ABSTRACT
When the clergy began to marry in England at the Reformation, it was part and parcel of the change which resulted from the radical reappraisal of doctrine undertaken by the reformers. It resulted in the emergence of a new group of women, the wives of the clergy, which had to be accorded some sort of place within the structure of a hierarchic society. Their position was bound to reflect the attitude of society both to women and to the church, and of the church to both. In England the problems were most acute for the bishops' wives, the wives of the leaders of the newly established Anglican Church. Whereas the lives of most clergy wives are irretrievably lost to the record, there is enough information about the wives of bishops to reconstruct something of the problems they faced, and the compromises and solutions achieved in absorbing them into the structure of church and state.
