Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England / / Andrew Buck, Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• TeilnehmendeR: Buck, Andrew,; Ferguson, Margaret W.,; Wright, Nancy E.,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England examines the competing narratives of property told by and about women in the early modern period. Through letters, legal treatises, case law, wills, and works of literature, the contributors explore women's complex roles as subjects and agents in commercial and domestic economies, and as objects shaped by a network of social and legal relationships. By constructing conversations across the disciplinary boundaries of legal and social history, sociology and literary criticism, the collection explores a diverse range of women's property relationships.Recent research has revealed fissures in our knowledge about women's property relationships within a regime characterized by competing jurisdictions, diverse systems of tenure, and multiple concepts of property. Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England turns to these points of departure for the study of women's legal status and property relationships in the early modern period. This interdisciplinary analysis of women and property is written in an accessible manner and will become a valuable resource for scholars and students of Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, early modern social and legal history, and women's studies.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One: Credit, Commerce, and Women's Property Relationships -- 1. Temporal Gestation, Legal Contracts, and the Promissory Economies of The Winter's Tale / Parker, Patricia -- 2. Putting Women in Their Place: Female Litigants at Whitehaven, 1660-1760 / Churches, Christine -- 3. Women's Property, Popular Cultures, and the Consistory Court of London in the Eighteenth Century / Lemmings, David -- 4. The Whore's Estate: Sally Salisbury, Prostitution, and Property in Eighteenth-Century London / Rosenthal, Laura J. -- Part Two: Women, Social Reproduction, and Patrilineal Inheritance -- 5. Primogeniture, Patrilineage, and the Displacement of Women / Murray, Mary -- 6. Isabella's Rule: Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure / Korda, Natasha -- 7. Marriage, Identity, and the Pursuit of Property in Seventeenth-Century England: The Cases of Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Wiseman / Chan, Mary / Wright, Nancy E. -- 8. Cordelia's Estate: Women and the Law of Property from Shakespeare to Nahum Tate / Buck, A.R. -- Part Three: Women's Authorship and Ownership: Matrices for Emergent Ideas of Intellectual Property -- 9. Writing Home: Hannah Wolley, the Oxinden Letters, and Household Epistolary Practice / Summit, Jennifer -- 10. Women's Wills in Early Modern England / Davis, Lloyd -- 11. Spiritual Property: The English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and the Dispute over the Baker Manuscripts / Walker, Claire -- 12. The Titular Claims of Female Surnames in Eighteenth-Century Fiction / Shevlin, Eleanor F. -- 13. Early Modern (Aristocratic) Women and Textual Property / Salzman, Paul -- Afterword / Grazia, Margreta De -- Contributors -- Index