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Review Date: 25 October 2018

Briony McDonagh estimates that over 10 per cent of land in Georgian Britain was owned by female landowners. Assuming her sample of 250,000 acres to be representative of broader patterns and trends, McDonagh surmises that ‘somewhere in excess of 3 million acres in England were owned by women in the later eighteenth century and more than 6 million acres in Great Britain as a whole’ (p.

Review Date: 29 June 2017

Amy Froide’s book is an excellent addition to the work on early modern women done by researchers such as Amy Louise Erickson. In fact, it was Amy Erickson who first drew my attention to this book even before I was asked to review it. It does not disappoint.

Review Date: 18 February 2016

At the heart of this book is a surprisingly straightforward methodology: an examination of responses given by witnesses in church court cases to two questions designed to probe their reliability: what were they 'worth'? (that is, the value of their moveable goods with all their debts paid); and how did they maintain themselves? This focus yields an enormous dataset of 13,686 witness statements from between 1550…

Review Date: 23 April 2015

This well-crafted volume of ten essays is an important contribution to the growing body of research on women and law in England the pre-modern period. Each essay examines a different aspect of women’s interactions with the law (broadly defined and encompassing both secular and ecclesiastical courts) and, as suggested in the title, foregrounds their agency.

Review Date: 01 October 2010

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels posited a fundamental relationship between women’s property rights, on the one hand, and changes in the social and political spheres, on the other.

Review Date: 01 June 2010

The Times in its editorial of 11 February 1857 opined 'It is a terrible incident of our social existence that the resources for gaining a livelihood left open to women are so few. ...

Review Date: 31 August 2008

The history of single women in pre-modern Europe has begun to attract a good amount of attention in the last decade. Thanks to historians such as Judith Bennett, Kim Phillips, Ruth Mazo Karras and P. J. P. Goldberg, we now have some knowledge about single women in medieval England, particularly about their working lives, their youth, their sexuality and contemporary attitudes toward them.

Review Date: 01 October 2005

In recent decades, the fields of women's and gender studies have rapidly expanded. In trying to understand women's roles in past societies, historians have paid particular attention to issues surrounding marriage, family, and the household. This volume seeks to expand the discussion of women's places in early modern northern-European societies by focusing on the institution of marriage and its role in economic activities.

Review Date: 31 July 2005

Since the 1970s historians have been redressing the longstanding omission of women from virtually all types of history. We now know much more about women’s experiences in the past, both in their own right and as contributors to larger historical events, than had previously been the case.

Review Date: 01 February 2004

Historians of early modern marriage have made much use of court records in uncovering the matrimonial difficulties of our ancestors. Yet the exceptional, and sometimes sensational, nature of the cases brought to court, especially causes for separation brought to the ecclesiastical courts, begs the question of how far such materials provide a reliable insight into the meanings of matrimony or are typical experiences of marriage.