ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that within the ideological context prescribed in early modern England, women's texts show some sense of their potential control over the female body and some consciousness of how to lay a tactical claim to a bodily space. Jane Sharp's Midwives Book, published in 1671, contains an illustration of a woman's naked body, much simpler, not so costly to reproduce, and until very recently, much less well-known. In marriage contracts, women's bodies were treated as male-owned property, items of patriarchal exchange. A woman's chastity was designated as the property of her husband or father, so that either could sue the wife's or daughter's seducer for damage to his property or theft. Women in early modern England as in most other historical situations seem to have resided in a bodily space where they functioned at one and the same time as both object and subject.
