ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a number of diverse documents dating from 1523 to 1632 and summarises women's legal options as a way of tracing a rhetorical history of and basis for female anxieties about men's unpredictable uses of power. The documents, letters, complaints, and diaries – written by both men and women – offer a sample history of women's agency in relation to law and marriage that is in dialogue with conduct manuals, educational and political treatises, and Shakespeare's cuckoldry plays. The narrative energy of marital conflict is remarkably in evidence in early modern legal cases on sex and marriage, especially those on slander and defamation. The chapter discusses that common law's apparent stranglehold on married women's legal rights disclosed the vulnerability of power relations to opposition and alteration. Narratives of monarchical authority were challenged by English subjects' negotiation with systems of power that could not account for, control, or adapt to the flexible nature of day-to-day encounters.
