Description
- Abstract:
- This project offers a revision to the social historiography of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Due to the increase in gendered and sexualized rhetoric in political propaganda and the changes to the social and political institutions that governed morality and sexuality, some historians have suggested that there were similar disruptions in patterns of the incidence and prosecution of gendered violence and sexual crime. By examining the common-law prosecution of gendered violence and sexual crime at a local level, this dissertation argues for social stability, rather than disruption during this period. Using digital humanities tools and common law records from Essex, Sussex, Somerset, Wiltshire, and Norfolk, this project conducts quantitative and qualitative analyses of three types of offenses: illegal sex, domestic violence, and bastardy. The incidence of, prosecution of, and approach to all of these types of crimes remained unchanged throughout this period of political unrest. A stable social order in spite of political chaos indicates an enduring respect for local judicial authority. This gap between political rhetoric and the reality of sexual crime in this period encourages historians to create compelling social-historical narratives that attend to a broader array of sources in a new enriched social history.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- All rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.
Citation
Housman, Talya,
"“To Plunder all under the Petty-coate”: Prosecuting Sexual Crime and Gendered Violence In The English Revolution"
(2019).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/n46m-jf22
