This book concerns the interactions of criminal behaviour, gender and social order in early modern England – both the conceptual interactions of these categories and their practical implications for early modern women and men. The scope of such a project is potentially immense. One might incorporate a history of the incidence and character of criminal acts, a history of criminal justice, a history of jurisprudence. Traditionally defined social and cultural history rubs shoulders with well-established legal history and political histories of local and central governance and polity, as well as with newer historiographies of gender. It is impossible to write a ‘total’ history, although my approach does not exclude new questions being asked by others. Even with all the materials we have to work with, so much will necessarily remain unsaid in any one account. I have tried, however, to weave disparate strands of various bodies of work into tableaux that reveal some of the textures of early modern life. This study is in part a history of social meanings. It is also a study of the dynamics of social interaction and the role of gender as a dynamic force. It therefore offers more, I hope, than a conventional study of crime per se. It is nonetheless primarily written in dialogue with the historiography of the social history of early modern crime.

This project has had a lengthy gestation. Like many first monographs, its origins lie in a Ph.D. thesis.