2025/03/20 by Laura Seymour · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Arts and Humanities · #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/0268117x.2025.2477132
This article introduces a hitherto unstudied pair of seventeenth-century texts, by the cordwainer’s wife Sarah Caute, which exercised political influence at the highest levels. Caute relates how in 1683–4, whilst in London, she experienced a sudden desire for herself and her six-year-old son Mathew to be baptised by Thomas Ken (1637–1711), who was then the prebend of Winchester (he would soon, in January 1685, be consecrated Bishop of Bath and Wells). Since he was a year old, Caute narrates, Mathew did not speak or walk and suffered ‘violent fitt[s]’ which ‘took him of his leges and his teeth fell out of his head at the roots…till they were all out’. Caute’s story reached the ears of Charles II and James II; thereby, she participated personally and in absentia in elite negotiations of confessional identity. Caute’s texts challenge the notion that non-elite women’s writing is scarce and of limited political interest.