Urban Women

Abstract

Mature fields of inquiry tend to generate interpretive diversity, even, at times, dissonance. The two books under review cover almost exactly the same period: Hubbard’s book deals with the years between approximately 1570 and 1640 while Korda’s more or less spans the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Both books focus on London women, particularly their work lives. Both utilize original manuscript and early printed sources and make attempts to grapple with issues to do with sex and sexuality. And yet, with all their surface similarities, these two books represent surprisingly divergent disciplinary traditions and methodologies, have dissimilar political departure points, and seek to make markedly different interventions in their authors’ respective fields. Eleanor Hubbard is a historian and City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order, which is her first book, joins a number of cognate social history studies which explore the lives of ‘ordinary’ people in the early modern period as mediated through court records. The study is based primarily on the Diocese of London Consistory Court deposition books, which run with only minor gaps right across the period she is studying (depositions were statements by witnesses attesting to the facts of a particular case; happily for the historian they also tend to contain a good deal of biographical information about the witness). Hubbard also relies fairly heavily on prescriptive literature, notably some fairly well-known contemporary handbooks –originally sermons – on family duties. The chapters track the female life-cycle from adolescence to service, to courtship and marriage, to running a household and participating, as a mature woman, in neighbourhood networks. There is a lengthy chapter on women’s work and an especially effective and affecting final chapter entitled ‘Dealing with Death’. The analytic method consists, first, of mining the depositions for quantitative and qualitative evidence about work and the life-cycle, on the not unfounded assumption that deposers represent a good cross-section of ‘middling’ London life; and, second, of reading the statistical evidence and the often sensationalistic stories in the Consistory Court cases (where the main business was sexual defamation, breach of promise, and marriages in dire trouble) against selected prescriptive literature. Historians of early modern women will recognize in Hubbard’s book a time-honoured method for writing about women’s lives in the past.