Manuscript Legal and Financial Documents
摘要
This entry discusses legal and financial documents in manuscript that were either written or dictated by early modern Englishwomen. Early modern Englishwomen wrote wills and kept financial accounts, as well as gave testimony in legal courts. Wills can be read as autobiographical texts that provide rich detail on how a woman wished to represent her life and character, remember her relationships, and perpetuate her memory. Court testimonies from female litigants and witnesses reveal incidental detail about their lives, illustrate women shaping their narrative to tell a particular story, and provide one of the best sources for getting at the words and language of common women. Early modern women’s numeracy meant that they regularly kept financial accounts, which were narrative and alphabetic as much as they were numeric. The narrative nature of probate and litigation documents and the hybrid generic nature of financial accounts mean that these sources should be of interest to scholars interested in women’s writing and women’s voices.