Nature's Cruel Stepdames: Murderous Women In The Street Literature Of Seventeenth Century England (Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies)

A unique selection of seventeenth century pamphlets revealing the populars press' obsessive concern with female violence -- a violence that is almost always domestic -- is presented in this book, along with a discussion of the texts' historical and cultural contexts. Modernised and annotated, these pamphlets vividly illustrate the precarious and often contradictory legal position of the early modern English woman. Because the early modern woman was so thoroughly defined by her marital status (either married or to be married), the crimes chronicled in this study -- infanticide, child murder and husband murder -- focus almost exclusively on women's roles as wives and mothers.