ABSTRACT
Historian David Underdown argues that the early modem period saw growing instability, with such causes and symptoms as inflation, land shortage, excessive population growth, poverty, and vagrancy, and he further connects the concern about general social disorder with the preoccupation regarding rebellious wives. His three categories of unruly wives-the scold, the witch, and the domineering wife-suggest how fine-tuned the misogynist tradition. In early modem jestbooks, jokes about the gender roles of wives and husbands have primarily conservative social effects. Susan Purdie comprehensively argues that comedy about gender generally does have such effects, because by setting something up as funny, wives and husbands in this case, one normalizes the way things. The jokes about husbands and wives in the seventeenth century support her claim. Such cultural conditions the feminist-antifeminist controversy of the early seventeenth century and the promulgation of the Protestant doctrine of married chastity, or heroic love, idealize the role of wives and marriage in living the Christian, respectable life.
