Domestic arrangements in early modern England

Abstract

This book provides a varied and rich array of perspectives on a wide range of early modern English social roles and relationships as well as cultural norms and areas of contestation. It demonstrates the many ways in which the attitudes and activities that pertain to the domestic sphere are not in any way peripheral to the study of the period -- domestic arrangements are political arrangements. This rich collection of 11 essays illuminates the many ways in which the domestic sphere served as a stage for playing out the pressing questions that perplexed the writers and thinkers of early modern England -- questions about family (householding, marriage, children and parenting), as well as questions about emerging political realities. While 'home' may seem to invoke blood ties-the mother with a child at her breast or siblings at play -- it is finally the bonds that replace blood that demand the mythos of domestic arrangements in all their variety -- from the legal, social, economic and cultural ties of marriage, sealed by the exchange of women from man to man and house to house, to the relationships of stepparents and stepchildren, to the even more tenuous ties that bind class to class and citizen to citizen.

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