Journal of Women's History

Journal of Women's History 11.3 (1999) 197-202

Negotiating Identity:
The Courtroom and the Archives

Rene S. Marion

Laura Gowing. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 301 pp. ISBN 0-19-820517-1 (cl).

Anne-Marie Sohn. Chrysalides: Femmes dans la Vie Privée (XIX^e -XX^e Siècles). 2 vols. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996. 1095 pp. ISBN 2-85944-289-8 (pb).

Contemporary consumers of modern media are perhaps more sensitive than ever to the complex motivations, possibilities, and problems of legal testimony. In an era of televised trials and hearings, reprinted testimony, and highly publicized discussions of cases—from the trials of war criminals to the confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court justices—the vulnerability and power of the witness, the nature and workings of legal narratives, and the dynamics of the courtroom have been exposed to observation and analysis as never before. This greater awareness of the peril and promise of legal testimony comes at a time when historians, too, have become better readers of court records. Thanks to in-fluences as diverse as literary theory, ethnographic analysis, and feminism, historians—Natalie Davis, Lyndal Roper, and Sarah Maza, among a host of others— are achieving richer and more sophisticated readings of court records which have long formed a staple of social history.

As two very different books, Laura Gowing's Domestic Dangers and Anne-Marie Sohn's Chrysalides, suggest, court records grant historians access to a host of information about social relationships and life in the domestic arena (areas about which other types of sources—particularly for premodern historians—are often silent). Both authors paint a rich portrait of that domestic world and turn a keen eye to the complex interactions of its inhabitants. Each book uses legal testimony to explore the formation and negotiation of relations between men and women, and the dialectic between models, morals, needs, and responsibilities that underlies daily acts and words. While Gowing analyzes the language of that interaction in order to tease out the characteristics and creation of early modern gender identity and morality, Sohn uses judicial testimony to explain the obstacles and progress on French women's path to emancipation during the Third Republic. Their common themes—such as conflicts over the formation of the couple and the meaning of sexuality—not only lend credence to Lyndal Roper's suggestion that "much of the tissue of the relations between the sexes and many of the points of conflict are perennial," [End Page 197] ¹ but also propose that our understanding of conceptions of gender and femininity may depend less on a contrast of "public" and "private" domains than on our grasp of dynamics within the domestic arena.

Gowing's fine book, Domestic Dangers, offers a carefully crafted and compelling analysis of the meanings of gender in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century London. Through a sophisticated examination of cases, which passed through London church courts between 1570 and 1640, Gowing takes on the now commonplace assumption that a double standard existed in early modern society and explores how it was "shared, understood, and deployed by" contemporaries both male and female (4). Gowing carefully contextualizes her analysis, in part by a reminder that London was a city with a young, fast-growing, concentrated, and highly geographically mobile population by the last decades of the sixteenth century. New arrivals and new neighbors provoked concerns among the city's elite—and among the middling orders (ranks of artisans, merchants, and the like) who most often used the city's church courts—about good order, prosperity, and morality in such an unstable urban environment. In court testimony on slander, breach of marriage contract, and marital conflict, Gowing finds evidence of those concerns and contemporaries' responses to them.

In a society concerned about order, the sexual insults that provoked accusations of slander, Gowing argues, reveal a moral system rooted in "a binary gender division that treated men's and women's honour as incommensurable" (110). In this moral code...