Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern Englandexamines 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 Englandturns 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.

Nancy E. Wright is the director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Property Rights at the University of Newcastle. Margaret W. Ferguson teaches in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. A.R. Buck teaches in the Division of Law at Macquarie University.