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Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603

Book

Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603

DOI link for Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603

Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603 book

Authority, Influence and Material Culture

Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603

DOI link for Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603

Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603 book

Authority, Influence and Material Culture
BySusan E. James
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2015
eBook Published 1 March 2016
Pub. Location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315546483
Pages 332
eBook ISBN 9781315546483
Subjects Humanities, Law
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James, S.E. (2015). Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315546483

ABSTRACT

Contributing an original dimension to the significant body of published scholarship on women in 16th-century England, this study examines the largest corpus of women’s private writings available to historians: their wills. In these, female voices speak out, commenting on their daily lives, on identity, gender, status, familial relationships and social engagement. Wills show women to have been active participants in a civil society, well aware of their personal authority and potential influence, whose committed actions during life and charitable strategies after death could and did impact the health of that society. From an intensive analysis of more than 1200 wills, this pioneering work focuses on women from all parts of the country and all strata of society, revealing an entire population of articulate, opportunistic, and capable individuals who found the spaces between the lines of the law and used those spaces to achieve personal goals. Author Susan James demonstrates how wills describe strategies for end-of-life care, create platforms of remembrance, and offer insights into the myriad occupational endeavors in which women were engaged. James illuminates how these documents were not simply instruments of bequest and inheritance, but were statements of power and control, catalogues of material culture from which we are able to gauge a woman’s understanding of her own reality and the context that formed her environment. Wills were tools and the way in which women wielded these tools offers new ways to look at England in the 16th century and reveals the seminal role women played in its development.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|46 pages

The Performance of Death

chapter 2|36 pages

Identity and Remembrance

chapter 3|54 pages

Women’s Work: Vocation, Occupation, and Labor

chapter 4|52 pages

The Dispersal of Assets: Land

chapter 5|30 pages

The Dispersal of Assets: Money

chapter 6|50 pages

The Dispersal of Assets: Undressing the House, Undressing the Body

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