Resource Post 1

I announced several weeks ago that the topic for the research portion of this blog would focus on homosocial bonds and adultery/husband murder in early modern England, particularly as it is presented in the play Arden of Faversham, by an anonymous author. Rather than make a post discussing one of these aspects and providing a bibliography of works (that I have found) which treat that subject, which would undoubtedly be quite unwieldy, I will be presenting a series of posts considering one source each. In each post I aim to do two things: 1) discuss a book or scholarly article's merit with regard to one of the two topics mentioned above, and 2) demonstrate (briefly) the book or article's significance with regard to my specific research topic. So without further ado, I present our first book: Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Crime in England, 1550-1700, by Francis Dolan. I do not aim to discuss the topics of any books in detail; that is, of course, what the books I discuss are for. I merely aim to survey their material with slightly more specificity than just reading their title/subtitle would allow.

This book is a great resource for anyone wishing to find out more information on crime within the scope of the domestic sphere in early modern England. Dolan, throughout the course of his book, covers such topics as: husband murder, the social conditions which led to husband murder, and the after-effects of such a murder on the perpetrator and the community as a whole; petty treason and also domestic violence and rebellion, particularly as seen in The Tempest (Shakespeare), Arden of Faversham (Anonymous), and transcripts of the earl of Castlehaven's rape and sodomy trial; wife murder, societal influences for wife murder, and the effects of wife murder; infanticide, its societal influences and effects, and its occurrence in The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare); and finally, witchcraft and its connection with domestic violence during the early modern period.

This text is ideal especially for those writers coming from a background in literature, history, and criminal justice, as Dolan deals at length with early modern plays (again, namely The Tempest, Arden of Faversham, and The Winter's Tale), which undoubtedly reflect many values and thoughts contemporary to the time, as well as with court cases and other recorded instances of domestic violence and domestic culture during the early modern period. In this aspect, Dolan's book is more focused in its subject material than other books designed to give a broad overview of the domestic landscape of early modern England, but it still broad enough of a subject to be useful in many regards. The only downfall to Dolan's book is that there is no bibliography of works listed, so the reader must be rather clever and hunt down the works referenced in the text of the book itself.

Finally, this book will, for a variety of the reasons listed above, be very useful to my research topic. As I have mentioned, the book deals specifically with domestic violence in the play Arden of Faversham, the main/sole text with which my topic deals. Moreover, the book as a whole deals with issues of wife murder in a more general sense, too, and since wife murder is what the action of Arden of Faversham accumulates to in the end, this material will doubtless be useful to me also.

I will continue to post more sources throughout the week and into next, and hopefully I can have some 13-14 sources in all to help give any interested persons a good starting place for finding material treating domestic violence and homosocial bonds in early modern England.