Manhood, Credit and Patriarchy in Early Modern England c.1580- 1640
Author(s)
Shepard, Alexandra
Abstract
Gender historians have demonstrated that in contrast to social practice, the principles outlined by Dod and Cleaver were severely overdrawn, at times verging on fantasy. Particular attention has been paid to the many ways in which women’s lives departed from the ideal, in terms of their authority both within the household and beyond it. Far from being cloistered in solitude, women defied any simple separation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres. Yet for all its inaccuracies and inconsistencies, domestic advice contained important and widely held assumptions about the evaluation of a woman’s good name. The association of female honor and reputation with chastity was perhaps the least contested principle of social evaluation in early modern England. Although the extent to which this was gender-specific (as opposed to gender-related) has been considerably debated by historians, the centrality of sexual reputation to female status is irrefutable.
