Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies

The documents contained in Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies tell a story of Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and the ongoing dispute between Mistress Bourne and her husband about their marriage and separation, and subsequently between Mistress Bourne and Sir John Conway both for custody of her daughters and her financial security. The letters capture the contradiction between married women’s official legal limitations and the often messy and complicated avenues of redress available to them. Elizabeth’s narratives and desire for divorce challenge literary representations of patient endurance where appropriate feminine behavior restores a husband’s devotion. The Bourne case offers a unique set of documents heretofore unavailable except through the British Library, National Archives’ State Papers, and Hatfield House. Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne is tremendously important to early modern scholars and our knowledge about and view of women’s negotiations for legal autonomy in the sixteenth century.

About the Author

Cristina León Alfar is Professor of Shakespeare, Early Modern English drama, and Women's and Gender Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Her first book, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy , was published in 2003. Her second book, Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal (Routledge 2017) examines a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. She is co-editor, with Helen Ostovich, of the series "Late Tudor and Stuart Drama: Gender, Performance, and Material Culture." Currently, her research focus is on women parrhesiasts in early modern English drama.

Emily G. Sherwood, Ph.D., is Director of Dgtl Scholarship at University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries where she helps faculty and students incorporate dgtl tools and methods in their research and teaching. She is an alum of both the Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the EDUCAUSE/CLIR Leading Change Institute. Her research interests include dgtl pedagogy and scholarship, extended reality, and medieval and early modern marriage law.