Name: SCEMS | Lecture | Martin Ingram, University of Oxford
Start: 2022-10-20T17:15:00+01:00
End: 2022-10-20T18:30:00+01:00
Location: The Diamond, LT2

SCEMS | Lecture | Martin Ingram, University of Oxford

Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies

Anxious Patriarchs? Male Complaints of Spousal Violence in Tudor England

The Diamond, LT2

<p>The figure of the termagant wife who beat her husband is well known as a prominent motif in the World Upside Down tradition, and as a pretext for the noisy, mocking skimmington rides that occasionally erupted in the villages and towns of Tudor and Stuart England. But, save for wives who actually murdered their husbands and featured in popular pamphlets, the aggression of wives has been little studied. It is commonly supposed that cruelty cases in the church courts were the prerogative of abused wives. In fact in Tudor England a persistent trickle of cases were brought by husbands. Commonly they claimed that their wives were trying to poison them, but other forms of physical aggression were also alleged. In the more usual form of cruelty case in which wives were the plaintiff, husbands in their defence frequently claimed that they themselves had been subjected to some sort of physical violence or at least threatened. Such material needs careful evaluation, but can shed vivid light on strife-ridden Tudor marriages, on gender roles more broadly, and on interactions between behaviour in real life and artistic, literary and dramatic representations.</p>

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SCEMS | Lecture | Martin Ingram, University of Oxford

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SCEMS | Lecture | Martin Ingram, University of Oxford

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