The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women: A Social History

In these absorbing and well-researched portraits, Norton (The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor), an authority on the queens of England, juxtaposes the experiences of prominent and ordinary women across the social, economic, and religious spectra during the Tudor period (1485–1603). Norton frames her work with the lives of Henry VIII’s younger sister Elizabeth (1492–1495) and his younger daughter, Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603). She posits that women passed through Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man” in parallel fashion. This construct proves awkward, as for women there was no fourth or fifth age comparable to those of a soldier or man at the peak of his professional success. Thus, two of the book’s middle sections devolve into narratives about well-known, exceptional women caught up in the religious turmoil of the 1530s–1550s. The earlier and later ages more successfully encompass a broad range of experiences, including those of wet nurses, witches, the poor, servants, and widows. Readers will learn about cooking and medicine, church pews and contraception, ladies in waiting, rape and prostitution, ecclesiastical courts, Lady Jane Grey, cosmetics, and more. Despite occasionally stretching the material to suit her thesis, Norton weaves her stories with an expert hand and illuminates many rarely discussed aspects of daily life for Tudor women. Illus. (July)