Women waging law in Elizabethan England / Tim Stretton.
1998
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Author
Title
Women waging law in Elizabethan England / Tim Stretton.
Imprint
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Description
1 online resource (xv, 271 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
Series
Cambridge studies in early modern British history.
Formatted Contents Note
1. Introduction
2. Women, legal rights and law courts
3. Female litigants and the culture of litigation
4. The court of requests
5. Unmarried women and widows
6. Married women
7. Freebench, custom and equity
8. Pleading strategies in requests
9. Women waging law.
2. Women, legal rights and law courts
3. Female litigants and the culture of litigation
4. The court of requests
5. Unmarried women and widows
6. Married women
7. Freebench, custom and equity
8. Pleading strategies in requests
9. Women waging law.
Summary
This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity court.
Note
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
Location
WWW
Available in Other Form
Print version:
Linked Resources
Alternate Title
Cambridge Core.
Language
English
ISBN
9780511583124 ebook
9780521495547 (hardback)
9780521023252 (paperback)
9780521495547 (hardback)
9780521023252 (paperback)
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