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Drawing on legal and literary sources, this work revises and expands understandings of female honesty, worth and credit by exploring how women from the middling and lower ranks of society fashioned positive identities as mothers, housewives, domestic managers, retailers and neighbours between 1550 and 1700.

\"Lucy Campion, formerly a ladies' maid in the local magistrate's household, has now found gainful employment as a printer's apprentice. On a freezing winter afternoon in 1667, she accompanies the magistrate's daughter, Sarah, to the home of a severely injured Quaker man to record his dying words, a common practice in 17th century England. The man, having been trampled by a horse and cart the night before, only has a few hours left to live. Lucy scribbles down the Quaker man's last utterances, but she's unprepared for what he reveals to her--that someone deliberately pushed him into the path of the horse, because of a secret he had recently uncovered. Fearful that Sarah might be traveling in the company of a murderer, Lucy feels compelled to seek the truth, with the help of the magistrate's son, Adam, and the local constable. But delving into the dead man's background might prove more dangerous than any of them had imagined. In The Masque of a Murderer, Susanna Calkins has once again combined finely wrought characters, a richly detailed historical atmosphere, and a tightly-plotted mystery into a compelling read\"-- Provided by publisher.

Focusing on a largely unknown type of popular print culture that developed in the late 1600s-the coffee house periodical-Helen Berry here offers new evidence that the politics of gender, far from being a marginal or frivolous topic, was an issue of general interest and wide-spread concern to the early modern reader. Berry's study provides the first full length analysis of John Dunton's Athenian Mercury (1691-97), an influential specimen of the coffee-house periodical genre, as well as the original question-and-answer publication which addressed both men's and women's issues in one journal. As the chapter headings in this book indicate, the topics addressed in the \"agony column\" of the Athenian Mercury-for example, the body, courtship, and sex-are of enduring interest across the centuries. Berry's study of this periodical provides new insights into the gendered ideas and debates that circulated among middling sorts in early modern England. An historical survey of the social effects of mass communication in the early modern period, this volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing study of how gendered ideas and values were communicated culturally, particularly beyond the milieu of elite groups such as the nobility and gentry. It argues that the mass media was from its infancy an important means of communicating powerful messages about gender norms, particularly among the middling sorts. The study will appeal not only to historians, women and gender studies scholars and literature scholars, but also to scholars of publishing history. Contents: Preface; Introduction: Pressing anxieties; Coffee houses, print culture and the public sphere; Authenticity and women readers; The community of readers; Casuistry and the ambiguity of advice; Interpreting the body; Courtship dilemmas; Problems with sex; Questioning friendship; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

This article explores how the reputations and agency of middling and plebeian women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London were affected by what they wore. Compared with provincial England, markets for women's clothes in the capital were more diverse and accessible. Ambiguous moral judgments were made of women based on their dress, but many sought to acquire good, fashionable attire as the right clothes would improve their options in terms of courtship, sociability and employment, as well as facilitating their ability to negotiate the metropolitan environment and providing them with a ready store of capital. Clothes were thus contested commodities which helped define the limits of the possible for women in early modern London. L'ambition de cet article est de rechercher comment la réputation et l'action des femmes ordinaires ou de milieu très populaire, vivant à Londres aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, étaient affectées par les vêtements qu'elles portaient. Si l'on compare avec la province anglaise, le marché du vêtement féminin était, dans la capitale, plus varié et plus accessible. La valeur morale des femmes était, de façon ambiguë, souvent estimée à l'aune de la robe qu'elles portaient. Mais beaucoup cherchaient à acquérir de bons atours qui soient à la mode, étant donné que des habits comme il faut ne manqueraient pas d'améliorer leurs chances de se faire courtiser, de se socialiser et d'être employée. Tout autant, un vêtement convenable les aiderait à s'adapter à l'environnement métropolitain et leur constituerait un capital immédiat. Pour les femmes de la Londres de l'époque moderne, les vêtements étaient par conséquent des produits contestés qui les aidaient à définir les limites du possible. Dieser Beitrag untersucht, inwiefern Ansehen und Verhalten von Frauen in den Mittel- und Unterschichten im London des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts davon beeinflusst wurden, was sie anhatten. Im Vergleich zur englischen Provinz war in der Hauptstadt der Markt für Frauenkleidung reichhaltiger und leichter zugänglich. Auch wenn die Werturteile, die über Frauen auf Grund ihrer Kleidung gemacht wurden, mehrdeutig waren, setzten viele Frauen auf den Erwerb guter und modischer Kleidung, weil die richtige Garderobe ihre Handlungsmöglichkeiten beim Werben um Männer, im Bereich der Geselligkeit bei der Suche nach Beschäftigung verbesserten und es ihnen überdies erleichterte, sich in der Umgebung der Metropole zu bewegen, und sie dadurch nicht zuletzt über einen handlichen Kapitalstock verfügten. Kleider waren somit heiß umkämpfte Waren, die Frauen im frühneuzeitlichen London dabei halfen, die Grenzen des Möglichen abzustecken.

John Dunton's 1696 parable about the dangers of middle-class women dressing like \"persons of quality\" has its roots in the more or less endemic anxiety that prostitutes' \"excellent Art . . . can easily turn a Sempstress into a waiting Gentlewoman.\" Recent scholarship on early modern prostitution and pornography interprets the time-honored conflation of women's bodies and the clothes they wear largely in economic terms, emphasizing English culture's treatment of prostitution as a degraded expression of capitalist production and consumption. But Dunton's allegory eludes this economic account of clothing's relationship to prostitution and pornography as he insists that clothing causes middle-class women's social and sexual degradation, rather than masking it. This insistence situates Dunton's warning within a half-century-long tradition of antidemocratic political pornographic satire that used clothing as a political rather than a social or economic signifier.