Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Ohio State UP, 2005; revised paperback 2017) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Bastardy in Butleigh: Illegitimacy, Genealogies and the Old Poor Law in Somerset, 1762-1834
Genealogy, 2020
Early academic histories of non-marital motherhood often focused on the minority of mothers who had several illegitimate children. Peter Laslett coined the phrase 'the bastardy prone sub-society' to describe them. More recent qualitative research has questioned the gendered perspectives underlying this label, and emphasized the complex, highly personal processes behind illegitimacy. By locating the social experience of illegitimacy, particularly multiple illegitimacy, within a broader genealogical and parochial context, this study tries to set the behaviour of particular individuals within a ‘community’ context in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It places illegitimacy alongside pre-nuptial pregnancy within the sample parish, but also focuses on the majority of illegitimate births that fell under the administration of the parish and became ‘bastardy’ cases. It examines the parish’s administrative responses, particularly its vigour in identifying and recovering money from putative fathers, and discusses the social circumstances of these fathers and mothers. It then goes on to reconstruct the inter-generational genealogy of a dense family network that linked several mothers and fathers of multiple illegitimate children. It highlights some significant and recurrent disparities of age and status within these family concentrations which lay beyond the limits of the courtship-centred model of illegitimacy.
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 2018
Anxiety over violation of legitimate issue runs through John Webster's canon. Alison Findlay's important 1994 volume Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama discusses Webster's The Devil's Law-Case; however, her listing of plays with bastard characters omits Webster's other works that focus on legitimacy, including Appius and Virginia, A Cure for a Cuckold, and The Fair Maid of the Inn. Further, Duke Ferdinand's concerns in The Duchess of Malfi about his sister's children's paternity form his hysteria. Thus the issue of who should be rightfully considered family is a central issue in many of Webster's plays, as female protagonists threaten familial and social order through perceived immoral behavior. As in Webster's two more well-known plays, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, the central character in The Devil's Law-Case is a widow, Leonora. Her Machiavellian son Romelio, with overtones of Webster's previous manipulative brothers Ferdinand and Flamineo, tries to force his sister Jolenta into marrying a wealthy suitor Ercole, in part by attempted murder of her suitor Contarino. In a plot twist, Leonora also loves Contarino, and the action climaxes in court as Leonora falsely accuses Romelio of being illegitimate and therefore incapable of inheriting his dead father's estate. The female lead presents a threat to the patriarchy that shaped the family structure and political rule of the seventeenth century. The pivotal issue of illegitimacy touches both home and court, and the ability of women to produce bastards represents their ability to upset established order. Leonora's transgression, however, is not entirely condemned, for even though the female protagonist appears to be contained, she receives reward for her subversive initiative. Bastardy had both grown in incidence and penalty during the time of Elizabeth, according to several primary and secondary sources. Martin Ingram's Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 finds an increase in the incidence of births of illegitimate children toward the end of the Elizabethan era (261), Rebecca Probert's more recent study, Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600-2012, similarly notes a peak in illegitimacy early in the seventeenth century (13), and Fiona McNeill notes, in Poor Women in Shakespeare, "in the period between 1600 and 1624, early modern England saw an explosion of convictions for bastardy in which women were either hanged or imprisoned" (80). The increase of incidents led to the social anxiety voiced in The Devil's Law-Case, though inverting the law-cases in which women were accused of producing illegitimate children for one in which a woman accuses herself. Much of the era's anxiety focused on economics: The Poor Law of 1531 charged the local parish with bearing the cost of illegitimate children, while the Poor Law of 1576 lamented the financial burden of the previous law from increasing numbers of cases (Findlay 12-13). As women's extramarital sex was regarded as a violation of both divine and earthly law, both church and civil courts dealt with bastardy cases. William Clerke's 1594 lengthy treatise, The Triall of Bastardie, whose title could have helped shape the trial scene in The Devil's Law-Case, details the causes and cases of illegitimacy, noting the differing treatment of the offense by sacred and secular authorities: The canons distinguish here, Legitimation ensues (by the canons) a subsequent marriage, in certain cases they dispence: the lawes distinguish not, they respect not marriages that ensue, they dispence not: neuerthelesse they CONTACT Carol Blessing
The English Historical Review
William Tennent (1759–1832) was a successful businessman and banker, who made his mark in Belfast as one of the city’s richest men. He was also a father and, later, a husband. By the time of his marriage in March 1805, Tennent had fathered at least thirteen illegitimate children, with at least four women. The child he would have with his wife, a daughter named Letitia, would be his only legitimate heir. Through this series of illicit sexual relationships, William Tennent created a complex family unit that consisted of legitimate and illegitimate children, half-siblings, step-siblings and step-parents, all of whom were united through a network of unmarried mothers. The example of the Tennent family therefore offers historians the unique opportunity not only to extend knowledge about the making of the family in Ireland, but also to refine ideas about contemporary attitudes to illegitimacy. Using the Tennents as a case-study, this article furthers understanding of the family in Ireland...
Illegitimate parenthood in early modern Europe
The History of the Family, 2020
This special section presents new research on the ways in which unmarried parents-particularly women-negotiated illegitimacy, how they interacted with urban institutions, and what legal resources they had. Throughout the early modern period, extramarital pregnancies were an important issue of concern to urban authorities and city dwellers. In line with recent historiographic strands, the two articles in this section approach the topic of unwed motherhood from below. The articles pay particular attention to the interactions between institutions and unwed mothers, the diversity of identities of unmarried parenthood, and the agency of unwed mothers in early modern Europe. Geographically, the contributions cover evidence from cities in Italy, Germany, Holland and Switzerland. In this introduction, we contextualize the most important issues addressed in the contributions. We explain why early modern societies regarded unwed motherhood as such a serious problem and expound the concept of 'agency' in relation to illegitimacy. We then elaborate on the institutions that dealt with unmarried parenthood in early modern Europe and their possible effect on the agency of unmarried mothers. This includes the impact of changes on the treatment of illegitimacy by institutions, and the North-South divide with regard to attitudes towards unwed parenthood.
Virtuous Foundlings and Excessive Bastards
Eighteenth Century-theory and Interpretation, 2008
In Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Ohio State, 2005), Lisa Zunshine works through the issues of illegitimacy, class, and gender in eighteenth-century England with efficiency and insight. For a comparatively brief text (172 pages, plus notes), Zunshine's analysis is wideranging and provocative in its implications for our understanding of family dynamics in the period. This study challenges the conflation of bastards and foundlings in literature and scholarship, by parsing these vexed, often mutually defining relationships. The slippage between the labels of "bastard" and "foundling" is considerable, for people often assumed that foundlings were bastards, as illegitimacy was a primary motive in abandoning a child. Parentlessness left children open to the stigma of bastardy, so that orphans also were often presumed to be illegitimate. That the assumption of illegitimacy was not necessarily true (for there were legitimate orphans and foundlings) allows Zunshine to analyze status as a construct, which leads her to a spectrum of illegitimacy: illegitimate children, legitimate children presumed illegitimate, illegitimate children presumed legitimate, and so on.
Journal of British Studies, 2022
If coverture justified patriarchal control and legally erased many aspects of wives' separate existence, did this mean that husbands in eighteenth-century England also enjoyed absolute authority over their wives' sexual bodies? This article examines how contemporaries described the sexual boundaries between spouses and what wives could do when they had been violated by their husbands. Wives had few legal protections and limited social and economic resources to escape unwanted marital sex, but the small number who could afford the high costs turned to the ecclesiastical courts to legally separate from their husbands. The five case studies from the ecclesiastical courts explored here are exceptional, first, because sexual problems were at their core, and second, because unusual collateral evidence survives describing attorneys' and judges' opinions about spouses' bodily rights within marriage. Whether they were seeking relief from reproductive toil, venereal infection, threat of sexual violence, or trauma from marital rape, these wives wanted to escape their husbands-but they faced hurdles. Because English ecclesiastical law did not explicitly identify sexual discord as justifying marital separation, the women's attorneys had to demonstrate that unwanted sexual relations were acts of cruelty. By invoking bodily safety, decorum and propriety, and sensibility and sympathy, advocates argued against husbands' absolute conjugal authority. The author considers how broader transformations in beliefs about gender and sexuality may have resulted in giving wives slightly more room for protection by the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly when they faced the threat of marital rape or venereal infection. A dam's rib, a stream that joins a river, two flesh made one: these traditional metaphors symbolized both the carnal fusion between spouses and wives' divinely ordained subordination under their