Workshops: Stories

Workshop 7: Seventeenth-Century Women and the Law:
New Directions in Research

Conveners:

• Mary Anne Case, Law, University of Chicago
• Paula McDowell, English, University of Maryland
• Kathryn Temple, English, Georgetown University

This workshop was prompted by the organizers' experiences in the recent Folger Seminar on 17th-century law (directed by Cynthia Herrup of Duke University). We invited participants to explore the ways that a focus on story-telling and stories in legal texts (court records, legal theory, feminist theory) enriches our understanding of the testimonies, writings, and lives of early modern women. Participants brought to bear their diverse interpretive and scholarly skills on two provocative legal "stories" (a case report and a deposition), accompanied by brief secondary materials (such as selections from Laura Gowing's award-winning *Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London* (1996) and Peter Goodrich's *Oedipus Lex* (1995)). A central concern of our workshop was to investigate what can be learned about early modern women and the law by a focus on gender vs. a focus on women.