ABSTRACT
In seventeenth-century England the institution of marriage had multiple meanings, involving as it did sexuality and property, love and power, material production and gender-identities, social standing and responsibility for children, and even a model of the whole society or 'commonwealth'. In formal terms marriage was a permanently binding public agreement which was strictly reciprocal and entailed both symmetrical and asymmetrical aspects. In the late 1580s a London couple, Joan Mortimer and Richard Campion, embarked upon what was to become a very troubled courtship, which was spun out over a period of four years. Marriage was a joint enterprise: the wife was expected to participate in material production, in a rich variety of ways which were summed up under the word 'huswifry'. Each seventeenth-century marriage created a family: a domestic group comprising the wife, the husband, in due course their children, and commonly also their servants and apprentices.
