters to Henrietta Maria may provide evidence that this secrecy of the marriage bed extended beyond the prescriptive literature. Derek Hirst has pointed out that the speed and tone of the debate in 1645 suggest that a language for discussing the relevant privacy issues was readily available. Hirst sees that language as “centred in the body and the affections,” terms reminiscent of the new historicist and cultural materialist debate about the history of subjectivity and which Hirst agrees need further investigation.Footnote ⁴⁹ The concept of legitimately secret marital communication, both sexual and emotional, seems a more likely source for the royalist position that the letters exposed something that should never have been seen.

The Parliamentarians in 1645 were not the only early modern people to violate this taboo against publicizing married sexuality: like other such cultural principles, marital privacy was open to debate and often worked more in theory than in practice. On a couple's wedding night, for example, most of the wedding party would accompany the couple into the bedroom, leaving only when the couple was in underclothes and in bed and after relentless sexual teasing.Footnote ⁵⁰ Given the dependence of families and communities on healthy future generations, the interest of wedding guests in a couple's consummation was probably more than prurient.Footnote ⁵¹ The concern of extended family members over the consequences of a married woman's sexual activity is apparent in a letter from Jarrard Birckhead to his kinswoman, Elizabeth, Lady Hicks. Lady Hicks's daughter Anne was living with her two young sons at her father-in-law's house in the north, far from the protection of her own family in London and Essex. Birckhead's letter reveals that her position at her in-laws’ was precarious, particularly with her jealous mother-in-law. The letter begins:

In the absence of a husband or natal family to protect her, Anne's pregnancy became a matter of considerable significance, a potential danger or opportunity, depending on the shifting attitudes of her husband's family. The pregnancy was so significant that Anne's mother asked a male kinsman “to aske her strictlie” if she is with child and to return the answer to Lady Hicks even without Anne's knowledge. Although the letter offers important evidence about the role of secrecy in the exchange of information among gentry families, a topic discussed further below, what is most striking in this passage is that a man who is not a close relative quizzed a woman about her pregnancy, which might seem to be a private matter or at least the preserve of women alone. What the letter suggests is that, although no one seems to have asked Anne about her sexual relations with her husband (as Perkins and other prescriptive writers expected), the outcome of those relations was legitimately considered to be of wider interest.

Perhaps because of those potential consequences, sexual activity outside of marriage was more open to community observation and interference. In London in 1639, Nicholas Skinner was presented to the church courts for allowing a woman who was not his wife to give birth secretly in his home and then arranging for the baby to be baptized in secret.Footnote ⁵³ The birth of bastard children could of course have considerable financial impact on a parish, and concealing this outcome of illicit sexual activity undermined the system that sought to deter illicit sex through punishment and public penance. Perhaps because of the threat of bastardy, in some cases privacy or secrecy in all relations between unmarried couples was considered a sign of moral disruption. In her study of defamation cases, for example, Laura Gowing noted that private was often a term of accusation among London women. Married couples could hide precisely because they had nothing to hide, but if men and women who were not married to one another sought to lock doors or to meet in secret, their neighbors were immediately suspicious. Although deliberate voyeurism was neither socially nor morally acceptable, couples who evaded observation were automatically suspect. Far from protecting a right to sexual privacy, early modern communities tended to consider it their duty to root out sexual misdeeds among their neighbors.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the final aspect of the household that modern usage tends to consider private—relationships among family members—any private life was similarly embedded in the context of the community. There is, of course, evidence of emotional intimacy among family members. Elizabeth Isham, for example, recorded that her sister and aunt consoled one another during her mother's prolonged illness: “they would sitt together priuetly takeing [sic] and reading.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Similarly, Nehemiah Wallington spent many hours “in speech with my wife Some of the world, some of heauen and how I may glorify God.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet far more often Wallington writes of instructing or praying with members of his family.Footnote ⁵⁷

In 1622, Wallington recorded the purchase of William Gouge's Of domesticall dvties, “that so euery one of vs may Larne and know our Dutyes and honour God euery one in his place where God had sett them.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Inspired by Gouge's hefty guide to godly family life, Wallington drew up a covenant of thirty-one articles for himself and his family. What fascinates many modern scholars about Gouge's book is the way it attempts to specify in meticulous detail the reciprocal duties of members of a household, with the aid of charts and a minutely detailed table of contents.Footnote ⁵⁹ Gouge was particularly and unusually adamant about the submission of wives to their husbands, placing more emphasis on submission and wifely inferiority than other writers who focused on mutual love. Gouge's position was inflammatory in his own day; on hearing these sermons, his congregation accused him of being “an hater of women.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Wallington's covenant, or at least what he copied down in his final book of 1654, surprisingly does not even mention the specific duties of family members. The first six articles he copied out in 1654 reflect general religious duties that were required of all Christians: praying, fasting, not swearing, rising before 6 a.m. on Sunday, repeating the sermon, and reading the Bible daily. These duties apply to individual Christians and are not specific to the family unit. Similarly, Wallington's last four articles list responsibilities to the community that extend beyond the family:

It is not clear whether the references to quarreling, lying, and breaking promises apply only to offenses against the members of the family or against the wider community, although the latter would be much more likely in this godly household with its strong emphasis on Christian duty. It is also possible that the other articles not repeated in Wallington's last book referred to more specific gendered duties. What is clear, however, is that in 1654 Nehemiah Wallington conceived of the Christian reform of his “private family life” not in terms of intimate relations among family members but in terms of duty to God and upright life within the community.

III

Nehemiah Wallington's response to William Gouge's domestic handbook leads us to the question of how such private life within the household was gendered. If aspects of life that we tend to view as protected by a right to privacy—religious belief, sexual activity, and family relationships—were considered more closely embedded in the community in the early modern period, what implication does this model of private life have for constructions of gender? Feminist historians have pointed out that the modern public/private distinction “has certainly been used to control, regulate, and construct gender and to victimize women.”Footnote ⁶² Notwithstanding, did this control and containment of women apply to the understandings of public and private in the early modern period?

On first glance, domestic handbooks do seem to support a “separate spheres” model of marriage that contained women in the household. William Gouge's detailed charts define the duties of men and women very clearly and balance them against one another.Footnote ⁶³ These duties tend generally to focus the man on the world outside the house and the woman on the household itself. John Dod and Robert Cleaver, for example, emphasize that the husband should “rule all the Householde, especially, outward affaires,” while the wife's chief duty is in housekeeping.Footnote ⁶⁴ Gervase Markham, likewise, begins his English huswife by describing “the perfit Husbandman, who is the father and master of the family, and whose office and imployments are euer for the most part abroad, or remoued from the house, as in the field or yarde” and goes on to introduce “our english Hous-wife, who is the mother and Mistris of the family, and hath her most generall imployments within the house.”Footnote ⁶⁵

On closer inspection, and when compared with the evidence gathered by social historians, this prescriptive model of reciprocal duties comes to appear less and less like a nineteenth-century model of separate spheres. Most women were, it is true, in principle and frequently in practice excluded from official public functions in the church or state. Nevertheless, a woman's economic activity, such as doing the marketing, managing the household accounts, or selling products she had made, was often vital for the survival of the household and conferred on her a degree of autonomy and agency. Such activities also took wives out of the household and into the wider community to conduct business.Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition, it is significant that while the prescriptive writers tend to place women indoors and men outdoors, they do not tend to use the terms public and private to describe these distinctions. Dod and Cleaver pointed out that “some [women] count it a disgrace to come much abroad, least they should be counted gosseps, which name is become odious: but they must haue tatlers come home to them, to bring them newes, and to hold them in a tale, lest they should be thought to be idle without a cause.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In other words, it was the act of unnecessary speech that was dangerous for women's virtue, not venturing out into the outside world. For these two writers, it was action that was dangerous, not a distinction between public space that opened women to temptations and private space where women were morally safe.

All of this evidence suggests that we should read the prescriptive literature carefully, without imposing a nineteenth-century model of a gendered household.Footnote ⁶⁸ Early modern women certainly did not have full political or even economic autonomy in their communities. Nevertheless, the reciprocal duties of the early modern household did not tend to confine women to a space that was devoid of political or economic significance. In fact, that space was deeply embedded in the community for most women. The prescriptive writers imagined and many early modern women experienced their role within the household as having a direct effect upon the community. As Wendy Wall has asked in her groundbreaking study of representations of domesticity, “How could women be ‘relegated’ to the household at a time in which it had not yet even superficially withdrawn from economic life or from some yet unborn public sphere?”Footnote ⁶⁹

Of course, even if women in their daily activities were not restricted to the household in either prescription or practice, it is nevertheless more difficult to determine how relationships between women and men within a household were regarded by the community. One way to test whether family members’ day-to-day relations were private in our sense of the meaning of the word as “privacy within the family” is to consider the cases of domestic abuse when relationships break down. The doctrine of privacy within the family has until relatively recently helped to legitimize domestic abuse of wives and children by husbands and made it more difficult for authorities or neighbors to intervene. The invocation of family privacy has been effectively a claim for privacy for the husband, sometimes at the expense of justice for women and children.Footnote ⁷⁰ The dominance of this paradigm, even in early modern studies, is apparent in B. S. Capp's analysis of marital breakdown. More than once, Capp asserts that “outsiders were reluctant to intervene” because “contemporaries preferred marital problems to be resolved within the privacy of the household.” These assertions are contradicted by Capp's own impressive collection of evidence to the contrary, which demonstrates that injured wives frequently called for, and received, help from neighbors, friends, and relatives. His evidence simply does not support the claim that affective relations between husbands and wives were considered a private realm separate from the community.Footnote ⁷¹

The work of Susan Amussen and Fran Dolan further demonstrates the frequency of community intervention when domestic relations grew disordered. Both Amussen and Dolan point out that the popular literature of the period betrays far more fear of unruly or violent women than it does of unruly or violent men, although men in this period were twice as likely to kill their wives as women were to kill their husbands.Footnote ⁷² Because of the way in which the household was viewed as intimately connected to the commonwealth, many feared that disorder in the household would lead to disorder in society, and women were perceived as the most likely source of that disorder. Despite that popular perception, the amount of violence a husband could use to govern his wife was limited, and violence was generally frowned upon unless absolutely necessary. When a woman did experience violence at the hands of her husband, it was the custom for her neighbors to intervene, counseling the couple or physically restraining the husband if necessary. Ministers, friends, and family members would attempt to reconcile the couple to one another but would facilitate a separation if the woman was in danger of injury.Footnote ⁷³ Because good conduct in the household was regarded as vital to the health of the society, male householders could not excuse domestic violence by invoking a right of privacy.

The church court records studied by Capp, Amussen, and Dolan tend to document the lives of the middling and lower sort: artisans, small farmers, and the like, who lived in close-knit villages and urban parishes. Domestic violence is one of the few areas of women's lives for which there is more evidence about these poorer women than there is about the gentry. In part, this is due to the geographic and social isolation of gentry households from the larger community. Family papers indicate that in their large houses, gentlewomen were more isolated from their neighbors and consequently more vulnerable when family relations broke down.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet, in spite of pointing to greater isolation, this evidence does not support a model of family privacy for the gentry.

The papers of the Bagot family in Staffordshire offer a complex picture of gender relations within disordered households. Walter Bagot was a well-connected gentleman who acted as an informal negotiator in a wide variety of disputes between immediate family members and distant kin. As a justice of the peace, Bagot could interpret and enforce contracts and represent individuals before higher authorities. In 1608, his sister Lettice wrote to him to protest that she was being punished for failing to make enough beer because her husband refused to provide her with sufficient malt. “The falt was layd all upon me,” she writes, “with maney bitter corsses. and the charge of the house tak[en] from me. and commanded to medle with nothing: but keepe my chamber: my saruants dis charged espeshallye she that lookes to my children: and is about my selfe: he wold neuer be halfe so ile. but for his mother. now her mayde useth ^to stand at my dore. to heare what I say. and then tels my mother in law. and makes it more: but I know my husband will not looke to things loung. but she must haue the ouer seete of all. and then shall not I be able to stay.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Lettice Kynnersley's pleading letter presents a picture of familial breakdown. Her husband, Francis, frustrated with their financial troubles, refused to give her the means she needed for housekeeping and then punished her for failing to perform her duties. Urged on by his mother, Isabel, he revoked Lettice's authority by taking away her keys and isolated her by dismissing trusted servants. His mother sent her own maid to spy on her daughter-in-law. Together, mother and son exploited the greater opportunities for being alone—for privacy—in a gentry household in order to construct a prison for Lettice Kynnersley. Unlike less wealthy women who could depend on near neighbors to see that something was wrong, Lettice was forced to plead in writing with a brother who was miles away.

Curiously, less than a year later, the tables were turned, when Isabel Kynnersley, Lettice's mother-in-law, wrote to Walter Bagot to beg for protection from her husband and an unnamed woman who may have been Lettice. Isabel's claims are remarkably similar to Lettice’s. She claimed to be “kept as a poore prisnor heere inmy [sic] chaumber and cannot goe abraude so lickewisse is expelled all people out of my presence & that it is almost vnpossible for me to gett one to wryte for me.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The similarities in how Isabel and Lettice were treated not only suggest that the daughter-in-law may have learned from her mother-in-law, but also imply a broader connection between secrecy, the control of information, and violence in early modern gentry households. Both women were confined in their chambers and separated from trusted servants in order to prevent them from alerting anyone to their plight. For Lettice Kynnersley, there was an implicit if not explicit threat of violence if she were to attempt to contact anyone. Isabel Kynnersley, however, regarded herself as explicitly threatened when she was on the verge of revealing her sufferings: “Good S^r hauing dispenced some parte of my mynde vnto you at your last being at Loxley I had thoughte to haue sayed those thinges vnto you that now I ame forc’d to wryte vpon that instant beinge then put in daunger of my Lyffe for that shee had thoughte to haue thruste me downe the stayers & to haue broken my necke had not you haue byne so neere, which I stand daly in daunger of.”Footnote ⁷⁷ It appears that, for this gentry household at least, containing the breakdown of familial order was so vital that the Kynnersleys would even resort to violence, or at least the threat of it, to prevent their disorder from being known outside the household.

This desire for containment was not quite the same as our notion of privacy within the family, even if it had the same effect on vulnerable family members. In the model of family privacy that derived from Locke, a man's right to private life included a right to be a despot in his home and depended upon the unpaid and undocumented labor of women in the household. In the interactions between the Bagot-Kynnersley families, the relations between the genders were much more complicated, and the correspondence makes clear that men's rights did not automatically predominate in these household disputes. The incidents involving Isabel, Francis, and Lettice Kynnersley were part of a fifteen-year struggle over money and control of heavily encumbered family lands and included Anthony Kynnersley, Isabel's husband and Francis's father, who had burdened with steep debts the land intended to support his son in marriage.Footnote ⁷⁸ Controlling the exchange of information, and in particular controlling access to Walter Bagot and others who might intervene or impose a compromise, was vital for these individuals as they vied for control of the family finances.Footnote ⁷⁹ One of the consequences of Lockean family privacy is that it does not matter if abuse is known because outsiders are discouraged from intervening in private family matters. The struggle of all of the Bagot-Kynnersleys, male and female, to tell their sides of the story strongly suggests that intervention was expected, as does the fact that Francis Kynnersley and his mother attempted to prevent his wife from broadcasting her plight.

The distinction between the need for secrecy and an expectation of family privacy is also apparent in letters to Elizabeth, Lady Hicks. Jarrard Birckhead begs Lady Hicks to destroy his letter, which candidly records her daughter Anne's predicament in the household of his fickle uncle and jealous aunt. After recounting his uncle's plans to provide for Anne and her sons, Birckhead writes: “Theise last lines may give cause of susspect, that my vncle was p[ri]vie to this letter, but soe god helpe me he was not. And therefore lett me Intreat yo^r La^pp: That as I, in much respect and good will to yo^w and yo^rs, haue thus plainelie declared what I thinke and knowe; doe likewise that yo^w wilbe pleased to ^{burne &} conceale these lines, that, (beinge knowene) might worke me much angre of my best friend[es]; euen to my overthrow.”Footnote ⁸⁰ What is apparent here is that Birckhead was as vulnerable as his cousin Anne. He was in a precarious position between two people—Lady Hicks and his uncle—whose patronage he needed. Unlike those who wrote to Walter Bagot, Birckhead did not offer secret information to promote his own interests directly but rather as a commodity in the exchange system of patronage.Footnote ⁸¹

Birckhead traded on the desire for secrecy and control of information whenever relations within the patriarchal system broke down. The collection of letters to the Bagot family is similarly full of requests that the enclosed information remain secret.Footnote ⁸² Rather than being connected to a perceived right to privacy, the need for such secrecy arose precisely out of the fact that privacy to control information was not guaranteed or even expected in early modern society. In these gentry households, more isolated from the community than their middling or poor counterparts, the vulnerable needed to beg for secrecy precisely because those in power over them abused the patriarchal ideal that household relations should be above suspicion and open to scrutiny. Lettice and later Isabel Kynnersley were confined to their chambers precisely to maintain that fiction. The difference between these women and women of lower status is that the geography of the gentry household made it possible to maintain such a fiction when the reality was quite otherwise.

The Kynnersley family saga offers one other insight into the gendering of the household in early modern England. The fact that Isabel Kynnersley was both abuser and abused points to the complicated status of women in the early modern period: women were not always the least powerful members of a household, nor were they always the most vulnerable. Although subordinate to their husbands, women were also companions. As mistresses and mothers, women could exert power over other members of the household and even abuse them.Footnote ⁸³ At the same time, men could be vulnerable. Francis Kynnersley's letters to Walter Bagot demonstrate that a son who had not yet inherited might have remarkably little power over his finances or even his domestic life. While never threatened with imprisonment or violence as his mother and sister were, Francis repeatedly faced financial ruination because of his father's capricious behavior. Anthony Kynnersley was also happy to use his daughter-in-law and grandson as pawns in his protracted battles with his son.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although women as a class were clearly more vulnerable to abuse in the early modern patriarchal household, on some level they were part of a larger group of individuals, vulnerable because of their position within the family or household hierarchy.

IV

The findings of this article are probably not surprising to social historians who have long recognized the embedment of the early modern household within the community. However, as Mary Hartman has recently argued, historians have thus far not focused their attention on the role of women and households in larger questions of historical causation, including the development of the concepts of public and private.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nor has the early modern continuum of public and private been absorbed by literary historians, many of whom continue to use these terms as if they meant the same to early modern individuals as they do to us.Footnote ⁸⁶ Although I would stop short of advocating a complete embargo on these terms, I would argue that private and privacy in particular had remarkably different meanings in the early modern period and should be used as analytical categories only with extreme care. For early modern individuals, private was either a value-free term implying simply “less public” or “not public”—the “private family” is a case in point—or else it denoted secrecy and therefore could be morally suspect, such as in “private” goings-on between unmarried men and women. Our associations of a right to privacy and particularly of a right to control private information, and of a gendered Lockean privacy within the family, simply do not obtain in the early modern period. Early modern individuals clearly did enjoy varying degrees of both solitude and intimacy with family members, but these aspects of life were regularly and repeatedly considered in light of their effect on and connection to the wider community and should not be conflated with concepts of privacy. In addition, the association of women with the household did not mean that women's lives were more isolated from community life; in fact, women and other vulnerable individuals at times needed to struggle to keep personal information secret precisely because there was no perceived right to privacy.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of prominent medievalists lamented the way previous historians had misrepresented the medieval past in order to underpin narratives of change in the early modern period. In a seminal article, David Aers reminded the scholarly world of the elementary demand for “any account that tells us stories of transformations” to define “precisely that against which it is being alleged the changes are identifiable as decisive changes and ruptures.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Aers, Judith Bennett, and Lee Patterson all challenged scholars who were too ready to accept that the medieval past was a foreign country, in order to support the hypothesis that the early modern world—and specifically Shakespeare's England—was the origin of our own. The research for this article strongly suggests that some researchers have also been too willing to accept that the early modern past was not a foreign country. The concepts of public and private are fundamental to our Western cultural identity, and the narratives underpinning those concepts—be they Habermas's public sphere or the family privacy that has its roots in Locke—tend to be forward-looking histories that can tell us what we think now about public and private better than they can tell us how seventeenth-century individuals encountered those concepts. We have, for the most part, been too ready to assume that the terms public and private have been stable throughout the modern period and not ready enough to interrogate the values we associate with those terms.

Of course, neither forward-looking narratives nor histories of change are categorically incorrect. This article, in demonstrating that early seventeenth-century individuals had a perspective on public and private fundamentally different from our own, implicitly argues for a narrative of change sometime after the period considered here. While investigating that moment of change, we must be careful not simply to push the anachronisms forward, allowing a hunger for modernity to obscure our judgment of what those changes actually meant in their own time. It is the nature of empty signifiers to discourage us from examining the emptiness of what they name, and if we are to trace the history of how those concepts became empty, we must work very carefully to separate concepts that signify in an ordinary way from those that signify a lack.Footnote ⁸⁸ I suspect that the tension between public and private was not part of a grand narrative, as it is for us, until at least the later seventeenth century. If that is the case, then narrating the history of public and private in the seventeenth century will require careful attention to our own tendency to value personal autonomy and public or political influence above communality, the family, and (for some) individual religious belief. Without such careful attention, we will find it difficult to isolate the concepts—including self-examination and secrecy—that were part of a significant cultural debate for early modern individuals.