Tim Stretton is a Professor of History at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since gaining Arts and Law degrees from the University of Adelaide and a PhD from the University of Cambridge he has held a studentship at the London School of Economics, a research fellowship at Cambridge and a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at Cardiff. He has taught at Durham and Cambridge universities in Britain, Waikato University in New Zealand, Dalhousie University in Canada and Beijing Normal University Zhuhai and Henan University in China. Supervisors: Professor Keith Wrightson
Alice Clark’s The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) continues to influence ... more Alice Clark’s The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) continues to influence economic, gender, labor, cultural, and social historians a century after its publication. Decades of intensive research (much of it inspired by Clark) have led scholars to question her methodology, chronology, assumptions, and conclusions, yet the boldness of her thesis still shines bright. This essay investigates why she chose to write her book, despite having no formal training or university qualifications, and why she focused on the seventeenth century. It finds the answers in her curious biography as a Quaker industrialist active in the suffrage movement and suggests that, despite its faults, her critique of gender and capitalism continues to warrant attention.
Court records provide invaluable evidence of the existence of laws and notional rights affecting ... more Court records provide invaluable evidence of the existence of laws and notional rights affecting women and how these were (or were not) enforced and exercised. Many documents provide tantalizing glimpses of female thinking and echoes of female voices, but these remain elusive because of the influence of the lawyers, scribes, and officials who helped shape and record them. This article examines the multiple difficulties that researchers face in distinguishing women's contributions from those of lawyers in legal records, and argues that the artificial nature of legal processes complicates conceptions of “authentic” female voices. It suggests ways to address methodological problems and concludes that focusing on multiple voices and processes of collaboration may bear more fruit than seeking to extract individual women's private thoughts and words.
Changes in marital property and marriage negotiations, the economy, and personal relations in ear... more Changes in marital property and marriage negotiations, the economy, and personal relations in early modern England form the backdrop for key elements of The Witch of Edmonton. This essay draws on recent scholarship surrounding these changes to provide historical context for analyzing the play. It argues that the commercialization of economic relations and the emergence of trusts facilitated a shift away from customary arrangements (such as dower) towards more contractual ones (such as jointures). Meanwhile, increased reliance on credit and legal instruments, such as bonds, produced record levels of litigation, contributing to legalistic thinking and cynicism about legal agreements.
Literary scholars have long been aware of the near saturation of English Renaissance plays with m... more Literary scholars have long been aware of the near saturation of English Renaissance plays with marriage plots. Many Jacobean City Comedies, for example, use marriages to contrast traditional visions of society, formed around reciprocal obligations within a status hierarchy, with a more self-interested and contractual view of social relations. This chapter highlights links between marital contracts and financial contracts and considers changes in contractual thinking in the context of unprecedented litigation over conditional bonds; the displacement of dower by jointure in marital negotiations; and the increasingly contractual nature of private marital separations (in a society where divorce in the modern sense was unavailable).
This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British St... more This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional boundaries that shaped litigation strategies, the constraints surrounding women's appearance as witnesses in court, the gendered differentiation of rights determined by primogeniture and marital property law, and the boundaries between legal and extralegal activity. Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced approach, it rejects the construction of women's litigation simply as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms and also urges caution against overestimating or oversimplifying the choices available to women in legal disputes or their latitude to operate as autonom...
Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter, eds, Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (Boydell & Brewer: Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2013), 189-210, 2013
Marriage, Separation & Divorce in England 1500-1700, 2022
• Puts the question of why England, of all Protestant jurisdictions, did not adopt full divorce i... more • Puts the question of why England, of all Protestant jurisdictions, did not adopt full divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation in the context of another distinctive aspect of English history: the common law formulation of coverture, marriage's legal consequences for wives • Examines what people in failed marriages did in the absence of full divorce, highlighting the private, secular separations they arranged for themselves and how these arrangements helped spur the rise of alimony • Re-examines the history of divorce and marital separations in the wake of the Reformation by turning to records of secular courts, rather than the usual focus on the church courts, and looks across a range of lay courts, including Chancery, Requests, and Star Chamber • Focuses on the two centuries after the Reformation up to the allowance of parliamentary divorce at the end of the seventeenth century • Engages with the 1640s and 1650s, decades often ignored in works that focus on church courts (given the abolition of those courts in the civil war years), thus bringing to light previously little-known changes to the provision of alimony • Selects influential precedents from the reported case law and examines them in the fuller detail afforded by the records of litigation, offering accounts of a range of fascinating real-life stories
Common law rules made litigation between husband and wife impossible in the 16/17th century, exce... more Common law rules made litigation between husband and wife impossible in the 16/17th century, except in ecclesiastical courts. In practice, however, a few wives and husbands sued their spouses in courts of equity. This volume reproduces twenty such suits from the Court of Requests – 'the poor man's Chancery' – during the final century of its operation. These extraordinary cases involving separated couples provide a fascinating and often surprising view of the limits of married people's rights and options at a time when divorce in the modern sense was unavailable. The court's decrees and orders show how Masters, or judges, of Requests dealt with the question of married women's legal status and with claims for alimony (by men as well as women). Historians and literary scholars will appreciate the richness of detail of the written pleadings and depositions that document the variety of human failings that parties alleged had devastated their marriages.
This book examines gender relations in Shakespeare's England by looking at women's involvement in... more This book examines gender relations in Shakespeare's England by looking at women's involvement in lawsuits in the largest courts in the land. It describes women's rights in theory and in practice, considers depictions of women in court scenes in plays, and analyzes the language and tactics women and their lawyers employed in pleadings. The book also reveals how many women went to law, how active they were, the discrimination they suffered, and the importance of the life cycle of marriage in determining their legal fortunes.
Alice Clark’s The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) continues to influence ... more Alice Clark’s The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) continues to influence economic, gender, labor, cultural, and social historians a century after its publication. Decades of intensive research (much of it inspired by Clark) have led scholars to question her methodology, chronology, assumptions, and conclusions, yet the boldness of her thesis still shines bright. This essay investigates why she chose to write her book, despite having no formal training or university qualifications, and why she focused on the seventeenth century. It finds the answers in her curious biography as a Quaker industrialist active in the suffrage movement and suggests that, despite its faults, her critique of gender and capitalism continues to warrant attention.
Court records provide invaluable evidence of the existence of laws and notional rights affecting ... more Court records provide invaluable evidence of the existence of laws and notional rights affecting women and how these were (or were not) enforced and exercised. Many documents provide tantalizing glimpses of female thinking and echoes of female voices, but these remain elusive because of the influence of the lawyers, scribes, and officials who helped shape and record them. This article examines the multiple difficulties that researchers face in distinguishing women's contributions from those of lawyers in legal records, and argues that the artificial nature of legal processes complicates conceptions of “authentic” female voices. It suggests ways to address methodological problems and concludes that focusing on multiple voices and processes of collaboration may bear more fruit than seeking to extract individual women's private thoughts and words.
Changes in marital property and marriage negotiations, the economy, and personal relations in ear... more Changes in marital property and marriage negotiations, the economy, and personal relations in early modern England form the backdrop for key elements of The Witch of Edmonton. This essay draws on recent scholarship surrounding these changes to provide historical context for analyzing the play. It argues that the commercialization of economic relations and the emergence of trusts facilitated a shift away from customary arrangements (such as dower) towards more contractual ones (such as jointures). Meanwhile, increased reliance on credit and legal instruments, such as bonds, produced record levels of litigation, contributing to legalistic thinking and cynicism about legal agreements.
Literary scholars have long been aware of the near saturation of English Renaissance plays with m... more Literary scholars have long been aware of the near saturation of English Renaissance plays with marriage plots. Many Jacobean City Comedies, for example, use marriages to contrast traditional visions of society, formed around reciprocal obligations within a status hierarchy, with a more self-interested and contractual view of social relations. This chapter highlights links between marital contracts and financial contracts and considers changes in contractual thinking in the context of unprecedented litigation over conditional bonds; the displacement of dower by jointure in marital negotiations; and the increasingly contractual nature of private marital separations (in a society where divorce in the modern sense was unavailable).
This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British St... more This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional boundaries that shaped litigation strategies, the constraints surrounding women's appearance as witnesses in court, the gendered differentiation of rights determined by primogeniture and marital property law, and the boundaries between legal and extralegal activity. Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced approach, it rejects the construction of women's litigation simply as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms and also urges caution against overestimating or oversimplifying the choices available to women in legal disputes or their latitude to operate as autonom...
Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter, eds, Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (Boydell & Brewer: Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2013), 189-210, 2013
Marriage, Separation & Divorce in England 1500-1700, 2022
• Puts the question of why England, of all Protestant jurisdictions, did not adopt full divorce i... more • Puts the question of why England, of all Protestant jurisdictions, did not adopt full divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation in the context of another distinctive aspect of English history: the common law formulation of coverture, marriage's legal consequences for wives • Examines what people in failed marriages did in the absence of full divorce, highlighting the private, secular separations they arranged for themselves and how these arrangements helped spur the rise of alimony • Re-examines the history of divorce and marital separations in the wake of the Reformation by turning to records of secular courts, rather than the usual focus on the church courts, and looks across a range of lay courts, including Chancery, Requests, and Star Chamber • Focuses on the two centuries after the Reformation up to the allowance of parliamentary divorce at the end of the seventeenth century • Engages with the 1640s and 1650s, decades often ignored in works that focus on church courts (given the abolition of those courts in the civil war years), thus bringing to light previously little-known changes to the provision of alimony • Selects influential precedents from the reported case law and examines them in the fuller detail afforded by the records of litigation, offering accounts of a range of fascinating real-life stories
Common law rules made litigation between husband and wife impossible in the 16/17th century, exce... more Common law rules made litigation between husband and wife impossible in the 16/17th century, except in ecclesiastical courts. In practice, however, a few wives and husbands sued their spouses in courts of equity. This volume reproduces twenty such suits from the Court of Requests – 'the poor man's Chancery' – during the final century of its operation. These extraordinary cases involving separated couples provide a fascinating and often surprising view of the limits of married people's rights and options at a time when divorce in the modern sense was unavailable. The court's decrees and orders show how Masters, or judges, of Requests dealt with the question of married women's legal status and with claims for alimony (by men as well as women). Historians and literary scholars will appreciate the richness of detail of the written pleadings and depositions that document the variety of human failings that parties alleged had devastated their marriages.
This book examines gender relations in Shakespeare's England by looking at women's involvement in... more This book examines gender relations in Shakespeare's England by looking at women's involvement in lawsuits in the largest courts in the land. It describes women's rights in theory and in practice, considers depictions of women in court scenes in plays, and analyzes the language and tactics women and their lawyers employed in pleadings. The book also reveals how many women went to law, how active they were, the discrimination they suffered, and the importance of the life cycle of marriage in determining their legal fortunes.
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Papers by Tim Stretton
Books by Tim Stretton
• Examines what people in failed marriages did in the absence of full divorce, highlighting the private, secular separations they arranged for themselves and how these arrangements helped spur the rise of alimony
• Re-examines the history of divorce and marital separations in the wake of the Reformation by turning to records of secular courts, rather than the usual focus on the church courts, and looks across a range of lay courts, including Chancery, Requests, and Star Chamber
• Focuses on the two centuries after the Reformation up to the allowance of parliamentary divorce at the end of the seventeenth century
• Engages with the 1640s and 1650s, decades often ignored in works that focus on church courts (given the abolition of those courts in the civil war years), thus bringing to light previously little-known changes to the provision of alimony
• Selects influential precedents from the reported case law and examines them in the fuller detail afforded by the records of litigation, offering accounts of a range of fascinating real-life stories
• Examines what people in failed marriages did in the absence of full divorce, highlighting the private, secular separations they arranged for themselves and how these arrangements helped spur the rise of alimony
• Re-examines the history of divorce and marital separations in the wake of the Reformation by turning to records of secular courts, rather than the usual focus on the church courts, and looks across a range of lay courts, including Chancery, Requests, and Star Chamber
• Focuses on the two centuries after the Reformation up to the allowance of parliamentary divorce at the end of the seventeenth century
• Engages with the 1640s and 1650s, decades often ignored in works that focus on church courts (given the abolition of those courts in the civil war years), thus bringing to light previously little-known changes to the provision of alimony
• Selects influential precedents from the reported case law and examines them in the fuller detail afforded by the records of litigation, offering accounts of a range of fascinating real-life stories