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Public, Private, and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Erica Longfellow
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , April 2006 , pp. 313 - 334
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 Harris, Barbara, “Women and Politics in Early Tudor England,” Historical Journal 33, no. 2 (June 1990): 260CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Cressy, David, “Response: Private Lives, Public Performance, and Rites of Passage,” in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, ed. Travitsky, Betty S. and Seeff, Adele F. (Newark, DE, 1994), 187Google Scholar.

3 Gobetti, Daniella, Private and Public: Individuals, Households, and Body Politic in Locke and Hutcheson (London, 1992), 1, 161–62 n. 2Google Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. Tully, James (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 55–56Google Scholar.

4 Adrian Mackenzie defines an empty signifier as “a constitutive term of alterity which allows particular social forces to enter into political relations without lapsing into the antagonism of exclusive identity claims or without assume [sic] a foundational unity in human collectivities,” in “Politics of Privacy, Technologies of the Political, and the Paradoxes of Individuality” (unpublished paper, Lancaster University, Lancaster, January 1999), 18, http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers/privacy.pdf.

5 Laclau, Ernesto, Emancipations (London, 1996), 42, 44, 46Google Scholar.

6 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed., s.v. “public” definition A; OED, s.v. “private,” note to definition A.4.c, “In this distinctive use, the sense may also be 5, 6, or 7, or may include some notion of 3,” http://www.oed.com.

7 Weinreb, Lloyd, “The Right to Privacy,” in The Right to Privacy, ed. Paul, Ellen Frankel, Miller, Fred D. Jr., and Paul, Jeffrey (Cambridge, 2000), 27Google Scholar.

8 The relative stability of the term public may in part account for the popularity of Jürgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere and for the attempt among scholars to apply this concept to nearly all periods in history. Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Berger, Thomas and Lawrence, Frederick (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

9 OED, s.v. “private” definitions A.2.e, “Of a city or town: That is not a seat of government”; A.4.b, “private (play) house”; A.9, “By one's self, alone”; see also A.3.a, “Kept or removed from public view or knowledge”; A.7.a, “Of, pertaining or relating to, or affecting a person, or a small intimate body or group of persons”; A.10.a, “Intimate, confidential.”

10 See, e.g., OED, s.v. “privacy” definitions 2.a, “Private or retired places”; 4.a., “A private matter, a secret”; 4.b (plural), “The private parts”; see also 2.b, “A secret place”; 3.b, “Keeping of a secret, reticence”; 5, “Intimacy, confidential relations”; 6, “The state of being privy to some act.”

11 OED, s.v. “privacy” definition 1.b.

12 Ibid.

13 Warren, Samuel D. and Brandeis, Louis D., “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4 (1890): 193–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Warren and Brandeis were primarily concerned with photography and print journalism but extended their definition of privacy to include “personal appearance, sayings, acts,” and “personal relations, domestic or otherwise” (ibid., 213).

14 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge, 1988), 1.48.174CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also 2.77.319.

15 Gobetti, Private and Public, 81; Clark, Lorenne M. G., “Women and Locke: Who Owns the Apples in the Garden of Eden?” in The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche, ed. Clark, Lorenne M. G. and Lange, Lynda (Toronto, 1979), 16–40Google Scholar; Butler, Melissa A., “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” American Political Science Review 72, no. 1 (January 1978): 135–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Okin, Susan Moller, “Gender, the Public and the Private,” in Political Theory Today, ed. Held, David (Cambridge, 1991), 67–90Google Scholar.

16 See sources in n. 15 and also Allen, Anita L., Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

17 Council of Europe, Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms as Amended by Protocol No. 11, Council of Europe Treaty Series no. 005, sec. I, art. 8, http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/Treaties/Html/005.htm.

18 Stewart, Alan, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations 50 (Spring 1995): 76–100, quote on 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Orlin, Lena Cowen, “Gertrude's Closet,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 134 (1998): 50–51, 57–58, 53–65Google Scholar. A “desk” was a portable book stand, and it was not uncommon for a man to have more than one. The fact that closets were used to control access does suggest a link with the contemporary model of privacy as “freedom from interference or intrusion.” Yet, the multiple uses of the rooms, the fact that some were used communally and some individually (and many in both ways), and the fact that the key might serve to protect valuables from theft, secret papers from prying eyes, or the individual in prayer from interruption, suggests that early modern closets did not always cordon off “privacy” in the way that we understand that term.

20 Orlin, “Gertrude's Closet,” 46.

21 Habermas, Structural Transformation.

22 For a critique of the historical relevance and accuracy of Habermas's description of the rise of the public sphere in the late seventeenth century, see Raymond, Joad, “The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century,” Prose Studies 21, no. 2 (August 1998): 109–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Studies of Aemilia Lanyer, for example, frequently claim public impact for her poem. See Coiro, Ann Baynes, “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Criticism 35, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 357–76, esp. 358–59Google Scholar; Benson, Pamela, “To Play the Man: Aemilia Lanyer and the Acquisition of Patronage,” in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies; Essays in Honour of James V. Mirollo, ed. Herman, Peter C. (Newark, DE, 1999), 243–64Google Scholar; Grossman, Marshall, ed., Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon (Lexington, KY, 1998), esp. 49–59, 83–98, 99–127, 143–66Google Scholar.

24 Locke, for example, employed government by consent as a model for understanding the origin of society, not the best method of organizing contemporary government. See Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 47–48.

25 On the unwillingness of some historicist scholars to consider the influence of Christianity on English literary history, see Aers, David, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’” in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. Aers, David (London, 1992), 195–96Google Scholar.

26 The modern notion of family privacy includes the damaging assumption that domestic violence is a private matter in which the state should not intervene. Although legal reform and social attitude have progressed considerably in the last few decades, the presumed privacy of the family as a unit continues to create problems for victims of domestic violence and for individuals and authorities attempting to intervene. See Naffine, Ngaire, “Sexing the Subject (of Law),” in Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates, ed. Thornton, Margaret (Oxford, 1995), 18–39Google Scholar.

27 Cressy, “Response,” 187.

28 Featley, Daniel, Ancilla pietatis; or, the hand-maid to priuate devotion (London, 1626), 1Google Scholar.

29 Nehemiah Wallington's Notebook, ca. 1654, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, esp. 4, 302, 373, 391, 406, 430, 468, 510, 512.

30 Gouge, William, Of domesticall dvties eight treatises (London, 1622), 18Google Scholar.

31 Ibid. The same phrase is also used in Dod, John and Cleaver, Robert, A godlie forme of hovseholde government (London, 1612), 13Google Scholar; Perkins, William refers to the family as “the Seminarie of all other Societies” in Christian oeconomie (London, 1609), sig. ¶3rGoogle Scholar.

32 Dod and Cleaver, A godlie forme, 13.

33 Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington point out that the term community exhibits the same tensions between past and present meanings as public or private: “Introduction: Communities in Early Modern England,” in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. Shepard, Alexandra and Withington, Phil (Manchester, 2000), 1Google Scholar. The present article makes no particular claims about present or historical uses of the term community but rather employs it as a shorthand for networks of people that were larger than individual households and had a stake in the business of those households. These networks were multiple and overlapping and differed depending on the status and location of the household. Nehemiah Wallington interacted within his parish, with Puritan networks in the city of London, and with the Company of Joiners. Elizabeth Isham, Elizabeth Hicks, and the Bagot-Kynnersley families, however, interacted with their own tenants, the gentry of their locality, and with far-flung clusters of kin and connections. In both cases, however, aspects of life that we would consider private emerge as enmeshed in these “communities.”

34 Jagodzinski, Cecile M., Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville, VA, 1999), 6Google Scholar.

35 New historicist and cultural materialist critics, such as Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore, and Catherine Belsey, argued in the 1980s that the modern notion of individual subjectivity emerged in the mid-seventeenth century (with early glimpses in the works of Shakespeare). Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980)Google Scholar, and Shakespearean Negotiations (Los Angeles, 1988)Google Scholar; Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy (Brighton, 1984)Google Scholar; and Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy (London, 1985)Google Scholar. David Aers has shown that these histories of subjectivity all rest on outdated assumptions about the social cohesion and lack of interiority of the medieval period (“A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists,” 177–202). Katharine Eisaman Maus has pointed out that the cultural materialist and new historicist critical interest in a history of changing subjectivities in the early modern period rests in part on their poststructuralist commitment to a decentered, socially constructed identity. In her own nuanced exploration of interiority in early modern drama, Maus points out that inwardness, subjectivity, and privacy should not be elided as categories of analysis. Maus, Katharine Eisaman, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1995), esp. 26–30Google Scholar. Thomas Betteridge summarizes the wider philosophical argument about the possibility of writing a history of the subject in Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics (Hatfield, UK, 2005), 40–42Google Scholar.

36 For a summary of scholarship on the origins of the self in the Reformation period, see Backschieder, Paula R., “Introduction,” Prose Studies 18, no. 3 (December 1995): 4–6Google Scholar. See also Maus, Inwardness and Theatre.

37 de Krey, Gary S., “Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667–1672,” Historical Journal 38, no. 1 (March 1995): 53–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tyacke, Nicholas, Aspects of English Protestantism ca. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), 68–71Google Scholar.

38 Featley, Daniel et al. , “A christians victorie,” in Θρηνοικοσ: The house of movrning (London, 1640), 279–80Google Scholar.

39 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, see, e.g., 314. Lena Orlin's research suggests that closets in modest households like the Wallingtons’ were used by the whole family, rather than one individual (“Gertrude's Closet,” 61).

40 Princeton University Library, Robert Taylor Collection (hereafter RTC), MS RTC01 no. 62, fol. 10r, ca. 1639.

41 Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print, 6.

42 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, 301.

43 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, 333.

44 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, fol. 4v, signatures of Jonathan Houghton (Wallington's son-in-law) and “Anne House her Booke giuen to me by Mis. Wallington: 1668” on fol. 1v.

45 Elizabeth Isham notes in her autobiography that “not that I intend to haue this published, but to this end I haue it in praise & thanksfullnes to God. & too my owne benefit. wch if it [may] doe my Brother or his children any pleasure I think to leaue it them. whom I hope will charitable censure of me.” Princeton University Library, MS RTC01 no. 62, fol. 2r.

46 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, 537.

47 Perkins, Christian oeconomie, 111. It is worth pointing out that while the bed itself—frequently hung with curtains—may have been a space for privacy, married couples at all levels of society might share a bedchamber with servants, children, or other family members. See Girouard, Mark, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT, 1978), 127–28Google Scholar.

48 Perkins, Christian oeconomie, 116.

49 Hirst, Derek, “Reading the Royal Romance; or, Intimacy in a King's Cabinet,” The Seventeenth Century 18, no. 2 (October 2003): 229Google Scholar.

50 Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), 374–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Even William Perkins is at pains to remind his readers that this most secret activity has direct consequences for the wider world. He cautions, for example, that before engaging in sexual activity, couples should pray that they might conceive. Perkins does permit sexual activity that is an expression of love and not solely for the purpose of procreation, although he cautions, “This reioycing and delight is more permitted to the man, then to the woman; and to them both, more in their yong yeares, then in their old age” (Perkins, Christian oeconomie, 115, 122–23).

52 Jarrard Birckhead to Elizabeth, Lady Hicks, 9 August 1613, British Library, Lansdowne MS 93, fol. 18r. Lady Hicks was the widow of Sir Michael Hicks, principle secretary to the Cecils.

53 Hale, William, ed., A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes (Edinburgh, 1973), 264Google Scholar.

54 Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 69–72Google Scholar.

55 Princeton University Library, MS RTC01 no. 62, fol. 12r.

56 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, 432.

57 See, e.g., Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, 356, 372, 391, 444, 468.

58 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, 13. This manuscript dates from 1654, but Wallington copies many passages from earlier books. The original book from 1622 is missing.

59 Gouge, Of domesticall dvties, sigs. Av–A2r, A3r–A8v.

60 Ibid., sig. ¶4r.

61 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, 13–14.

62 Backschieder, “Introduction,” 3.

63 Gouge, Of domesticall dvties, sigs. Av–A2r.

64 Dod and Cleaver, A godlie forme, 86.

65 Markham, Gervase, Covntrey contentments, or the english huswife (London, 1623), 1, 1–2Google Scholar.

66 Amussen, Susan Dwyer, “‘Being Stirred to Much Unquietness’: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of Women's History 6, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also her An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar, and Friedman, Alice T., House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar. Susan Cahn argued that the restriction of women to “within” the house developed in this period in her Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women's Work in England, 1500–1660 (New York, 1987), esp. 177Google Scholar. Judith Bennett has, however, questioned the narrative of dramatic and negative change in the area of women's work in the early modern period, pointing out that the argument rests on misconceptions about the supposed golden age for women's work in the middle ages. Bennett, Judith, “Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. Aers, David (London, 1992), 147–75Google Scholar.

67 Dod and Cleaver, A godlie forme, 94.

68 Amanda Vickery has pointed out that a “separate spheres” model is a misleading guide to household experience even for nineteenth-century individuals. Vickery, Amanda, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,” Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (June 1993): 383–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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70 Naffine, “Sexing the Subject (of Law).” Susan Moller Okin points out that traditional theories of family privacy tend to ignore the possibility of injustice within the family (“Gender, the Public and the Private,” 70–73).

71 Capp, B. S., When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 103, 85, 104–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Amussen, “Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,” 75–76; Dolan, Fran, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (London, 1994), 25–26Google Scholar.

73 Amussen, “Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,” 71–72, 79; Capp, When Gossips Meet, 104–14.

74 Amussen, “Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,” 81.

75 Lettice Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, 14 Sept. [1608], Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.a.598.

76 Isabel Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, 27 July 1609, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.a.593. Isabel Kynnersley writes from her own home at Loxley. The woman who threatens her may be her daughter-in-law Lettice, another woman in the family, or her husband's mistress, as Isabel implies that she and Anthony Kynnersley are not living “as man & wiffe ought to doe.”

77 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.a.593.

78 See Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.a.576, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, ca. 1602; MS L.a.119, Walter Bagot to Anthony Kynnersley, 19 March 1605; MS L.a.120, Walter Bagot to Anthony Kynnersley, 23 March 1605; MS L.a.568, Anthony Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, 23 March 1605; MS L.a.121, Walter Bagot to Francis Kynnersley, ca. 1605/6; MS L.a.122, Walter Bagot to Francis Kynnersley, 21 May 1607; MS L.a.578, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, 4 May 1609; MS L.a.579, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, 29 August 1609?; MS L.a.128, Walter Bagot to the Earl of Essex, ca. 1610; MS L.a.580, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, 8 Feb. ca. 1610; MS L.a.583, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, ca. 1618; MS L.a.151, Walter Bagot to Anthony Kynnersley, 1 September 1619; MS L.a.584, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, ca. 1620; MS L.a.585, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, ca. 1620; MS L.a.588, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, ca. 1620.

79 As Isabel Kynnersley points out when she pleads with Bagot to represent her at the assizes, “If greate speeches may prevayle the truthe shall alwayes be as it is now, drowned in the oscion of oblivion and the certenty of thinges neuer come to lyghte.” Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.a.593.

80 British Library, Lansdowne MS 93, fol. 18r.

81 His interests are not necessarily cynical; he may genuinely wish to help Elizabeth Hicks and her daughter. Regardless of his motivations, his secret actions do have the effect of preserving his relations with both patrons.

82 For example, see Folger Shakespeare Library, MSS L.a.593 and L.a.600, Lettice Kynnersley to Elizabeth Bagot, 20 May 1610? See also MS L.a.588, Francis Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, ca. 1620, in which the writer protests that nothing was concealed, and MS L.a.117, Walter Bagot to unknown addressee, ca. 1605, in which the writer begs the addressee to conceal nothing.

83 Amussen, An Ordered Society. On gentlewomen, see also Ezell, Margaret, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987)Google Scholar; and Daybell, James, “Introduction: Rethinking Women and Politics in Early Modern England,” in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. Daybell, James (Basingstoke, 2004), 1–20Google Scholar.

84 See, e.g., Folger Shakespeare Library, MSS L.a.119, L.a.120, L.a.568, and L.a.596, Lettice Kynnersley to Walter Bagot, 21 March 1605. A similar pattern is apparent in letters to Elizabeth, Lady Hicks, from her daughter and son-in-law, Helena and John Delahay, who begged her help to extract promised funds from John Delahay's father: British Library, Lansdowne MS 93, fol. 8r, John Delahay to Elizabeth Hicks, 19 July 1613; fols. 9r–10v, Helena Delahay to Elizabeth Hicks, 24 July 1613; fols. 15r–17v, Helena Delahay to Elizabeth Hicks, August 1613; fols. 22r–24r, John Delahay to Elizabeth Hicks, 15 August 1613.

85 Hartman, Mary S., The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (Cambridge, 2004), 202–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For histories that consider the embedment of the family in the community, see, among others, Amussen, An Ordered Society; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death; and Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.

86 See n. 23 and Huebert, Ronald, “The Gendering of Privacy,” The Seventeenth Century 16, no. 1 (2001): 37–67Google Scholar.

87 Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists,” 186. Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women,” makes a similar argument about women's history. Both Bennett and Aers are particularly indebted to Patterson, Lee, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, WI, 1987)Google Scholar.

88 Empty signifiers point to a lack within the system of signification. Laclau, Emancipations, 42.