Chapter 2 analyzes kinship both between employer and servant and between the female attendant and her other family members in service. Ladies-in-waiting usually owed their positions at court and in great households to connections within their kin group, sometimes through active negotiations and promotions that appear in surviving records, but mostly through maneuverings that occurred behind the scenes. The surviving documents allow me to argue that courtier families used kinship ties to build networks of influence. In return, employers gained new servants from connections already known and trusted. Marriages within the household were well rewarded and female attendants often took advantage of opportunities to wed fellow servants and promote their children, siblings, cousins, and even grandchildren into similar employment. This chapter also asserts that the familial networks of ladies-in-waiting paralleled the dynastic networks that made for effective monarchy. Although only one royal body, usually male, ruled the kingdom, a king could not rule successfully in isolation; rather monarchs employed consorts, siblings, and other kin to govern and enhance royal prestige. Similarly, courtier families worked together to promote members of their kin group and parlay influence into rewards.

In order to situate the women who worked in royal and aristocratic households in their proper context, the first chapter explores household composition, demonstrating similarities of servant arrangements at all levels of elite society even though household size varied at different status gradations. Over time, households of every status level grew, offering further career opportunities, especially since elite households became more welcoming to women in the late fourteenth century, even though throughout the Middle Ages they remained almost exclusively male domains. This chapter argues that female servants gained their positions through kinship and patronage opportunities that favored their placement and promotion. In investigating the qualities that employers desired in their servants, I contend that they chose attendants who demonstrated useful skills, good character, and pleasing appearance. This chapter reveals that turnover occurred due to death, retirement, marriage (which did not necessitate retirement), dismissal, or transition to different households, and seems to have been a frequent aspect of life for a lady-in-waiting, yet I also assert that a minority of attendants served their ladies for long durations, at least a decade or more.

Chapter 3 focuses on the kinds of domestic duties expected of women in gentle, noble, and royal establishments and thus offers an understanding of everyday life in a late medieval elite household. The range of activities required of highborn household servants was broad, encompassing both public and private obligations. They saw to their queens’ or noblewomen’s personal needs in terms of apparel, entertainment, and piety. They traveled when duties demanded it and assisted their queens and ladies with medical care. To perform these tasks, they were entrusted with significant household resources and also, sometimes, care and custody of royal and noble children. Over years of service, through daily serving the needs of their employers, some serving women and their mistresses developed affectionate relationships as they shared literary tastes and devotional practices. Their employment provided opportunities for elite female servants to live a sumptuous lifestyle surrounded by luxury and entertainments, and also to network with other courtiers. I argue that investigating the domestic duties and daily lives of these often-overlooked women completes our understanding of courts and great households by showing the importance of female employment in the Middle Ages.

An introductory chapter briefly outlines relevant historiography of courtier studies in general and analyses of elite female servants more narrowly. This introduction establishes important classifications of household servants and demonstrates how roles and terminology shifted over time as the royal court and household grew in both size and complexity over the course of the later Middle Ages. In addition to illuminating categories of female service, the introduction details the sources and methodology employed to produce this analysis of medieval English ladies-in-waiting, highlighting the goals, successes, and limits of this kind of prosopographical methodology. The introduction argues that an analysis of ladies-in-waiting offers insight into female social networks, gender dynamics at court, and issues of power, authority, and wealth, along with how women accessed these features, in late medieval society.

The freedom and power of citizens was buttressed by the exclusionary effects on non-citizens. My reading of Apollodoros’ Against Neaira ([Dem.] 59) in Chapter 5 exemplifies the practical results of the ideology of freedom on all levels of Athenian society. The case calls into question the limits of citizenship and demonstrates how a status transgression can impair the jury’s own power. The prosecution speech alleges that Neaira, a resident foreigner, is guilty of pretending to be a citizen. As a foreign, female sex laborer, Neaira represents the antithesis of the model citizen. Neaira’s arrogation of citizenship privileges, however, gives her a measure of positive freedom and power. In contrast to other readings, I show that power struggles are crucial to analyzing the prosecution’s arguments. The prosecution attempts to show that instead of doing “whatever she wishes,” Neaira deserves to be subject to others doing “whatever they wish” to her. Apollodoros’ characterization of her transgressions as destabilizing citizenship indicates the centrality of autonomy and power to citizen identity. Hence, the importance of positive freedom was not simply theoretical, but practical.

This chapter is a broad account of the experiences of the printmaker’s family home-cum-workshop in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, focusing on the role and status of women within these families and spaces. Weaving key examples throughout, it highlights the centrality of the family workshop in framing and encouraging women’s printed productions. However, it also exposes the gendered mechanisms at play within these overlapping commercial and domestic spaces.

Despite the degree to which the printmaking family facilitated and often encouraged women’s work, the small body of literature specifically focusing on printmaking families in the eighteenth century has often obscured the role of women within these workshops. Printmaking apprenticeships were largely closed to women in this period, and this chapter reveals that the family workshop gave many women an invaluable social and economic opportunity to work, to earn money, to create prints, and to forge an artistic identity. In turn, their labour was often crucial for the running of the family workshop, providing income but also enabling other relatives to fashion their own artistic identities in turn.

Chapter 4 brings the household into focus and demonstrates how it denies women political agency and constrains their political participation. Drawing on data from a census survey and interviews, it documents the alignment of the household in political decision-making and the authority of elder men in these decisions. It shows that women lack autonomy in their vote choice and are often coerced into compliance with the wishes of the heads of household. It further documents the inefficiency of household cooperation for women and demonstrate its perpetuation as rooted in coercion and strategic political mobilization.

Chapter 7 turns to the recipients of petitions for royal justice and their initiation of litigation. The chapter begins by weighing up the evidence for direct royal involvement in these judicial processes, with particular attention paid to a set of documents signed by Henry VII and Henry VIII personally. Otherwise, based on a survey of the signatures and annotations scattered across the Court of Requests’ early Tudor archive, this chapter identifies the men who delivered justice in this tribunal day to day. Mapping onto the evolutionary trajectory set out in Chapter 3, the overall impression is of transition from a diverse and changeable group of bill handlers within the royal household under Henry VII, followed by a spell in which the household clergy oversaw all business in Requests, and culminating in a smaller quorum of legally trained judges and Masters of Requests by the end of the period. The chapter then spells out the procedures followed once a petition was in the hands of this frontline personnel, and the measures they took to preserve the traditional prioritisation of the poor litigant.

By way of a firm case study for the new system of royal justice in action, Chapter 3 provides the first history of the Court of Requests from its initial entry in the historical records in 1483 through to its settlement at Westminster by the end of Henry VIII’s reign. The origin of this tribunal is located in the practice of receiving petitions during royal progresses, particularly in the reign of Richard III. Thereafter, Requests was part of the itinerant household, following Henry VII and Henry VIII as they travelled around their dominions. It only acquired a more defined timetable, judiciary, and seat at Westminster in the 1530s, when it became subject to ministerial reform programmes. Importantly, this evolution to courthood was neither smooth nor linear: its business levels peaked and troughed, it could seemingly always revert to acting on the road, and it was rarely referred to by the name ‘Court of Requests’. With these interpretive challenges in mind, this chapter argues that, contrary to administrative historians’ tendencies to identify positive development in improved bureaucracy, Requests’ flexibility and proximity to the king’s person was advantageous to petitioners.

Beginning in the 1760s, white women’s political activism and agency grew and developed as a result of Enlightenment theory, religious revival, and the politicization of the household economy. Revolutionary fervor created new political spaces for women as they engaged in political protests and boycotts. The circumstances of the war further refined Americans’ perceptions of women’s fortitude, political allegiance, piety, and self-direction. These factors combined to create a new foundation for white women’s participation in the republican political culture of the United States as the guardians of moral and political virtue. These new notions of women’s political connection to the state through moral authority and motherhood, however, created increasingly separate political spaces for women and men. Despite the development of women’s political agency during the Revolution, by the early 1800s many Americans began to look to the patriarchal family to restore order and social authority. Men abandoned the idea that women could be competent political actors and instead promoted a specifically masculine ideal of citizenship. State legislators and jurists revised their ideas about women’s citizenship, inheritance, and allegiance to the state. This refashioning chipped away at most claims women had to economic independence or direct political participation.

This chapter surveys the status of the (pseud)epigrapha and treatises credited to Pythagorean women. While we cannot be certain they were written by women, it is clear their intended audience is women, who were expected to entertain the texts and hopefully even find the reasoning persuasive. As such, if the content of these texts can be called philosophical, then that will show that women engaged with philosophy at least as far back as the datings of the earliest texts. To that end, the chapter focuses on a few texts, which the author argues address how the running of a household can contribute to the development of virtuous families and cities, an interest shared by canonical authors including Plato and Aristotle. It is further argued that the Pythagorean texts address aspects of the household that are of essential importance but which are ignored in our canonical texts.

This chapter sets out the relationship between local officeholding and the central institution of gendered power in early modern society: the household. Throughout the early modern period, most officeholders were also heads of household. This was the result of legal and social ideas about who should wield state authority; only those who were economically, socially, and domestically ‘independent’ were seen as possessing the necessary capacity for responsible decision-making. In practice, this generally meant middle-aged married men of the middling sort, who dominated most local offices. These men were expected to exercise patriarchal control over others, which brought them into conflict with other men who resented their intrusions as an affront to their own sense of manhood. In many of these cases, policing was characterised by clashes between competing modes of masculinity. It was not, however, an exclusively male domain. Male officers’ wives took part in their husbands’ duties, while women who headed their own households held office in their own right.

Egypt has an abundance of well-preserved monastic settlements. The mudbrick structures provide ample evidence for examining domestic spaces associated with the daily household activities of food preparation through the acts of cooking, frying, and baking. While monastic literature presents a portrait of food scarcity in monastic communities, the archaeological evidence of kitchens and cooking spaces creates a more dynamic story of how monks interacted with ingredients, prepared meals, and considered the economy of space in designing areas for food preparation. The monastic movement required new habitations and ones in new locations to be set apart from the traditional and biological households. The importance of consumption habits within the family setting played a role in reinforcing one’s identity in a monastery or in a non-monastic family. The numerous examples of preserved monastic kitchens offer substantial evidence for a robust analysis that combines the theoretical models of household archaeology and spatial configuration to consider how monastic builders addressed the specific needs for food production within a homosocial community. The advent of new monastic settlements in late antique Egypt provides a unique opportunity to observe the evolution of cooking within an archaeological context.

German excavations carried out between 1980 and 1995 in Tall Bi’a (Raqqa, Syria) uncovered the remains of a unique Syrian orthodox monastery on the top of the central hill above the Bronze Age city of Tuttul. The building complex is unique in that, although it is of inexpensive mudbrick, three of the rooms are decorated with carefully executed mosaic floors with figural decoration. Two of these mosaics have Syriac inscriptions that date the construction of the building (509 AD) and the renovation of parts of it (595 AD). The complex can be identified as the monastery of Mar Zakkai. This chapter focuses on the economic life of the monastery and describes it as a household unit. The starting point is the well-preserved refectory, the large kitchen, and the storerooms. The refectory is equipped with circular benches, unique in Syria, parallels of which are known only from Egypt.

Twelfth Night engages audiences in exploring the failure of hospitality from the positions of shipwrecked strangers seeking refuge in Illyria. While the law polices against strangers presumed hostile and households remain oblivious to the plight of the refuge seekers, household hospitality, grounded in patriarchal property relations, remains open to mercenary perversions from within. With Viola and Sebastian assuming nonthreatening roles as domestic servant and tourist, the play stages comedy’s marriage drive as the means by which society assimilates strangers deemed desirable and excludes individuals deemed undesirable. This repurposing of plot device effectively probes the will’s affective disposition to others in prompting a range of action from hospitable to hostile. The process reveals inhospitality not just to strangers without but also to members within the household; it also renders imaginable instances of mutual and even unconditional hospitality. In posing the problem of hospitality, Twelfth Night speaks to the global migrations—climate, economic, political—we confront in our communities today. Viola stands for the migrant here, her wit and resourcefulness countering stereotypes that normalize fear and inaction, even as her stalled nuptial indicates the need for systemic social inclusions based on mutual hospitality, fueled at heart by a transformation of the will.

The centuries after the so-called collapse of the Mycenaean palace administration from the twelfth to the eighth centuries BCE saw several transformations of social and economic structures. These had an impact on the economic performance in the period. It is also significant that during this period there was no attempt to restore palatial administration, but instead Early Iron Age communities built new social and economic relationships on household units that could be understood as adaptable social-political organisations with fluid boundaries. Moreover, the Early Iron Age should not be seen as a period of stagnation but one characterised by adaptive and resilient features. These led to the well-documented visibility of the archaeological record of the eighth century BCE.