ABSTRACT

So much has happened since 1985, when Barry Reay called for more knowledge about ‘the contact points for female popular culture,’ as he lamented that ‘sadly the women in the pages which follow appear infrequently and then often as victims.’1 Not only has there been a veritable explosion of scholarship on women whose names we know; there has been an outpouring of scholarship on the very real agency of women in a popular culture who must, for the most part, remain nameless. There’s Pamela Allen Brown’s work on women’s agency in a culture of jest, and her anthology with Peter Parolin on women players in early modern England; Bernard Capp’s scholarship on gossips; Adam Fox’s chapter on old wives’ tales (an important resource for this essay); Diane Purkiss’s work on ghosts and on fairy allusions in Scottish witch trials; chapters on lower-class women readers by Heidi Brayman Hackel and Lori Humphrey Newcomb; the active work by women in healing by, for example, Rebecca LaRoche; the active labors of women seamstresses by Fiona MacNeill; and Natasha Korda’s archival research on women brokers of used clothing in London.2 Studies of popular culture can

1 Barry Reay, ‘Introduction,’ in Barry Reay, ed., Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England (London and Sydney: Croom Helm), p. 10.