Introduction 1
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NOTES Introduction 1. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 3. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 5. 4. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, ed., Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1. 5. Judith M. Bennett, “Medievalism and Feminism,” Speculum 68.2 (1993): 327. 6. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Capp, When Gossips Meet; Bardsley, Venomous Tongues; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Cynthia J. Neville, “Widows of War: Edward I and the Women of Scotland during the War of Independence,” in Wife and Widow in Medieval England, ed., Sue Sheridan Walker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 109–139; J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York, Borthwick Papers 58 (Heslington, York: University of York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1980); Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Kim M. Phillips, “The Invention of the Scold,” History Workshop Journal 66.1 (2008): 253–58; Anthony Musson, ed., “Appealing to the Past: Perceptions of Law in Later Medieval England,” in Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages, (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2001), 165–80; Sara 148 NOTES Heller Mendelson, “ ‘To shift for a cloak’: Disorderly Women in the Church Courts,” in Women and History: Voices from Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Frith (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995), 3–18; Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, ed., Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 2000); Cordelia Beattie, “Single Women, Work, and Family: The Chancery Dispute of Jane Wynde and Margaret Clerk,” in Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 177– 202; Maryanne Kowaleski, “A Prosopography of Scolds in a Medieval English Town,” Paper presented at the 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 1999. 7. E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), xvi. 8. Kate McKluskie, “Women’s Language and Literature: A Problem in Women’s Studies,” Feminist Review 14 (1983): 54. 1 The Control and Criminalization of Women’s Speech 1. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, “Introduction,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1. 2. The device is called a scold’s brank or brace and fits over the head like a cage, usually with a metal tongue depressor built in. Some extant branks show additional spikes on the tongue depressor preventing its wearer from speaking without injury. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109, argues that despite the “scattered references to these vicious instruments, there is scant evidence that the branks were regularly inflicted upon women. The records of the Chester Corporation and the Stockport Court Leet are typical in that they contain not a single order or notice to that effect.” My demure is slight (Walker’s work is among the top in the field). Yet, thousands of defamation cases in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century English courts likewise contain not a single order or notice as to the cases’ resolution. Given the expensive undertaking by claimants and given the occasional reference to fines and punishments in a few cases among these thousands of cases, we can nevertheless assume that fines and punishments were very likely the usual resolution to these cases. It may be that scolds’ branks were not “regularly inflicted upon women,” but given the expense of towns’ having these branks forged and the number of towns in which some of these branks survive, I think we need to assume that they did indeed inflict them, whether regularly or not. And the object of that infliction was far more likely to be women than men, if Sandy Bardsley is right: in the Liber Albus (1419), the rules for the governance of London, the compiler’s list of crimes ascribed to indicted men omits scolding but lists NOTES 149 it as an habitual practice by indicted women. The omission, Bardsley says, is no accident. In the articles setting out rules for each London wardmote (a court or ward meeting by inhabitants within a certain ward), Bardsley writes, “scolding was again listed among a list of crimes for which women might be indicted but was left out of the comparable list for men.” Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 85. Both the 1486 Latin ordinances of the borough of Hereford, and the 1510 decrees of the borough of Northallerton (Yorkshire) make it clear that “from the time of its emergence as a legal category, scolding was reflexively a female-gendered crime” (85). (Walker lists the towns of Altrincham, Macclesfield, Congleton, Carrington, Knutsford, Stockport, Chester, and the parish of Acton near Nantwich as places where scold’s bridles were listed by nineteenth-century antiquarians; see Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 108n172). 3. Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 2. 4. William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew; Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness; Jonson, Epicene; and Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl. 5. Judging from the wealth of extant literature on the subject: Peter Abelard, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), 187–89, citing Augustine, Retractiones 1, preface; Proverbs 10:19 (Vulgate); James 3:2, 5; Gregory, Moralia 7.37. See also Erasmus, Lingua (1525), Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne (1303), and John Gower, Vox Clamantis (1377–81). 6. Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5. Kamensky’s specific reference to New England attitudes toward speech is couched within the larger British context. The Puritans, with their obsession with speech, “were turning out to be even more English than they intended.” David Waldstreicher, “The First Linguistic Turn,” Reviews in American History 27.1 (1999): 17 [14–21]. 7. Michaela Paasche Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 6. 8. Walter Brueggemann, “Life-Giving Speech amid an Empire of Silence,” Michigan Law Review 105.6 (2007): 1124 [1115–32]. Brueggemann’s essay is an analysis of James Boyd White’s Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force. The full sentence is “Imagination is the capacity to entertain an alternative wholeness that is not enthralled to the particular demand of the immediate moment.” 9. By “creation,” I refer not to the medieval understanding of God’s conferring existence ex nihilo, but rather to its understanding of humans “actualiz[ing] what God had already created in potency.” Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “The Analogy of Creation in Dante,” Speculum 32.4 (1957): 706 [706–721]. “Where we would use the term ‘creativity’ loosely, patristic 150 NOTES and mediaeval thinkers used it with great care to refer only to the work of the Creator. The term that could be applied to the agents of creation, generation, and making equivocally was auctor.” “God, nature, and man are all auctores on a descending scale, with creation only appropriate to the first” (707). In Canto XXIV, ll. 40–63 of Purgatorio—a speech act insofar as the texts were, apparently, verbally presented—Giuseppe Mazzota sees “Dante’s formulation to Bonagiunta of the poetic process as an act analogous to the Incarnation,” but not a divine act or an act ex nihilo. Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Dante’s Literary Typology,” MLN 87.1, The Italian Issue (1972): 3 [1–19]. 10. Leslie K. Arnovick, “ ‘In Forme of Speche’ is Anxiety: Orality in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Oral Tradition 11.2 (1996): 338 [320–45]. 11. Susan E. Phillips, “Gossip and (Un)official Writing,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 484 [476–90], writes that Mannyng worried about the exemplum’s “ability to enter- tain,” and his narratives “dangerous affinity with idle talk.” He was aware of the common objection that exempla, including classical fables and new verse chronicles, sull[ied] the pulpit with ‘newe soteltes.’ ” See also, Susan E. Phillips, “ ‘Janglynge in Cherche’: Pastoral Practice and Idle Talk,” in Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), Chapter 1. 12. According to J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 8, a speech act occurs where “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action.” Examples may be “I pronounce you husband and wife,” or “I nominate you to be Chair.” 13. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 395.