English Aristocratic Women 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers.

Barbara J. Harris. English Aristocratic Women 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv + 346 pp. + 7 b/w pls. index. illus. gloss. bibl. $65 (cl), $29.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-19-505620-5 (cl), 0-19-515128-3 (pbk).

Harris's important and engaging study draws from family archives (including marriage contracts, accounts, inventories, letters), State Papers, Chancery cases, and over a thousand men's and women's wills to argue that aristocratic Yorkist and early Tudor women's responsibilities "constituted female careers" which, although "not professions in the modern sense," gave them considerable power over their families, servants, and communities (5). The vast variety among these women's experiences notwithstanding, Harris finds that most had frequent "opportunities to act with relative independence" (242). Her analysis of roughly 1,200 aristocratic couples and their children demonstrates both how the benefits of social class can mitigate considerably the legal disabilities born out of gender and how class and gender interact to form identity. Harris's work focuses on a central paradox: aristocratic English women lived in a society marked by undeniably oppressive patriarchal social structures; yet widespread evidence exists of individual women's personal authority and control of resources. Exploration of the malleability of patriarchal theories and structures in the context of individual lives is a primary concern of her volume. Furthermore, she analyzes how her subjects, women both subordinated and empowered, had "a vested interest in maintaining the system that oppressed them" (9).

After an introductory examination of the structures of patriarchy, Harris assesses women's experiences as daughters, wives, never-married women, mothers, widows, members of familial and regional patronage networks, and maids-of-honor and ladies-in-waiting at court. She identifies the linchpins of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century patriarchy as the doctrine of coverture in common law, primogeniture with male entail, arranged marriages, limitations of widows' property rights, and a misogynistic ideology based on classical philosophy, Christian theology, and early modern science. Because of coverture, wives "could not sign a binding contract, initiate or defend a lawsuit, or write a will" (18), yet ultimately the legal system was multidimensional and flexible enough to leave some room for female agency.

Although aristocratic women were inculcated from birth with the idea that they were to be chaste and obedient, they were not to be passive. Because elite women managed familial assets during their husbands' frequent absences, Harris argues persuasively that men had much incentive to treat their wives not as their minions, but "as de facto, if junior, partners in the family enterprise" (8). Thus, despite the system of arranged marriages and the reality of women's and men's different personal and economic interests, a woman was likely to find wifehood a satisfying career if her husband was neither abusive nor a poor fiscal manager. Although the degree of an individual woman's emotional contentment and financial stability at any given stage in the "uxorial cycle" varied, Harris argues that for most aristocratic women the institution of marriage offered more opportunities than liabilities. In particular, without marriage, one could not enter widowhood, the zenith of female power and "the culmination of aristocratic women's careers as wives and mothers" (127). Unbound by coverture, widows headed their own households and maintained active business and personal relationships with their "accumulated families." Harris's examination of widows is especially important since she argues against prevailing historiography with her assertion that long widowhoods benefited husbands' patrilineages rather than placing economic burdens on marital families' estates. Similarly, her work on women at court contends with the dominant historiography by arguing that women's participation was crucial to the institution's "social, ceremonial, political, and diplomatic functions" and thus had political significance (211). Likewise, the rise of the early modern state, which saw heightened focus on the court, benefited aristocratic Englishwomen. Harris's analysis of how female "career servants of the crown" (217) competed for and dispensed patronage, performed in court pageantry and masques, used their appearances and accomplishments to create a congenial environment for foreign relations, and participated actively in high politics with the dawn of the Reformation, is the most provocative element in this prodigiously researched and wonderfully detailed study.

COLLEEN M. SEGUIN

Valparaiso University