ABSTRACT
This essay delves into a series of court records and examinations against provocative speeches, seditious utterances, and incidents in which women engaged in the politics of civil war and revolution in mid-seventeenth century England. It looks at the potential potency ascribed to women’s disaffected and well-affected speech, and how reported speech was tied to larger political discourses about honesty, order, and affection in a world turned upside down. While early modern women often deployed tested ‘weapons of the weak’ to navigate power within interpersonal relations, civil war and revolution produced new discourses and conceptions of loyalty, order, and honesty that informed women’s engagement with the politics of slander, sedition, and informing within urban communities.
