Guest Lecture

Abstract:

‘Voice’ has long been a productive heuristic for scholars interested in the traces left by women in the legal records of early modern England: a metaphor for legal and/or authorial agency whose enduring appeal appears to be tied to the implication that legal records contain echoes of someone at some point actually speaking. If this often-imprecise tying of agency to speech, however, has helped to make ‘voice’ so generative for historians, then it perhaps also explains why ‘voices’ are yet really to be sought in the plea rolls of England’s common law courts: speech may be mediated in a vernacular deposition, but individuated voices would seem to be obliterated by the strict formalism of a Latin enrolment. Moreover, for the scholar seeking to recover the voices of women, and those of married women, in particular, there is also the no small matter of coverture to contend with in these records – the ‘voice’ of a married woman would, after all, seem difficult to recover from a common law document when the jurisdiction itself considered a married woman’s legal personhood to be ‘covered’ by that of her husband’s. Yet, as part of my work on the FEATHERS project, I have catalogued the appearances in these sources of hundreds of married women, and their presence asks that we think a little differently about our conceptions of ‘voice’ and what constitutes it in these records. In this paper, I will therefore first recover some of the different authorial influences that shaped the composition of sources that account for the silent majority of women’s involvements with the legal system in early modern England. I will then propose the concept of vox as a means to re-conceptualize ‘voice’ as the product of a process of profoundly collaborative, textual production.

Zoom link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/9165566880