Women And Petitioning In The Seventeenth Century English Revolution

During the English Civil Wars and Revolution (1640-60), the affairs of Church and State came under a crucial new form of comment and critique, in the form of public petitions. Petitioning was a readily available mode of communication for women, and this study explores the ways in which petitioning in seventeenth-century England was adapted out of and differed from pre-Revolutionary modes, whilst also highlighting gendered conventions and innovations of petitioning in that period. Male petitioning in the seventeenth century did not have to negotiate the cultural assumptions about intellectual inferiority and legal incapacity that constrained women. Yet just because women did not claim separate (and modern) women's rights does not mean that they were passive, quiescent, or had no political agency. On the contrary, as this study shows, women in the Revolution could use petitioning as a powerful way to address those in power, precisely because it was done from an assumed position of weakness. The petition is not simply a text, authored by a single pen, but a series of social transactions, performed in multiple social and political settings, frequently involving people previously excluded from participation in political discussion or action. To the extent that women participated in collective petitioning, or turned their individual addresses into printed artefacts for public scrutiny, they also participated in the public sphere of political opinion and debate.

From the most important feminist scholar of early modern Britain in the UK, this is a fascinating and unique examination of how the experience of the civil wars in England changed both role and conception of women and men in politics, society and culture.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Offering an analysis of the ways in which groups of non-aristocratic women circumvented a number of interdictions against female participation in the pamphlet culture of revolutionary England, this book is primarily a study of female agency. Despite the fact that pamphlets, or cheap unbound books, have recently been located among the most inclusive or democratic aspects of the social life of early modern England, this study provides a more gender-sensitive picture. Marcus Nevitt argues instead that throughout the revolutionary decades pamphlet culture was actually constructed around the public silence and exclusion of women. In support of his thesis, he discusses more familiar seventeenth-century authors such as John Milton, John Selden and Thomas Edwards in relation to the less canonical but equally forceful writings of Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, Mary Pope, 'Parliament Joan' and a large number of Quaker women. This is the first sustained study of the relationship between female agency and cheap print throughout the revolutionary decades 1640 to 1660. It adds to the study of gender in the field of the English Revolution by engaging with recent work in the history of the book, stressing the materiality of texts and the means and physical processes by which women's writing emerged through the printing press and networks of publication and dissemination. It will stimulate welcome debate about the nature and limits of discursive freedom in the early modern period, and for women in particular.

What was the relationship between woman and politics in 17th century England? Responding to this question, this work argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it. It is a study of gender and cultural politics in the century of revolution.

This concise introduction provides an overview of the state of research on women's history in the early modern period. It emcompasses a guide to the historiography, an assessment of the major debates, and information about the varied sources available for women's history in this period. Arranged around familiar themes - the family, work, religion, education - the book presents a comprehensive survey of the social, economic and political position of women in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Unbridled Spirits is a vibrant and authoritative study of the women of the 17th century, women who found the means to speak out and demand change at a time when a woman could be publicly humiliated, bridled and tortured for scolding her husband.

In Domesticity and Dissent Katharine Gillespie examines writings by seventeenth-century English Puritan women who fought for religious freedom. Seeking the right to preach and prophesy, women such as Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Wentworth envisioned the modern political principles of toleration, the separation of Church from state, privacy, and individualism. Gillespie argues that their sermons, prophesies, and petitions illustrate the fact that these liberal theories did not originate only with such well-known male thinkers as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Rather, they emerged also from a group of determined female religious dissenters who used the Bible to reassess traditional definitions of womanhood, public speech and religious and political authority. Gillespie takes the 'pamphlet literatures' of the seventeenth century as important subjects for analysis, and her study contributes to the important scholarship on the revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War in England.