This volume brings together essays that demonstrate, women during the 1550 to1750s were far from being passive victims or bystanders, and it is no longer adequate to discuss their experiences within the simple paradigm of active/passive or public/ private. By exploring the dynamics of female behaviour, these works dramatically expand the perception of the legal process, of women's engagement with it, and of the gendered attitudes of early modern England. Each of the chapters in this book serves to qualify a model of oppressive patriarchy with women as passive victims. A crucial challenge for historians is to understand the way in which the whole of society, including women, constructed gender and allocated and imagined rôles for either sex. By closely examining behaviour when individuals exhausted social tolerance or broke fundamental taboos we gain insights difficult to achieve by other means.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.