Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Women and the city: new perspectives on women’s experience in early modern cities
Chair: Cynthia Herrup (University of Southern California)
For
almost four decades, urban historians and historians of women have
tried to integrate women’s experience into their work on early modern
cities. Most of them have focused on women in the popular or working
classes who made essential contributions to the economies and social
life of cities as diverse as London, Southampton, York, Edinburgh,
Paris, Lyon, Venice, Florence and Rome. This research has dramatically
expanded our understanding of early modern cities and the opportunities
and challenges they posed to women in these classes. It shows that
early modern cities were a powerful magnet for women—mostly
young—seeking a way to support themselves and, perhaps, some
independence from their families and village communities.
Employment was not, however, the only opportunity that drew women to
urban center. Affluent English women—often, but not only, widows—saw
the city as a place that held out the promise of greater independence
from their families, investment opportunities, new kinds of social
relationships, religious communities, cultural experiences and even
adventure.
The three papers in this session, all based on rich archival material, develop these themes. Barbara Harris’s paper explores the choices and lives of aristocratic Yorkist and early Tudor widows who moved to London rather than remaining on their husband’s estates. Anne Laurence’s paper investigates the way in which provincial women took advantage of the financial institutions that developed after the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. For them London became a new “virtual City” that transformed the ways in which they managed their finances. Linda Levy Peck examines Baroque Rome through the extraordinary Grand Tour of Frances Bennett, dowager countess of Salisbury, who left England in 1699, spent the entire Jubilee Year in Rome, and also had extended stays in Naples, Venice and Paris. This paper looks at the cultural connections of women, cities, luxury, and elite culture.
Abstracts
Unexpected migrants to London: aristocratic widows 1450–1550
Barbara J. Harris (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
This paper argues that Yorkist and early Tudor aristocratic women, particularly widows, had a much larger presence in London and its immediate surrounding area than scholars usually recognize. In some cases the women were the wives and widows of members of the merchant elite, who achieved knighthood through their financial service to the crown or as Lords Mayor. But a surprising number came from the landed elite, who owned castles and great houses in their home counties. These women chose to reside in London and its environs after their husbands died. Research on 413 noble and knightly families has revealed that more of the widows of noblemen and knight widows were buried in London and the immediately surrounding area than in any single county. The women built their monuments and made benefactions to their adopted home, benefiting their parish churches and neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of their tombs have survived the intervening centuries, which were marked by iconoclasm, fire, war, and rebuilding.
This argument rests on the evidence of wills, funeral monuments, contemporary chronicles, and antiquarian sources.
The evidence not only illuminates an unexplored aspect of aristocratic women’s lives. It also provides insight into the heterogeneity of London society and its impact as a magnet for the landed classes long before the James I recognized the phenomenon as a political and social problem.
Women and the city: investment, banking and the spread of women’s financial activity in early eighteenth-century England
Anne Laurence (Open University)
The tale of the financial revolution in early eighteenth-century England is usually told in terms of the development of financial institutions following the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the expansion of the stock market, especially during the period of the South Sea Bubble of 1720. But much of this would have been impossible without changes – both through legislation and in the courts – that made the transfer of funds between individuals, banks and joint stock companies easier and more secure. These changes made it possible for private individuals, both men and women, to start to use banks and the stock market without being part of the commercial elite of the City of London. It is in this period that the ‘city’ ceased to be a geographical location where banking and stock market activity took place and became a virtual space in which the new financial markets operated.
In particular, this transformation affected women. For the most part they had been outside the commercial and mercantile networks that had characterised the limited financial markets that existed before 1694. Acts of Parliament of 1698 and 1704 and the development of the use of letters of attorney allowed money to be transferred more securely and stock to be bought and sold without the owner visiting the company offices in person. While newspapers during the South Sea Bubble wrote of the visibility of women in ’Change Alley, what was significant in reality was the participation in the market, often for the first time, of women living in the provinces or who visited London only occasionally.
This paper will explore the impact of the new ‘virtual City’ on women’s finances and consider the extent to which their experience differed from that of men.
Cities, gender, and elite culture: the Countess of Salisbury in Rome in Jubilee Year 1699
Linda L. Peck (George Washington University)
Baroque Rome celebrated the power and authority of the Roman Catholic Church, the ancient ruins of the Roman Empire and the villas, gardens and libraries of the Roman nobility. Rome’s power and ritual became especially visible in Jubilee years which attracted not only pilgrims from all over Europe but elites on the Grand Tour.
While the Grand Tour is seen by historians as the province of young gentlemen and their tutors, the travels of Frances Bennet, dowager Countess of Salisbury, in Europe between 1699 and 1703 are perhaps the longest of any noblewoman of the period. She spent all of Jubilee Year in Rome. Her detailed account book chart her visits to the cultural centres of Baroque Rome from the inauguration of the jubilee year with the opening of the doors of St. Peter’s, to the installation later in the year of a new Pope, to her meetings with Cardinals and the leader of the English College, her connections to the political salon of the French faction led by the Princesse des Ursins, and her visits to the Villa Borghese, the Villa Pamphillia, the theatre and opera, as well as other Italian cities on the Grand Tour route from Naples to Venice.
At the same time, the Countess of Salisbury’s extraordinary year in Rome also drew critical comment on a wealthy and independent English widow who chose to identify herself with the sights and sounds of a foreign cityscape as well as her luxury, her religious and political leanings, and her sexuality. At a time when landscape was usually personified as female, for a woman to be the gazer and not the gazed upon, provoked the bystander to complaint. This paper on the Countess of Salisbury in Rome in 1699 and 1700 looks at the cultural connections of cities, luxury, gender and elite culture.
