Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought is an interesting and thought-provoking book on a topic which has been ripe for the picking ever since early modern historians began to think about connections between household structure and political philosophy. Ideally, a satisfying treatment of the topic ought to entail the mastery of a spectrum of different 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 quite a tall order, although the exhaustive multidisciplinary approach has produced some modern historical masterpieces, including Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), Carole Levin's Heart and Stomach of a King (Philadelphia, 1994), and, more recently, Mihoko Suzuki's Subordinate Subjects (Aldershot, 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 individual heads of households. This thesis is developed in three parts, entitled “Marriage Contract as Political Contract,” “Subjection in Oeconomy and Polity,” and finally, “Tyranny, Chastity and Liberty.” The first part offers a chronological survey of the theme of marriage as a 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 a selection 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 one of James Tyrrell's arguments against the French theorist Jean Bodin's assertion that the production of children gave fathers an absolute unlimited 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” (64).

The second section appears to focus on the marital relationship itself and women's subordinate status therein. Here Peters breaks with chronology, or rather begins all over 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 some of the points about some of the same authors she has analyzed 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 and a little coda devoted to Lady Anne Fanshawe's memoirs at the end of part 2, the attempts to include a female perspective are few and far between. For example, Peters offers an analysis of male Levellers’ views on the household franchise in several different contexts. Yet we hear nothing about female Levellers 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 had limited her research to three types of printed sources: political tracts, domestic literature, and drama. Accordingly, she gives full treatment to Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke, William Gouge and Robert Cleaver, Richard Brome and John Dryden, and several exceedingly obscure authors and playwrights. I 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; more to the point, she constantly used the one to talk about the other. Her absence, like Banquo's ghost, is one of the more inexplicable of several curious omissions of primary and secondary sources which could have been relevant to the book's theme.

And what of Peters's thesis? For me, the Whiggish half of Peters's scenario looks more convincing than the Tory half. After all, what could Whigs like Tyrrell and Locke do with women, except sweep 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. Think of King Lear.