Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England.

Tim Stretton. Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England.

(Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xvi + 271 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-49554-7.

Mary Chan. Life into Story: The Courtship of Elizabeth Wiseman.

(Women and Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1750.) Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. xlviii + 113 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 1-84014-212-X.

Although both of these books study the situation of women in early modern England, they go about conducting their historiography in very different ways. The one is a meticulous and wide-ranging archival analysis; the other reproduces a single set of forgotten documents along with the author's somewhat large claims about her discovery.

Despite his rather expansive title, Tim Stretton's book focuses on the minor Court of Requests, whose primary purpose was to provide inexpensive equitable relief to the poor; however, for Stretron's purposes, one third of the cases he surveys involved a female plaintiff or defendant. Stretton surveys over 2,000 documents from the 20,000 court files from Elizabeth's reign. In his introduction he puts forward several caveats. His survey is of limited applicability to other courts and times -- indeed, in his concluding remarks he writes that to get at the heart of women's relationship with the law "it is necessary to look beyond the lives of the women who gained entry to large Westminster courts like Requests, to the lives of the many women who did not" (240). Nonetheless, the subject here is limited to women and litigation. Within the group of women litigants, the varieties of class and status need to be taken into account. Moreover, the evidence needs careful handling, since the distortions of pleadings and their self-interest never give direct access to reality. Here Stretton follows the lead of Natalie Zemon Davis, stressing story telling, representation of the truth, and the attitudes revealed, as much as attempting to get at the way things really were. Reality and cultural stereotypes, of course, do not always coincide. Here he turns to literary culture on women litigants, although his treatment of cultural documents is cursory and lacking in sophistication.

The judiciousness and balance of Stretton's findings can be seen in several of the statements from his concluding chapter: "it seems that women's rights were in flux in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries largely because the jurisdictions that extended them rights were in flux" (232); "[w]omen's relationship with the law was far from ideal, but it was not as uniformly bleak as some commentators have assumed" (216); [t]he balance of power within the law was weighted against women, but those who had sufficient drive and opportunities, and who pushed aside public anxiety about the correctness of women going to law, could gain relief in a variety of different courts" (240).

Mary Chan's book is primarily an edition of a single set of fifty-seven documents, which she has annotated, concerning the widow Elizabeth Wiseman's resistance to a marriage proposal in 1686. The documents were found among the manuscripts of the North family at Rougham Hall in Norfolk and appear to have been gathered together as protection against a potential breach of contract action by Wiseman's suitor, Robert Spencer. The documents consist of various accounts of events by Wiseman and her relatives, in the style of legal depositions. Chan's introduction makes sweeping claims for the significance of the papers. She justifies the value of the "micro-history" she is undertaking: "I concede that the study of [the documents] might be subject to the possible claims against all such history: of concentration on too much detail or too small an episode to be of historical significance. I would claim, conversely, that the documents make available -- precisely because of their detail ... -- historical evidence that i s not available in sources or studies which engage in a larger sweep .... By allowing us to concentrate on a single (and singular) event and reactions to it, the documents give ... evidence for a number of issues of larger historical significance for our understanding of the latter years of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century" (xv).

If this is so, it is important, nevertheless, to draw general conclusions from one set of documents with great care and suspicion. For instance, as a story of courtship and marriage, "[t]his is not a correspondence about love, or between lovers; it is, rather, about indifference, dislike and, eventually, fear. It is about the social and legal constraints and, for some parties, the possibilities for wealth and status, of matrimony at the end of the seventeenth century" (xi). It would be foolhardy, however, to overextend the reaches of "indifference, dislike and ... fear" in our understanding of matrimony in the period, based on a single set of documents.

Among the other large issues Chan addresses is the changing nature of legal evidence, from an emphasis on the stature and character of the witness to an emphasis on probability and verisimilitude. As interesting as this claim is, the evidence the Wiseman documents provide for this change is a bit thin in the larger context. Like Stretton, Chan calls on Natalie Zemon Davis to support her interest in story telling. The documents are, she claims, a "prototypical novel" (xlii) in the eighteenth-century epistolary tradition, and this narrative form dovetails with the change in legal evidence to support Chan's sense of a general epistemological change. Again, this may be true, but microhistory can only suggest rather than go far towards proving such a development.

Although Chan is interested in story telling as much as she is in the truth behind the story, she makes distinctions between the apparent authenticity of Elizabeth Wiseman's accounts, which speak of the social role imposed on her (xxvi), and those of other correspondents, which are "carefully contrived" (xviii) and "stylized" (xxvii). One wonders if, in principle and given the inevitable divergence of story and reality, Chan's scepticism should not have been more systematic. Life into Story is a very suggestive book, but limited in convincing us about its claims.

These two books tell us interesting things about women and law in early modern England, but they leave us in their own ways with large questions about what we can know about this subject and how best to gather and process the evidence.