Women, Legal Discourse, Interpretative Maneuvers and Negotiating Safety

This essay examines three court documents revealing how late medieval and early modern English women employed rhetorical strategies or exploited the conventions of the legal system so as to negotiate another’s safety, insist on a different knowledge of their economic and sexual position, and openly negotiate the terms of their subordination. It is to this different knowledge of both her economic and sexual position, and the negotiation of such terms that Agnes Barons’ testimony in July 1636 bears witness. Joan Smith even more aggressively than Barons insists upon a different knowledge of both her and Elizabeth Moorfoote’s socio-economic position and challenges the authority of a self-deputized constable in the second deposition under discussion, namely, the Elizabeth Moorfoote vs. William Crowther case of 1596. In the last deposition, Susan More challenges the socially inherited ideological constructs of single women as threats to economic stability and sexual order, family relationships and community, in the 1608 John Scales vs Thomas Creede case. Thomas Creede was Shakespeare’s printer.