| सारांश: | This thesis systematically samples Star Chamber files for litigation undertaken between 1558 and 1603. It uses these sources to examine women’s relationship with the court as litigants and witnesses, and also to demonstrate that this was informed by cultural narratives outside of courtrooms. Changing narrative tactics in pleadings, new statutory provisions, and quantitative and qualitative changes in women’s crime, demonstrate that the intersection of culture, theology, and law creates and reinstates gender and its performance. It examines how ‘the letter of’ common and substantive law, its ‘real life’ application, an increasingly reflexive judicial apparatus, and the political concerns of elites worked together so that ‘will, rather than right’ was increasingly shored up by the law. Litigant narratives became increasingly concerned with what plaintiffs ‘did’, according to pleadings, and what they had intended to do – which invited gendered assumptions about personal actions to inform pleadings. These assumptions were gleaned from a Protestant culture which was deeply interested in biblical stories like the Genesis, and spiritual authenticity and hypocrisy. Ultimately the thesis calls for a reassessment of scholarship which has regarded this court’s concerns as being primarily the machinations of over-mighty or disorderly subjects at either end of the social scale. It is shown to be a broadly criminal court which spoke directly and indirectly to the social and religious issues of the period. As such, it heeds Joan W. Scott’s call to use the analytical category of gender to reassess existing historical understanding of institutions.
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