Two very powerful stories structure the history of the changing roles of English women. The tale of the nineteenth-century separation of the spheres of public power and private domesticity relates principally to the experience of middle-class women. The other story, emerging from early modern scholarship, recounts the social and economic marginalization of propertied women and the degradation of working women as a consequence of capitalism. Both narratives echo each other in important ways, although strangely the capacity of women's history to repeat itself is rarely openly discussed. This paper critically reviews the two historiographies in order to open debate on the basic categories and chronologies we employ in discussing the experience, power and identity of women in past time.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0018246X93000019

Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history*

T history of masculinity is still very much a nascent field for historians of early modern Britain, but there have been some important foundations laid by a few key publications. On the basis of such work, it would not be surprising if a student attempting an overview of the period were impressed by a profound change in the meanings of manhood between 1500 and 1700. Yet this is perhaps attributable more to methodological differences among historians than to a dramatic shift in male identities over the course of the early modern period. It will be argued here that despite the semblance of a transformation in concepts of manhood, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were marked as much by continuity as by change. Although there was an increasing plurality of and fluidity to male identities between 1500 and 1700, they remained focused—if variously reconfigured—around many of the same fixed points. Most of the terms used to identify both normative and deviant manhood remained current throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most profound change witnessed during the early modern period was, therefore, not in the available repertoire of male identities themselves but in different men’s

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/427128.pdf

From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700

The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century

Doe not supose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world for alas tis not so, I am alive and … as nearly concern’d for thos I love as if I had never left them and must shar in all ther fortunes wither good or bad.1

Alison Wall

Papers

Elizabethan Precept and Feminine Practice: The Thynne Family of Longleat

Patterns of Politics in England, 1558–1625

Religion and the Composition of the Commissions of the Peace, 1547–1640