Case of Mistress Mary Hampson

Regular price €95.99
50-100
A01=Jessica L. Malay
A01=Jessica Malay
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Jessica L. Malay
Author_Jessica Malay
autobiography
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BG
Category=DNB
Category=DS
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
early modern family
early modern legal system
early modern marriage
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
marital abuse
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
seventeenth-century pamphlets
softlaunch

Product details

  • ISBN 9780804786287
  • Weight: 454g
  • Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 29 Jan 2014
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

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The centerpiece of The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson is the autobiographical narrative of a 17th-century woman in an abusive and violent marriage. Composed at a time when marital disharmony was in vogue with readers and publishers, it stands out from comparable works, usually single broadsheets. In her own words, Mary recounts various dramatic and stressful episodes from her decades-long marriage to Robert Hampson and her strategies for dealing with it. The harrowing tale contains scenes of physical abuse, mob violence, abandonment, flight, and destitution. It also shows moments of personal courage and interventions on the author's behalf by friends and strangers, some of whom are subject to severe reprisals. Mary wrote her story to come to terms with her situation, to justify her actions, and to cast herself in a virtuous light. The accompanying discussion of her life, drawn from other sources, provides chilling evidence of the vulnerability of seventeenth-century women and the flawed legal mechanisms that were supposed to protect them. Readers are also invited to consider in what ways the self-portrait is accurate and what elements of it may be considered fabrication. Malay's archival efforts have thus rescued a compelling and complicated voice from the past.

Jessica Malay is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Huddersfield.