ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on seventeenth-century women's use of legal discourse is an example of the abiding influence Smith's scholarship has had on the field. Sir Edward Coke, one of the most prominent beneficiaries of the "educational revolution", elucidated his reason for publishing accounts of his cases-"The reporting of particular Cases or Examples is the most perspicuous course of teaching, the right rule and reason of the Law". Four years before the 1632 publication of the Lawes Resolutions, Sir Edward Coke's commentary on Littleton was published as the first volume of Coke's four Institutes of the Laws of England. Although Coke's mother Winifred, the daughter of an attorney, owned and read law books, which became part of her son's law library. Many have noted that Coke's title announces its affinity to Justinian's codification of Roman law. Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, whose 1894 British Free Women was a pioneering study of women's political standing in medieval and early modern England.