Introduction

Abstract

This volume participates in the ongoing, interdisciplinary study of the establishment—and testing—of gender roles in early modern England, a time and place in which religious and political change undermined the assumptions that supported political authority. Men exerted considerable energy to keep the debates and controversies of the period their exclusive domain but, despite the sweeping claims they might make about their patriarchal power, they had to acknowledge that their authority over women was limited. At the same time, men were hardly engaged in a collective conspiracy against women. Rather, they were raised in a culture that assumed that men rightly and naturally governed society.1 The political stresses of the early modern period did not overturn that assumption, but they did create opportunities for men to display their disagreements over, among other things, the extent of their power over women.