ABSTRACT
Historians’ impressions of widows’ relationship with the law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, based on analyses of conduct books, statutes, legal commentaries, private papers and diaries, have fluctuated, shifting between positions of relative optimism and unconstrained pessimism. Over the course of the Tudor and Stuart period hundreds of thousands of widows went to law to assert or defend their rights in an array of different courts. To make their clients appear deserving, lawyers emphasized widows’ poverty, attempting to harness the sense of purity and innocence that in advice literature and the Bible so often attached to the figure of the defenceless widow. Widowhood, like marriage, was a major spur to litigation where women were concerned. Widow moneylenders sued for debts when debts went unpaid, while other individuals brought or answered legal actions connected with their property and trades.
