Women, property, and the letters of the law in early modern England / edited by Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson, A.R. Buck.

Toronto, Ont. : University of Toronto Press, c2004.

24993

Women and literature -- England -- History -- 16th century.

Women and literature -- England -- History -- 17th century.

Women and literature -- England -- History -- 18th century.

Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- England -- History.

Law and literature -- History -- 16th century.

Law and literature -- History -- 17th century.

Law and literature -- History -- 18th century.

Right of property -- England -- History.

Property in literature.

Pt 1. Credit, commerce, and women's property relationships

1. Temporal gestation, legal contracts, and the promissory economies of 'The winter's tale'

2. Putting women in their place: female litigants at Whitehaven, 1660-1760

3. Women's property, popular cultures, and the consistory court of London in the eighteenth century

4. The whore's estate: Sally Salisbury, prostitution, and property in eighteenth-century London

Pt 2. Women, social reproduction, and patrilineal inheritance

5. Primogeniture, patrilineage, and the displacement of women

6. Isabella's rule: singlewomen and the properties of poverty in 'Measure for measure'

7. Marriage, identity, and the pursuit of property in seventeenth-century England: the cases of Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Wiseman

8. Cordelia's estate: women and the law of property from Shakespeare to Nahum Tate

Pt 3. Women's authorship and ownership: matrices for emergent ideas of intellectual property

9. Writing home: Hannah Wolley, the Oxinden letters, and household epistolary practice

10. Women's wills in early modern England

11. Spiritual property: the English Benedictine nuns of Cambrai and dispute over the baker manuscripts

12. Titular claims of female surnames in eighteenth-century fiction

13. Early modern (aristocratic) women and textual property.

Includes index.

0802087574

x, 316 p.