Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Introduction

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

  • 317 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter introduces the relationship between food exchange and women’s governance through an examination of the early modern concepts of providence and physiology, and through a discussion of historical and theoretical concepts of gift-giving. In drawing our attention to food-related practices such as hospitality, gift-giving, nursing, and charity, early modern women’s writing establishes these practices as contributing not only to the traditional and informal arts of local administration, but also to the establishment of national and transnational religious and political networks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Paul Hentzner, A Journey into England. By Paul Hentzner, In the Year M.D.XC.VIII., ed. Horace Walpole (Twickenham, 1757), pp. 51–3. Walpole translates Hentzner’s report from the original Latin publication (Hentzner 1757).

  2. 2.

    John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (London and New York: Penguin, 2000), 5.398 (Milton 2000).

  3. 3.

    Margaret J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). For a more recent historical examination of this topic, see also Bernard Capp’s When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) (Capp 2003).

  4. 4.

    Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) (Wall 2002); Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 5, and ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–35 (Gray 2007).

  5. 5.

    Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 5–6 (Harris 2002). Also see Harris’s article, ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’, Historical Journal 33.2 (1990): 259–81 (Harris 1990).

  6. 6.

    Harris, English Aristocratic Women, p. 8.

  7. 7.

    Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 12, 15 and ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–29 (Crawford 2014).

  8. 8.

    Harris’s perspectives have been extended into the seventeenth century by James Daybell in his edited collection, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004) (Daybell 2004). Other recent work that addresses early modern women’s blurring of public and private, political and domestic, includes: Crawford, Mediatrix; Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate; Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne, eds, Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) (Richards and Thorne 2007); Hilda L. Smith, ed., Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) (Smith 1998); Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003) (Suzuki 2003).

  9. 9.

    Crawford, Mediatrix, p. 20.

  10. 10.

    Crawford, Mediatrix, pp. 18–20. See also Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) (Hannay 1990).

  11. 11.

    Especially helpful historical sources include: Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002) (Albala 2002); Steven Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985) (Mennell 1985); Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007) (Thirsk 2007); C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to the 19th Century (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1973, 2003) (Wilson 2003 [1973]). Recent examinations of early modern food and literature have likewise been invaluable: Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006) (Appelbaum 2006); Joan Fitzpatrick, Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007) (Fitzpatrick 2007); Joan Fitzpatrick, ed., Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010) (Fitzpatrick 2010); David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) (Goldstein 2013), which notably discusses the Examinations of Anne Askew and the cookbook of Ann, Lady Fanshawe (see chs 3 and 4); and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) (Schoenfeldt 1999).

  12. 12.

    For discussions of domesticity, see Michelle M. Dowd, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) (Dowd, 2009); Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) (Knoppers 2011); Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) (Korda 2002); Wall, Staging Domesticity. Dowd notably attends to male and female writers, while Knoppers’s examination of Caroline, Commonwealth and Restoration politics includes an analysis of recipe books associated with Henrietta Maria (The Queens Closet Opened [1655]) and Elizabeth Cromwell (The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth [1664]).

  13. 13.

    The growing scholarship on women’s printed and manuscript recipe books includes: Jayne Archer, ‘The Queens’ Arcanum: Authority and Authorship in The Queens Closet Opened (1655)’, Renaissance Journal 1 (2002): 14–25 (Archer 2002); Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, eds, Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550–1800 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013) (DiMeo and Pennell 2013); Catherine Field, ‘“Many Hands Hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books’, in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 49–63 (Field 2007); Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, ch. 4; and David B. Goldstein, ‘Woolley’s Mouse: Early Modern Recipe Books and the Uses of Nature’, in Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, ed. Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 105–27 (Goldstein 2011); Elaine Hobby, ‘A Woman’s Best Setting Out Is Silence: The Writings of Hannah Wolley’, in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 179–200 (Hobby 1995); Julia Lupton, ‘Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt’, postmedieval 3 (2012): 63–79 (Lupton 2012); Sara Pennell, ‘Perfecting Practice?: Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 237–55 (Pennell 2004); Amy L. Tigner, ‘Preserving Nature in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet’, in Ecofeminist Approaches, pp. 129–49 (Tigner 2011); Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) (Wall 2016). See also the work of Rebecca Laroche and Edith Snook, on medical and beauty recipes respectively: Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) (Laroche 2009) and Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) (Snook 2011).

  14. 14.

    Thomas Dawson, The good huswifes Iewell (London, 1587) (Dawson 1587); Dawson, The Second part of the good Hus-wiues Iewell (London, 1597) (Dawson 1597); Hugh Plat, Delightes for Ladies (London, 1600) (Plat 1600); Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (London, 1615) (Markham 1615). Other contemporary recipe books that advertised to women include: John Murrell, A Daily Exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen (London, 1617) (Murrell 1617); John Partridge, The treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets. Commonly called The good Huswiues Closet (London, 1584) (Partridge 1584) and The Widowes Treasure (London, 1588) (Partridge 1588). Discussions of housewifery were often included in popular husbandry manuals such as John Fitzherbert’s Booke of Husbandrie (London, 1598) (Fitzherbert 1598), substantially revised from the original 1523 edition, and Thomas Tusser’s A hundreth good pointes of Husbandry, lately maried vnto a Hundreth good poynts of Huswifery (London, 1570) (Tusser 1570) and Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry vnited to as many of good huswiferie (London, 1573) (Tusser 1573).

  15. 15.

    Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths note that Le Strange ‘took charge of provisioning the household with food. For her this task did not require shopping, but staying at home, overseeing the production and delivery of foodstuffs, and occasionally sending male servants out to buy extra items’, in Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth-Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 11 (Whittle and Griffiths 2012).

  16. 16.

    James Heywood Markland, ‘Instructions by Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, to his son Algernon Percy, touching the management of his Estate, Officers, & c. written during his confinement to the Tower’, Archaeologia 27 (1838): 342 (Markland 1838). Markland suggests in his introduction to the transcribed manuscript that the letter may have been written later than 1609, see p. 316, n. a.

  17. 17.

    Rachel Weigall quotes from an unnamed source in ‘An Elizabethan Gentlewoman: The Journal of Lady Mildmay, circa 1570–1617 (unpublished)’, Quarterly Review 215 (1911): 133 (Weigall 1911).

  18. 18.

    Susan S. Arpad, ‘“Pretty Much to Suit Ourselves”: Midwestern Women Naming Experience through Domestic Arts’, in Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1940, ed. Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), p. 12 (Arpad 1988).

  19. 19.

    For discussions of providence, see Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present 109 (1985): 55–99 (Worden 1985); Keith Thomas’s chapter on providence in Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 90–132 (Thomas 1980); and Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) (Walsham 1999).

  20. 20.

    Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical citations come from The Geneva Bible, 1560 fasc. edn (Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) (Geneva Bible 1969).

  21. 21.

    Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, tr. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1970), p. 3 (Mauss 1970). Other relevant theoretical work on gift and exchange includes Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) (Derrida 1992); Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, tr. Nora Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) (Godelier 1999); Mark Osteen, ed., The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) (Osteen 2002); Alan D. Schrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) (Schrift 1997).

  22. 22.

    Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 5 (Ben-Amos 2008).

  23. 23.

    Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) (Heal 2014).

  24. 24.

    Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 11 (Davis 2000).

  25. 25.

    Milton, Paradise Lost, 12.587, 582–4.

  26. 26.

    Davis discusses these Calvinist interpretations in Gift, p. 116.

  27. 27.

    Davis, Gift, p. 15. See also Heal, Power of Gifts, pp. 11–12.

  28. 28.

    On food as an early modern gift, see Heal, Power of Gifts, and ‘Food Gifts, the Household and the Politics of Exchange in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 199 (2008): 41–70 (Heal 2008).

  29. 29.

    Godelier, Enigma, p. 48.

  30. 30.

    Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, p. 44.

  31. 31.

    See Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, for further discussion of commensality as an act of both inclusion and exclusion.

  32. 32.

    Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, p. 67. Also see Mauss’s discussion of the West Coast potlatch in The Gift as exemplifying the need always to give more than one has received, pp. 31–45.

  33. 33.

    Influential examinations of Galenic physiology in literature include Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) (Paster 1993), and Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves.

  34. 34.

    William Younger, The Nvrses Bosome: A Sermon within the Greene-Yard in Norwich. On the Guild-day when their Maior takes his Oath (London, 1617), pp. 15–16 (Younger 1617). Younger bases his sermon on Numbers 11:12.

  35. 35.

    Davis, Gift, p. 14.

  36. 36.

    Ben-Amos, Culture of Giving, p. 214.

  37. 37.

    Davis, Gift, p. 117.

  38. 38.

    Ben-Amos, Culture of Giving, p. 214.

  39. 39.

    For discussions of women in relation to both the local and the transnational see Kate Chedgzoy, ‘The Cultural Geographies of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Journeys Across Spaces and Times’, Literature Compass 3.4 (2006): 884–95 (Chedgzoy 2006); Merry Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Early Modern Women and the Transnational Turn’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2012): 191–202 (Wiesner-Hanks 2012); and Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Crossing Borders in Transnational Gender History’, Journal of Global History 6.3 (2011): 357–79 (Wiesner-Hanks 2011). For further literary investigations of local, national, and transnational dynamics, see John M. Adrian, Local Negotiations of English Nationhood, 1570–1680 (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) (Adrian 2011); and Scott Oldenburg, Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014) (Oldenburg 2014).

  40. 40.

    Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, p. 59.

  41. 41.

    Keith Wrightson, ‘The “Decline of Neighbourliness” Revisited’, in Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Norman L. Jones and Daniel Woolf (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 21, 31. Wrightson’s emphasis (Wrightson 2007).

  42. 42.

    Elizabeth I, The Queenes Maiesties Proclamation, 1. For obseruation of former orders against Ingrossers, & Regraters of Corne…4. And a prohibition to men of hospitalitie from remoouing from their habitation in the time of dearth…and no inhabitant to depart from the Sea coast (London, 1596), p. 2 (Elizabeth 1596). These sentiments were repeated numerous times in James I’s proclamations, issued throughout his reign.

  43. 43.

    Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, pp. 62–3.

  44. 44.

    Heal, Power of Gifts, esp. ch. 6, 149–79.

  45. 45.

    Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640–60 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966), p. 13 (Everitt 1966); Charles Phythian-Adams, Re-thinking English Local History (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), p. 11 (Phythian-Adams 1987). Other recent scholarship by local historians includes: Jan Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006) (Broadway 2006); Jacqueline Eales and Andrew Hopper, eds, The County Community in Seventeenth Century England and Wales (Hatfield, Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2012) (Eales and Hopper 2012); Alan Everitt, Landscape and Community in England (London and Ronceverte, WV: Hambledon, 1985) (Everitt 1985); Norman L. Jones and Daniel Woolf, eds, Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) (Jones and Woolf 2007); Christopher Lewis, Particular Places: An Introduction to English Local History (London: British Library, 1989) (Lewis 1989).

  46. 46.

    Jones and Woolf, ‘Introduction’, in Local Identities, p. 6.

  47. 47.

    ‘Habits of thought’ comes from Debora K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) (Shuger 1900).

Bibliography

  • Dawson, Thomas. 1587. The good huswifes Iewell. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1597. The Second part of the good Hus-wiues Iewell. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1596. The Queenes Maiesties Proclamation, 1. For obseruation of former orders against Ingrossers, & Regraters of Corne…4. And a prohibition to men of hospitalitie from remoouing from their habitation in the time of dearth…and no inhabitant to depart from the Sea coast. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fitzherbert, John. 1979. Fitzharberts Booke of Husbandrie, 1598 facs. edn. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; Norwood, NJ: Walter J. Johnson.

    Google Scholar 

  • The Geneva Bible. 1969. 1560 fasc. edn. Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hentzner, Paul. 1757. A Journey into England. By Paul Hentzner, In the Year M.D.XC.VIII. ed. Horace Walpole. Twickenham.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1615. The English Huswife. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Markland, James Heywood. 1838. Instructions by Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, to his son Algernon Percy, touching the management of his Estate, Officers, &c. written during his confinement to the Tower. Archaeologia 27: 306–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Milton, John. 2000. Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard. London and New York: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Murrell, John. 1617. A Daily Exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Partridge, John. 1584. The treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets. Commonly called The good Huswiues Closet. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1588. The Widowes Treasure. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1600. Delightes for Ladies. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tusser, Thomas. 1570. A hundreth good pointes of Husbandry, lately maried vnto a Hundreth good poynts of Huswifery. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1573. Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry vnited to as many of good huswiferie. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • W.M. 1655. The Queens Closet Opened. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Younger, William. 1617. The Nvrses Bosome: A Sermon within the Greene-Yard in Norwich. On the Guild-day when their Maior takes his Oath. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Adrian, John M. 2011. Local Negotiations of English Nationhood, 1570–1680. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Albala, Ken. 2002. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Andrea, Bernadette. 2007. Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Appelbaum, Robert. 2006. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Archer, Jayne. 2002. The Queens’ Arcanum: Authority and Authorship in The Queens Closet Opened (1655). Renaissance Journal 1: 14–25.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arpad, Susan S. 1988. ‘Pretty Much to Suit Ourselves’: Midwestern Women Naming Experience through Domestic Arts. In Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1940, ed. Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Browne, 11–26. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. 2008. The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Broadway, Jan. 2006. ‘No historie so meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2003. When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Chedgzoy, Kate. 2006. The Cultural Geographies of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Journeys Across Spaces and Times. Literature Compass 3(4): 884–95.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crawford, Julie. 2014. Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, Natalie Zemon. 2000. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Daybell, James, ed. 2004. Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • DiMeo, Michelle, and Sara Pennell, eds. 2013. Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550–1800. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dowd, Michelle M. 2009. Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Eales Jacqueline, and Andrew Hopper, eds. 2012. The County Community in Seventeenth Century England and Wales. Hatfield, Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Everitt, Alan. 1985. Landscape and Community in England. London and Ronceverte West Virginia: Hambledon.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1966. The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640–60. Leicester: Leicester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ezell, Margaret J.M. 1987. The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Field, Catherine. 2007. ‘Many hands hands’: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books. In Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, 49–63. Aldershot: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fitzpatrick, Joan. 2007. Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———, ed. 2010. Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Godelier, Maurice. 1999. The Enigma of the Gift. Trans. Nora Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldstein, David B. 2011. Woolley’s Mouse: Early Modern Recipe Books and the Uses of Nature. In Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, ed. Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche, 105–27. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gray, Catharine. 2007. Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1990. Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris, Barbara J. 1990. Women and Politics in Early Tudor England. Historical Journal 33(2): 259–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2002. English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008. Food Gifts, the Household and the Politics of Exchange in Early Modern England. Past and Present 199: 41–70.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hobby, Elaine. 1995. A Woman’s Best Setting Out is Silence: The Writings of Hannah Wolley. In Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. Gerald MacLean, 179–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Jones, Norman L., and Daniel Woolf, eds. 2007. Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Knoppers, Laura Lunger. 2011. Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Korda, Natasha. 2002. Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laroche, Rebecca. 2009. Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, Christopher. 1989. Particular Places: An Introduction to English Local History. London: British Library.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lupton, Julia. 2012. Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt. postmedieval 3: 63–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mauss, Marcel. 1970. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen and West.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mennell, Steven. 1985. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oldenburg, Scott. 2014. Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Osteen, Mark, ed. 2002. The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paster, Gail Kern. 1993. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pennell, Sara. 2004. Perfecting Practice?: Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England. In Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson, 237–55. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Phythian-Adams, Charles. 1987. Re-thinking English Local History. Leicester: Leicester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richards, Jennifer, and Alison Thorne, eds. 2007. Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schoenfeldt, Michael C. 1999. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schrift, Alan D., ed. 1997. The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. New York and London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shuger, Debora K. 1990. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Hilda L., ed. 1998. Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2011. Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Suzuki, Mihoko. 2003. Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2007. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760. London: Hambledon Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomas, Keith. 1980. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tigner, Amy L. 2011. Preserving Nature in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet. In Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, ed. Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche, 129–49. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Wall, Wendy. 2002. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Walsham, Alexandra. 1999. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weigall, Rachel. 1911. An Elizabethan Gentlewoman: The Journal of Lady Mildmay, circa 1570–1617 (unpublished). Quarterly Review 215: 119–38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Whittle, Jane, and Elizabeth Griffiths. 2012. Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth-Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. 2011. Crossing Borders in Transnational Gender History. Journal of Global History 6(3): 357–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. Early Modern Women and the Transnational Turn. Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7: 191–202.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, C. Anne. 2003 [1973]. Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to the 19th Century. Chicago: Academy Chicago.

    Google Scholar 

  • Worden, Blair. 1985. Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England. Past and Present 109: 55–99.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wrightson, Keith. 2007. The ‘Decline of Neighbourliness’ Revisited. In Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Norman L. Jones and Daniel Woolf, 19–49. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of English and Writing Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

    Madeline Bassnett

Authors
  1. Madeline Bassnett
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Bassnett, M. (2016). Introduction. In: Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England . Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40868-2_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation