ABSTRACT
Hunting was culturally and legally imagined as an elite male activity in early modern England, with clear lines of demarcation that excluded both the poor and women. Yet a careful analysis of social participation in the sport in the early seventeenth century suggests that lines of exclusion were more complicated. Each hunt had multiple specific inclusions and exclusions dependent on politics, religion, and gender. National, local, and religious politics intersected with the sporting sociability in which gentlemen and noblemen engaged. As alliances shifted and different strategies of power were used, who hunted with whom shifted and changed. This modulation between inclusion and exclusion could occur over time but also within single sociable spaces. This chapter argues that women could participate in hunting within carefully defined limits and uncovers evidence to show how they were able to carve out a political role for themselves.
