Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England

Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History

by Garthine Walker

Garthine Walker reveals that women were not treated leniently by the courts and that beliefs about gender and order impacted on real legal outcomes in early modern England. She demonstrates that the household role had as much to do with the nature of criminality as the individual in this period. Challenging hitherto accepted views regarding gender stereotyping, this book illuminates the complexities of everyday English life in the early modern period.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

332 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 1999

Reviews

[Zeynep Tezer]

Garthine Walker combines a quantitative and qualitative approach to investigate the interrelationship between gender, socioeconomic background, and criminality in Cheshire, England between the 1590s and 1660s. Her comparative reading of the legal documents and the narrative sources, e.g. found in the contemporaneous pamphlets and treatises, demonstrates how the popular discourses about women, virile pride, and fixed expectations about both genders informed the English subjects' understanding of justice and usage of the law. Her nuanced analysis of the criminal records involving female criminality offers alternative explanations for the underrepresentation of women in such documents. For example, she argues that disruptive feminine actions were often silenced, ridiculed, or depicted as inconsequential because they hurt or interfered with the honor of men. Moreover, she demonstrates that the law itself evolved in a way to treat women differently than men, although not necessarily to the detriment of the former. In my opinion, Walker's larger claim that the volatile political attitude towards the English monarchy transformed, through the state-household analogy, the general societal attitude regarding how the women should conduct themselves within the patriarchal household, is beguiling, yet not quite apparent from the evidence provided by her. Overall, Walker approaches the question of female criminality through the vantage point of the household and domesticity, which she regards as central to the early woman's daily life. She convincingly and innovatively argues that the contemporaneous philosophical, ethical, as well as legal discourses all centered on the concept of the household, both as the nuclear societal unit that needed to be preserved and as the framework by which the early-modern woman's activity and role in society were delineated.

[Christoffer Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good academic piece on crime in early modern England/Chester

[Evelina Asp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I should really stop having high expectations on books. Those books I have looked forward to read has been really bad or just a pain in the butt to get through.
This book did not speak to me when I first saw it, and I did not really feel any need of wanting to read it (of course I have to read it thouhg when it's for Uni). But this book is probably the best book we have read during this semester. I really did enjoy it.