ABSTRACT
Historians have long been aware that many early modern Britons were denied formal participation in the political sphere due to status, gender, age, property, ethnicity, and other characteristics. This chapter argues that such exclusions were not achieved solely by such sociological demarcations, but also through the methods increasingly used to exercise authority during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. As numerous historians have observed, the written word assumed greater authority than oral tradition in this period, and accordingly Tudor and Stuart administrators and statesmen collected, copied, and consulted past texts, seeking to tighten their grasp on power. This regime of practice attributed prescriptive power to records that represented England’s political and legal spheres as resolutely patriarchal. By examining early modern Englishwomen’s mobilisation of records and women’s labour in archival repositories, this chapter reveals that the heightened authority attributed to archival sources often elided the complex negotiations behind their production, while also occluding the work of individuals whose labour facilitated their use. It argues that the intensifying authority attributed to the written word in early modern England reinforced and deepened longstanding systems of exclusion and suggest the need for historians to recognise the systemic distortions of the archives on which they rely.
