Manchester University Press The Gentlewoman's Remembrance: Patriarchy, Piety, and Singlehood in Early Stuart England (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain)

The gentlewoman's remembrance provides a microhistory of a never-married gentlewoman, Elizabeth Isham, in early modern England. It is centred on an extremely rare piece of women's writing - a relatively newly discovered 60,000-word spiritual autobiography that Elizabeth penned circa 1639 - held in Princeton's manuscript collections. The autobiography is among the richest extant sources related to early modern women and offers a wealth of information not only in relation to Elizabeth's life but also the seventeenth-century Ishams. Indeed, it is unmatched in providing an inside view of her family relations, her religious beliefs, her reading habits, and, most sensationally, the reasons why she chose never to marry despite desires to the contrary held by her male kin, particularly her father, Sir John Isham. Based on the autobiography, combined with extensive research of the Isham family papers now housed at the county record office in Northampton, the book recreates Elizabeth's world, placing her in the larger community of Northamptonshire and reconstructing her family life and the patriarchal authority that she lived under at her home of Lamport Hall. This reconstruction of our historical memory of Elizabeth and her female relations demonstrates why she wrote her autobiography and the influence that family and religion had on her unmarried state, reading, and confessional identity, expanding our understanding and knowledge about patriarchy, piety, and singlehood in early modern England. The gentlewoman's remembrance will be of particular interest to students and lecturers in early modern British history.