Women’s Testimony: Legal Records as Forms of Life-Writing, 1558-1649

The early modern period witnessed an explosion in the production of autobiographical writing. Despite the plethora of examples from this period, however, it remains difficult to reconstruct a picture of everyday female experience from the extant corpus of life-writing. The vast majority of examples are penned by men; there are only a handful of immediately recognizable autobiographies and diaries of early modern women extant, such as Anne Halkett’s Memoirs. Moreover, the few examples we do have are not representative of women’s experiences in general, as there are no known diaries or extant autobiographies by women below the level of the middle ranks. The contention of this thesis is that women left records of their lives in documents not normally included within the critical framework of life-writing. Indeed, before the genres of autobiography and diary were established, printed and popularized, people who wished to record details of their lives necessarily experimented with form. This study shows how thousands of lives remain to be uncovered in the legal archives, and that these legal records form an alternative form of life-writing. The early modern law courts were sites of cultural production that provided opportunities for women’s voices to be heard, and legal proceedings enabled even the illiterate to leave a perpetual record in manuscript of a narrative of their lives. By reading legal records from the period 1558-1649 alongside more immediately recognizable works of life-writing from the later seventeenth century, such as Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, this thesis shows that the narrative strategies and rhetorical tropes that women used in the court room pre-empt the literary strategies used by these later life-writers. Ultimately, this project aims to show that in the face of male cultural and literary norms, women found alternative means to express themselves in the court room