J.P.Sommerville

 

XIII: THE FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Q: What were the main changes which took place in family structure and in attitudes towards the family in early modern England?

 

[NB many of the items in lists XI. Agriculture and XII. Social Change are also relevant]

The family: general

  1. R Houlbrooke, English family life
  2. L Pollock, A lasting relationship: parents and children over three centuries
  3. L Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500-1800
  4. A Macfarlane, Marriage and love in England: modes of reproduction 1300-1840
  5. A Macfarlane, Review of (1) in History and theory 18 (1979)
  6. S Ozment, When fathers ruled: family life in Reformation Europe
  7. C Durston, The Family in the English Revolution

 

Specific topics

  1. P Laslett, Family life and illicit love in earlier generations
  2. P Laslett and R Wall, Household and family in past time
  3. M Ingram, 'The reform of popular culture? Sex and marriage in early modern England', in B Reay, ed., Popular culture in early modern England
  4. M Ingram, Church courts, sex and marriage in England 1570-1640
  5. GR Quaife, Wanton wenches and wayward wives: peasants and illicit sex in early seventeenth century England
  6. JA Sharpe, Defamation and sexual slander in early modern England: the church courts at York
  7. K Thomas, 'The double standard', Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959)
  8. RB Schnucker, 'Elizabethan birth control', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4(1975)
  9. EA Wrigley, 'Family limitation in pre-industrial England', Economic History Review 19 (1966)
  10. K Wrightson, 'Infanticide in earlier seventeenth century England', Local Population Studies 15 (1975)
  11. R Houlbrooke, 'The making of marriage in mid-Tudor England', Journal of Family History 10 (1985)
  12. P Crawford, '"The sucking child"': Adult attitudes to child care in the first year of life in seventeenth-century England', Continuity and Change 1, (1986) 23-51

 

Women

  1. MR Sommerville, Sex and subjection: attitudes to women in early modern society
  2. M Prior, ed., Women in English Society 1500-1800
  3. I Maclean, The Renaissance notion of women
  4. A L Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England
  5. K Thomas, 'Women and the Civil War sects', Past and Present 13 (1958)
  6. P Hogrefe, Tudor women: commoners and queens
  7. P Rushton, 'Women, witchcraft and slander', Northern History 18 (1982)
  8. J Nadelhaft, 'The Englishwoman's sexual civil war', Journal of the History of Ideas 1982
  9. P Mack, 'Women as prophets during the English Civil War', Feminist Studies 8 (1982)
  10. JK Kinnaird, 'Mary Astell and the conservative contribution to English feminism', Journal of British Studies 19 (1979)
  11. V Fildes ed., Women as mothers in pre-industrial England
  12. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England 1550-1720 . Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1998
  13. Barbara J. Harris. English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002
  14. Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500-1760: A Social History . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994
  15. Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker, eds. Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994
  16. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before her 1995
  17. Eales, Jacqueline,  Women in Early Modern England 1500-1700 London: UCL Press 1998
  18. David M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660-1740  Cambridge University Press, 2002
  19. J Daybell ed., Early Modern Women's Letter Writing , 1450-1700 Laura Gowing Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England Yale University Press, 2003
  20. Thomas Gataker, Marriage Duties (1620)
    [Standard seventeenth century account of a wife's duties].

 

Some of the best known writings by women

  1. M Fell, Women's speaking justified 1666 (defence of women's speaking at Quaker meetings; also other works in defence of Quakers and religious tolerance)
  2. M Astell, Reflections upon marriage 1700 (also works in defense of conservative Anglicanism and religious intolerance)
  3. D Osborne, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (on love, marriage and other topics)

 

Other women's writing

  1. B Harley, Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley , Camden Society 1854 (on politics, religion, family life etc)
  2. A Goreau, ed.,The whole duty of a woman: female writers in seventeenth-century England (anthology)