Abstract
One of the marked differences between early modern and twenty-first-century households was the ubiquitous presence of servants and lodgers in the former, especially in urban communities. The interactions of masters and mistresses with their domestic employees is well-explored terrain, but to a significant degree ‘the long history of problematic relations between servant and employer has frequently been characterised by manipulation, loaded negotiation, tension and conflict’ with far less attention paid to moments of compassion and collaboration, something which this chapter aims to rectify.1 By contrast, ‘the circumstances and experiences of both lodgers and those who took lodgers into their dwellings or shops has not been subjected to detailed examination by historians’.2 This chapter makes contributions to the historiography of both topics, focusing on the positive aspects of domestic relationships from the perspectives of mistress, maidservant and landlady.
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Notes
J. McEwan and P. Sharpe, ‘“It buys me freedom”: genteel lodging in late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century London’, Parergon, 24:2 (2007), p. 160.
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W. C. Baer, ‘Landlords and tenants in London, 1550–1700’, Urban History, 38:2 (2011), pp. 234–55
V. Harding, ‘Families and housing in seventeenth-century London’, Parergon, 24:2 (2007), pp. 129–30
M. Berry and P. Baker, ‘“For the house her self and one servant”: family and household in late seventeenth-century London’, London Journal, 34:3 (2009), pp. 213–17.
W. C. Baer, ‘Housing the poor and mechanick class in seventeenth-century London’, London Journal, 25:2 (2000), pp. 13–39
W. C. Baer, ‘Housing for the lesser sort in Stuart London: findings from certificates, and returns of divided houses’, London Journal, 33:1 (2008), pp. 61–88
B. Capp, ‘The poet and the bawdy court: Michael Drayton and the lodging-house world in early Stuart London’, The Seventeenth Century, 10:1 (1995), pp. 27–37.
D. Willen, ‘Women in the public sphere in early modem England: the case of the urban working poor’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 19:4 (1988), pp. 562–73
R. Munkhoff, ‘Searchers of the dead: authority, marginality, and the interpretation of plaguem England, 1574–1665’, Gender and History, 11:1 (1999), p. 20.
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© 2014 Tim Reinke-Williams
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Reinke-Williams, T. (2014). Domestic Management. In: Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372109_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372109_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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