Abstract
This book examines the lives of six Tudor women celebrated for their reputed negative characteristics, thus the adjective “wicked.” They are Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, two consorts of Henry VIII executed for adultery; Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, and Lettice, Countess of Essex and Leicester, two defamed noblewomen. Lady Somerset stands accused of arrogantly disputing over precedence with Katherine Parr, the dowager queen, and of urging her reluctant husband, Edward, first Duke of Somerset, to commit fratricide. Lady Leicester allegedly committed adultery with her future spouse, Robert Dudley, first Earl of Leicester, while married to Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex. They also include Jane and Alice More, two wives of Sir Thomas More charged with contrariness and shrewishness. Their supposed flouting of patriarchal conventions may not seem serious enough to warrant the wicked characterization. They were not murderers or abusers of children.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Ayre (ed.), The Sermons of Edwin Sandys, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842), pp. 324–5.
John Ayre (ed.), The Catechism of Thomas Becon, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), p. 345.
Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 11.
Martin Ingram, “‘Scolding Women Cucked or Washed?’ A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England,” Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: UCL Press, 1994), pp. 49, 65–6.
R. H. Helmholz (ed.), Select Cases on Defamation to 1600, vol. 101 (London: Seiden Society, 1985), p. 26.
Ingram, “Scolding,” pp. 58–60; Alison Wall, Power and Protest in England, 1525–1640 (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 148–9.
Margaret Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early Modern Society (London: Arnold, 1995), pp. 90–2.
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 335–58, 404–9.
Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 83.
Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, ed. Clarence Miller, second ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 22.
Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 273–5.
Laura Gowing, “Language, Power, and the Law: Slander Litigation in Early Modern England,” Women, Crime, and the Courts, ed. J. Kermode and G. Walker (London: UCL Press, 1994), pp. 26–47.
J. A. Sharpe, “‘Such Disagreement Betwyx Neighbours’: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England,” Disputes and Settlements: Laws and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 171–8.
See also Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 30–2.
Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 149, 156.
Marvin Lowenthal (ed.), The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne: Comprising the Life of the Wisest Man of his Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), p. 88.
Robert Shephard, “Sexual Rumours in English Politics: The Cases of Elizabeth I and James I,” Desire and Discipline in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 102.
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 34–9
Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 34–9.
Mendelson and Crawford, Women, pp. 21–30; Marilyn Boxer and Joan Scot, “Overview,” Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. M. Boxer and Jean Quataert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 24–5.
Vivienne Larminie, “Marriage and the Family: The Example of the Seventeenth-Century Newdigates,” Midland History, 9(1984), 18.
Alison Wall, “Elizabethan Precept and Feminine Practice: The Thynne Family of Longleat,” History, 75(1990), 30–8; Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Governmente for the Ordering of Private Families… (London: Thomas Creede for Thomas Man, 1598), sig. F8; Matthew Griffith, Bethel: Or, a Form for Families (London: Richard Badger for Jacob Bloome, 1633), p. 316.
Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae: Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Papers in Prose and Verse, ed. Henry Harington and Thomas Park, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press Reprint, 1966), I, 28–9.
Martin A. S. Hume (ed.), Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simancas: Elizabeth I, 4 vols. (Nedeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1971), I, 63, 101, 244; (Hereafter CSP Span/Eliz); P. Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke (ed), Miscellaneous State Papers from 1501 to 1726, 2 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1728), I, 167, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, http://www.galenet.galegroup (accessed August 5, 2011).
G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones (eds.), De Maisse: A Journal of All That Was Accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse Ambassador in England from King Henry IV to Queen Elizabeth Anno Domini 1597 (Bloomsbury, UK: Nonesuch Press, 1931), p. 110,
Retha Warnicke, “Diplomatic Rumor-Mongering: An Analysis of Mendoza’s Report on Elizabeth’s Audience with Scottish Ambassadors in 1583,” Sovereignty and the Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Robert Sturges (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 111–27.
Donald Queller, The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 84–140
J. Bain, W. Meikle, M. Giuseppi, and J. Mackie (eds.), Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, 13 vols. (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register Office, 1898–1969), VIII, 247 (Hereafter CSP Scots).
J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (eds.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols. in 35 (London: HMSO, 1862–1932), XIV–1, no.449; HenryWotton, Reliquiae Wottononiae (London: Thomas Maxey for R. Marriot, G. Bedet, and T. Garthwait, 1654), sig. C6.
Desiderius Erasmus, “On the Writing of Letters” (De Conscribendis Epistolis), trans. Charles Fantazzi, ed. J. Sowards, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 25 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. Li–Liii, 10–254.
Sara Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart England: Three Studies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. 1–11.
Copyright information
© 2012 Retha M. Warnicke
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Warnicke, R.M. (2012). Introduction. In: Wicked Women of Tudor England. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391932_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391932_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-03237-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-39193-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)