Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre-Reformation England

Abstract

but some very tangible penalties. The particular configuration of English law and legal institutions conspired to bring this about. Networks of informing, gossip, rumor, talebearing and, on occasion, lies about neighbors' sex lives fuelled curial action against both defamers and sexual delicts. They were, in fact, an integral part of the regulation of sexuality in pre-modern England. The cases discussed here, taken together, show how dangerous the words could be. by a variety of means: gender indoctrination ... [and] the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining 'respectability' and 'deviance' according to women's sexual activities. A similar argument is also made by James A. Sharpe, Witchcraft and Women in Seventeenth-Century England: Some Northern Evidence, Continuity and Change, VI (I991), 177-I99, noting the empirical difficulties in attributing to simple misogyny the preponderance of women among accused witches in early-modern England (Many if not most accusers were also female); ibid., I9I: Witchcraft in early modem England existed in conjunction with a number of other social phenomena: among these, I would suggest, were women's cultural perceptions, women's notions of honour, female power, and female social space. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.170 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 04:01:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms