Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Law

Early modern women’s relationship to the law has been a long-standing point of critical contention, pitting their restricted position and legal limitations against an increasing sense of their legal agency, and early modern women’s writing is no less interested in legal questions. Traditionally inflected by biographical concerns, scholarship attuned to law in early modern women’s writing has, as this entry demonstrates, tended to cluster around these same concerns, with an emphasis on legal matters pertaining to the domestic sphere. However, there is also a palpable resistance identified by critics in these imaginative engagements with law that envisage alternatives to and possibilities within prevailing legal systems and practices, however fictive. Approaching this topic with a transnational outlook, this entry surveys the legal landscape of early modern Europe and women’s position in it before moving to consider the myriad ways legal matters manifest in women’s writing from the period. Taking in a range of legal topics and their imaginative representations, including (in)justice, personhood, wills and inheritance, property and possession, rhetoric and complaint, marriage, rape, sovereignty and citizenship, custom, and jurisdiction, this entry brings together and illuminates the core strands of scholarship on early modern women’s writing and law. Concluding this entry is a reflection on the state of the field with a view to identifying future directions and opportunities for further exploration.