The gentlewoman's remembrance: Patriarchy, piety, and singlehood in early Stuart England

By Isaac Stephens

A microhistory of a never-married English gentlewoman named Elizabeth Isham, this book centres on an extremely rare piece of women's writing - a recently discovered 60,000-word spiritual autobiography held in Princeton's manuscript collections that she penned around 1639. The autobiography is unmatched in providing an inside view of her family relations, her religious beliefs, her reading habits and, most sensationally, the reasons why she chose never to marry despite desires to the contrary held by her male kin, particularly Sir John Isham, her father. Based on the autobiography, combined with extensive research of the Isham family papers now housed at the county record office in Northampton, this book restores our historical memory of Elizabeth and her female relations, expanding our understanding and knowledge about patriarchy, piety and singlehood in early modern England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526100917

Book preview

Acknowledgements

No book is solely the product of just one person, and this is definitely true for this monograph. My awareness of Elizabeth Isham occurred well over a decade ago when Tom Cogswell sat me down in his office and revealed that he had stumbled on her ‘Booke of Rememberance’ while he spent a day on Princeton University's campus snooping about the Firestone Library's special collections. That meeting was fortuitous, for it ultimately laid the seeds for this present study of Elizabeth's life and world. Consequently, no words can express my enormous debt to Tom – not only did he steer me towards the foundational source of this book but he has also served as an inspiring mentor since my time as a graduate student under his guidance. Equally crucial mentorship has come from Peter Lake and Ann Hughes, who have both intently listened to me talk about Elizabeth over the years and have read many versions of the book manuscript. Their suggestions, insights, support, and friendship have greatly impacted the final product, as well as influenced my growth as a historian. I am also grateful for other colleagues, peers, and friends who have served as sounding boards for ideas and have offered thoughtful advice, particularly Bill Bulman, Elizabeth Clarke, David Como, Anne Cotterill, Richard Cust, Michael Drake, Lori Anne Ferrell, Ken Fincham, Paul Hammer, Heidi Brayman Hackel, Randolph Head, Steve Hindle, Dale Kent, Krista Kesselring, Paul Lim, Erica Longfellow, Noah Millstone, Rupa Mishra, Jason Peacey, Mary Robertson, Sandy Solomon, Tim Stretton, Denise Thomas, Amos Tubb, and Vanessa Wilkie. Of course, without various sources of financial support – especially those that came in the forms of a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University and a National Endowment of the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the Henry E. Huntington Library – this book would never have seen the light of day, since they have given me the time and means to research and write. Moreover, I am conscious of the invaluable research assistance that I have received at such repositories as the British Library, Clarke Library, the Firestone Library, the Huntington Library, the National Archives, and the Northamptonshire Record Office. My family has also greatly contributed, and I owe special thanks to my father, mother, and grandmother, the latter to whom I dedicate this book. Finally, no debt is greater than the one I owe Kathleen McGuire – she has lived nearly as long as I have with Elizabeth Isham in her life, and has read and commented on countless drafts and thoughts of mine. Thank you, Kath, for always being in my corner and being a wonderful spouse.

Portions of this book have appeared in previous incarnations in the following articles: ‘The Courtship and Singlehood of Elizabeth Isham, 1630–1634’, The Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 1–25; ‘My Cheefest Work: The Making of the Spiritual Autobiography of Elizabeth Isham’, Midland History, 34 (2009), 181–203; ‘Confessional Identity in Early Stuart England: The Prayer Book Puritanism of Elizabeth Isham’, Journal of British Studies, 50 (2011), 24–47. Quotations from the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ are here printed by permission of the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; quotations from materials in the Isham Collection, Northamptonshire Record Office (NRO), printed by permission of the Lamport Hall Trust.

Abbreviations

Author's note:all dates are in Old Style with the exception that I take 1 January to be the beginning of the New Year. For quotes, I have retained, whenever possible, the original seventeenth-century spellings, but have expanded contractions.

Introduction: finding and remembering Elizabeth Isham

Gazing out the windows of a bus at the bucolic setting of the English countryside while headed north along the A508 – a road that leads from Northampton to Market Harborough – on a pleasant and late summer day. The destination is the small Northamptonshire village of Lamport. Upon arrival, the driver drops passengers off just outside a quaint gastro-pub called The Swan; to the east is the adjacent High Street shrouded in the shadows of oaks and pines. There are homes lining the street, but all pale in comparison to the stately domicile, Lamport Hall, the residence of the Isham family for over four hundred years and now under the purview of a private trust that offers tours of the stately home's rooms and gardens. Adjacent to the home, on the north side of the High Street, is All Saints (also called All Hallows), the small parish church of the village. The church is chiefly notable because of the family monuments of the Ishams found inside. Procurement of a key from the trust's docent allows entrance into the church graced with a late Norman tower and medieval nave accentuated by a late Stuart chapel and an early Georgian ceiling. Beneath the communion table, a slate funeral monument rests, memorializing Sir John Isham, the family's first baronet who secured much of its wealth in the early seventeenth century. North from the communion table, inside the side chapel, sits the fine marble monument to Sir Justinian, second baronet of the Ishams, Restoration MP, and early member of the Royal Society. On the north wall of the chancel exist two memorials to Sir Justinian's first wife, Jane, and their infant son John, who both died in 1639. More inconspicuous are the two brass plaques found near the communion table and dedicated to Sir Justinian's mother and sister, both of whom were named Judith. Combined with the grandness of Lamport Hall, all these monuments strikingly represent the social prominence of the Ishams over the centuries. Yet, after meticulous inspection of the church, there is a peculiar absence amongst these various tributes to a long-dead family; there are no monuments to Elizabeth, eldest child of Sir John and sister to Sir Justinian. Indeed the only recognition of her is a brief inscription on her father's tomb: ‘Sir John Isham … married Judith [Lady Isham] … had by her one son Justinian and two daughters Elizabeth and Judith’.¹ Thus, a departing visitor could leave All Saints and its tombs wholly ignorant of any aspect of her life except that she had been the daughter of a knight and baronet. In other words, there's little to mark the existence, much less the inner thoughts of Elizabeth Isham, apparently lost and forgotten as so many women have been in the shadows of history and the recesses of historical memory.

Fortunately, the opportunity to bring out her of these shadows and recesses arose in the spring of 2002 with the discovery by Tom Cogswell, in the special collections of the Firestone Library at Princeton University, of a previously unknown (at least among scholars) and extensive manuscript autobiography that Elizabeth Isham penned and completed circa 1639.² Entitled ‘My Booke of Rememberance’ and one of the earliest narrative autobiographies in seventeenth-century English, it is essentially a life-narrative in the form of an extended written supplication or confession, with Elizabeth's voice directed towards God as she interwove details of her family and her life with prayers, scriptural citations and quotations, and recognitions of the active role that she believed Providence had in her existence. An intensely private document, the autobiography allows us to enter her mind, so to speak, and view how an early seventeenth-century woman perceived – through primarily a religious understanding – her relationship with God, her family, and her overall world. The richness of the source is further apparent when juxtaposed with the Isham papers, especially those related to the seventeenth-century branch of the family, deposited at the Northamptonshire Record Office (NRO). An overwhelming impression, if not reality emerges from these papers – Sir John and Sir Justinian Isham are amply documented with correspondence, indentures, bonds, deeds, probate inventories, and academic writings, revealing much about the lives of two men who, combined, served as the Isham patriarchs for nearly three-quarters of the seventeenth century. Thus they each cast a wide shadow over their family and, by extension, the Isham papers.

Largely lost in this shadow are the day-to-day interactions and relationships that existed at Lamport Hall, particularly those between the women of the family. Fortunately, Elizabeth Isham represents the most documented seventeenth-century woman in the family collection, with a smattering of correspondence, lists of books she owned, collections of medicinal recipes, and a peculiar manuscript that the NRO has catalogued as a ‘diary’. Consisting of only one folio, Elizabeth produced this ‘diary’ sometime around 1651 and jotted down short notes on events that she experienced from roughly the ages of eight to forty. Combined with the other materials related to her in the Isham papers, the ‘diary’ thus allows for an impression of her life, but it is exactly that – an impression, something that no doubt had contributed to her relegation to mere footnotes in scholarly literature before 2002. All of this further throws into sharp relief the significance of the ‘Booke of Rememberance’, since, in comparison to everything that exists in the family papers – including all that we know about Sir John and Sir Justinian from the collection – it provides the most intimate perspective of both Elizabeth and the other seventeenth-century Ishams of Lamport. Indeed, when read within and against the context that the Isham papers provide, the autobiography presents an enhanced understanding of Elizabeth Isham's life and her family, an understanding that also offers unique and compelling ways to examine the broader seventeenth-century English society and culture in which they lived.³

The book that you now hold in your hands seeks to provide such an understanding and examination, with Elizabeth's ‘Booke of Rememberance’ and her family serving as the primary contact points with the early modern period. From these points, we learn much about Elizabeth and the world she inhabited. Above all, it appears that God and the cultivation of her personal piety defined much of her existence. Nothing illustrates this better than how the autobiography reveals the intimate role that God and religion had in shaping perhaps the defining characteristic of her identity and status – the fact that she never married. Elizabeth entered into courtship in 1630 with John Dryden II of Canons Ashby, a fellow member of the Northamptonshire gentry and grandson of the notable Puritan firebrand, Sir Erasmus Dryden. Scholars had long known of the match, with all knowledge ultimately coming from correspondence found in the Isham papers that showed that, having reached a financial impasse, the couple's respective family patriarchs – Sir John and Sir Erasmus – aborted the proposed marriage. At first glance, such a case seems rather unremarkable; similar stories abound of other contemporary families and in more detail.⁴ Yet the match gains increased significance because of the ‘Booke of Rememberance’. Unlike the correspondence that mainly dealt with the economic aspects of the match, Elizabeth provided a more personal and emotional account, revealing the importance that familial love and honour played in the arrangement. She also explained how the failed match gave her a religious aversion to wedlock. While Sir John and Sir Erasmus, along with their representatives, haggled over acceptable financial terms for over a year, Elizabeth explained that she grew to have an enormous affection for her suitor. All of this, in her mind, proved providentially dangerous – God ultimately stepped in to dissolve the match because she had come to love John Dryden II more than God himself. Determined not to displease her heavenly father again, Elizabeth subsequently chose never to flirt with the prospect of wedlock despite Sir John's strong desires to the contrary, instead deciding to devote her life to her family and the cultivation of her relationship with God while continuing to live at Lamport Hall until her death on 11 April 1654.⁵

That cultivation found its primary expression with the production of the ‘Booke of Rememberance’. Indeed, the autobiography is essentially a written confession to God, with Elizabeth composing it in a rhetorical style rooted in Puritan practices of self-examination.⁶ Despite its godly overtones, the autobiography also reveals that Elizabeth revered the Book of Common Prayer, especially its set prayers and the ebb and flow of the holy feasts and holidays that its sacred calendar prescribed. In other words, both Puritan divinity and Prayer Book devotion shaped her piety. Autodidactic reading and personal exegesis – centred largely on devotional literature and Scripture – played a crucial role in the cultivation of such piety and greatly influenced Elizabeth's life-writing.⁷ It was a piety and writing that she desired to share with her brother Justinian's first four daughters, for she bequeathed her ‘Booke of Rememberance’ to them to read. Moreover, Elizabeth wished to leave a memorial testament of her mother, Lady Isham, and sister, Judith, in the autobiography, and in doing so produced the richest source on the lives of her two closest female relations. Such a testament grew out of the relationship that Elizabeth had with her mother and sister, and their deaths – the former in 1625 and the latter in 1636 – had a profound impact on why she decided to put pen to paper and compose her ‘Booke of Rememberance’. When read together with the Isham papers, the autobiography is also a wonderful source for examining the lives of the seventeenth-century gentry, and reveals in vivid detail Elizabeth's relationship with both her father and brother, showing how she negotiated gendered expectations for gentry women and their place within a society defined by idealized patriarchal conventions.⁸ Key here were the cultivation of her piety and her beliefs in God's providence, two things that provided her with the means to dramatically subvert Sir John's patriarchal authority and to justify following what, to her, was a vocational calling as a never-married woman devoted to her spiritual father in Heaven. During her remaining years, Elizabeth adhered to such a vocation as she lived with her father at Lamport Hall, while also directly experiencing the tribulations of the English Civil War and subsequently coming under the familial authority of her brother when Sir John died in 1651.

In examining all of these defining aspects and biographical details of Elizabeth Isham, the present study belongs to a small but increasing group of scholarship – mostly literary in its focus – that has been responsive to her existence and acutely sensitive to the significance of the ‘Booke of Rememberance’. One of the literary scholars to do so earlier than others was Anne Cotterill, an expert on John Dryden, the poet, not Elizabeth's suitor. She had stumbled upon the autobiography in Princeton's special collections while she was a visiting lecturer at Rutgers University and searching for materials related to the famous bard. She inherently understood the uniqueness and scholarly value of the ‘Booke of Rememberance’, and later offered a short study on the autobiography's literary production. Independent of Cotterill, another literary scholar named Erica Longfellow had come across Elizabeth's autobiography during a trip to give an unrelated paper at Princeton University on Nigel Smith's invitation. Subsequently, Longfellow teamed up with Elizabeth Clarke – co-editor of the women's writing database, the Perdita Project – to receive in 2006 a substantial British Academy fellowship for a team project called ‘Constructing Elizabeth Isham’. Two significant results manifested from this endeavour: a two-day literary conference centred on Elizabeth Isham at Princeton University in 2007 – which included Cotterill, Longfellow, Clarke, and Smith – and the publication of an on-line edition of Elizabeth's ‘Booke of Rememberance’ in 2009. Combined with the work that a few historians (including myself) have devoted on the subject, the online edition has increased the scholarly awareness of Elizabeth Isham, and since its publication we have begun to see traces of this awareness emerge in scholarly works.⁹ If roughly a decade ago she was an obscure figure to the academy, the situation has changed as more and more scholars have found her and her ‘Booke of Rememberance’ worthy of mention and study. Yet this new attention has largely taken shape as short studies or mere anecdotal references to her and her life-writing, and more often than not from a predominantly literary perspective. Consequently, to date, there has not been an extensive study on Elizabeth that thoroughly and seriously examines both her and the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ in their multiple contexts and considers the many historiographical insights that such an examination can produce. The present study is an attempt to achieve exactly this and to bring her further out of historical obscurity, placing her fully into scholarly view by influencing our broader historical memory of her existence. In other words, this book is as much about remembering as it is about finding Elizabeth Isham and her writing, and it does so with a thoroughness that no other scholarly work has yet done.

Remembering and memory are central to understanding both Elizabeth Isham and the world she inhabited. After all, her autobiography is entitled ‘My Booke of Rememberance’, indicating, if not denoting that she found the retrospective act of writing about her life – and God's place in that life – an act of memory. Yet the memory of Elizabeth is not restricted to her own process of remembering but also includes how both her contemporaries and subsequent generations have remembered her. A case in point is the absence of a funeral monument to Elizabeth in the parish church of All Saints, something that distinguishes her from the other members of her immediate family who lived in the seventeenth century. Of course, it was fairly typical for never-married women to not receive such markers after their deaths due to a myriad of reasons, ranging from financial constraints to social stigmas in the early modern period that revolved around lifelong singlehood for women. However, Elizabeth was not the only never-married woman who lived and died at Lamport Hall in the early seventeenth century, since her sister Judith found herself honoured with a monument – one designed by Sir Justinian in 1636 – even though she never wed. Thus the Ishams seemingly chose to remember one female member of their family while essentially forgetting another by neglecting to erect a funeral monument in her honour, something that has helped shape our subsequent memory of Elizabeth Isham. The contents of the Isham papers have further affected such memory. Regardless of the fact that Elizabeth represents the most documented early Stuart woman in the family collection, such status is really only in relative terms, for what material does exist only provides vague impressions of her life that pale in comparison to the far richer detail of Sir John and Sir Justinian Isham found in the collection. Again, there is nothing necessarily unusual about this – as in nearly all gentry collections from the early modern period, men often take centre stage. What makes the relative paucity of materials on Elizabeth's life in the papers, combined with the absence of a funeral monument, more scholarly intriguing is when we consider the provenance of the ‘Booke of Rememberance’. Important to the story and history of Elizabeth Isham are not just events and people of the seventeenth but also the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.

The autobiography is one of only a few manuscripts related to the Ishams that does not rest among the family collection housed at the NRO. In 1985, Robert Taylor – an alumnus and American bibliophile – bequeathed, along with numerous other manuscripts and rare books, the ‘Book of Rememberance’ to the special collections at Princeton. Constituting what became known as the Taylor collection, these materials were not fully catalogued until the turn of the century, resulting in why Elizabeth's autobiography likely went unnoticed for so many years. In short, the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ essentially sat for years in a repository in central New Jersey, hidden from scholarly view. This raises the question of why the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ does not currently reside among the Isham collection, where it had once probably rested for centuries with Elizabeth's other papers after her death. Possible answers seem to point to the activities of two Ishams who lived centuries later. The family had owned an extensive library of early modern titles, several of which Sir Charles Isham – the late nineteenth-century patriarch of the family – sold in 1893 to the Christie-Millers of Britwell Court, a book-collecting family who later unloaded their entire library from 1916–27 at successive Sotheby's auctions.¹⁰ If the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ did not belong to this sale, then it may have left the Isham collection in the middle of the twentieth century because of the actions of the last head of the family, Sir Gyles Isham. After a career in the military and film, Sir Gyles inherited the Isham estate, making Lamport Hall in the 1940s his primary residence and also taking a keen interest in both the history of his family and Northamptonshire. He worked hand-in-hand with Joan Wake – founder of the Northamptonshire Record Society – in promoting interest in the county's history, and also allowed Lamport Hall to serve as the home of the NRO from 1947 to 1959. Moreover, as the baronet and patriarch of the Ishams of Lamport, Sir Gyles enjoyed full custodianship of the family papers, and his interest in history provoked him to dive headlong into reading and researching them; he became an amateur historian, producing many publications on the Ishams, particularly in relation to correspondence produced by Elizabeth's brother, Sir Justinian, and a diary written by her nephew, Sir Thomas.¹¹ Despite such historical interests, there is evidence that Sir Gyles may have been involved in the sale of the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ or had been at least privy to its auctioning at a Sotheby's sale in 1952, an auction that seems to have proved instrumental in the autobiography eventually going to the United States.¹² If it was either Sir Charles or Sir Gyles who were responsible, then it appears an Isham patriarch may have directly expunged the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ or at least never felt it worthy enough to purchase the manuscript to include it among the family papers once again. Whatever the case may be, the exclusion of the autobiography greatly shaped people's, if not scholars' memory of Elizabeth Isham.

Memory studies, of course, has carved out a significant place in the academy, particularly in relation to the practice of cultural history that has wrestled with concepts like ‘collective memory’ or ‘social memory’ and ‘historical memory’. Often, scholars have viewed the former two as processes of shared recollections and identities linked to actual lived experience – such as through ties to living elders – while their perception of the latter concept has revolved around engagement and investigation that relies less on individual and lived recall and more on the exploration of historical fragments like documents to remember or construct a sense of the past.¹³ Throughout this study of Elizabeth Isham, the application of such a conception will occur with the use of the term ‘historical memory’, as well as with the assertion that the early modern sources deployed and examined have locked within them essentially ‘crude’ historical memory that the book refines and processes through an analytical discussion and mapping of her life and world. Scholarship – most of it outside the purview of the field of early modern English history – on archival custodianship and control is significant to such methodology, since it illustrates the effects that archival custodianship and control can have on historical scholarship and historical memory. Early commentary on these effects came from French academics, with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida breaking much of the ground for subsequent scholars, particularly with their assertions that archives are essentially cultural and social artifacts rather than simply inanimate repositories of records or knowledge lacking any conscious or subconscious agenda for their existence. Who creates or determines what belongs to an archive shapes how we view, interpret, and remember the past as much as the materials housed in that archive. Therefore, an archive can both hide and reveal, greatly determining the narratives and arguments that historians are capable of producing. Since such narratives and arguments can often have political uses, they, in turn, can create a usable past in contemporary contexts.¹⁴

Inspired by such revelations, a number of historians – particularly feminist and post-colonial scholars – have participated in what we may characterize as an ‘archival turn’ in the discipline. Much of this turn has been acutely concerned with problematizing the revered pedestal on which previous scholarly generations have placed archives in the production of objective historical knowledge or historical memory. Moreover, some historians have begun to imagine what constitutes an archive, moving beyond just thinking of it at the institutional level (e.g. a national or county record office) to include a whole range of possibilities, such as the memories locked within the mind of an individual person, papers kept in boxes found in a family household, or the electronic data stored on flash drives or digital ‘clouds’. In such a scholarly context, an interest has emerged to examine archives – and the knowledge and the historical memory of societies that they assist in shaping – as historical phenomena in their own right.¹⁵ In studying early modern Europe, such concepts and methods have produced insights on the dynamics between historical memory and identity, the relationship between power and knowledge, and the ties between institutional archives and state formation, all of which have proven significant to enhancing our understanding of the period and region.¹⁶

Regardless of these scholarly developments, literary scholars and historians of early modern England have largely been behind the curve set by their counterparts in other fields. One goal of the present study is to underscore the historiographical power that archives wield. Particularly in relation to our understanding of early modern England, the desire – one that borrows from the insights of feminist historians mainly researching other periods – is the impact that patriarchy, as a system of power and cultural influence, can have in shaping our historical memory of women who lived in the past. Elizabeth Isham's socio-economic status helps highlight such influence. Similar to the Isham papers, many family collections of the landed elite traditionally fell under the purview, if not archival authority of men – like Sir Charles Isham or Sir Gyles Isham – who often underappreciated the documentary remnants of their female relations, either finding them insignificant or peripheral to the respective status or history of their families. Consequently, it is common to find that women are relatively less represented in such collections, be they still housed in stately homes or institutionally based archives. While it is true that there have been enormous strides made since the 1970s in expanding our knowledge of early modern women, particularly those of elite status, it is nonetheless still common that many scholars examine or know far more about men of the upper ranks and their worlds than their female counterparts.¹⁷ Of course, it could be true that women simply produced less documentation than men, since the former usually received less formal education and held fewer positions of authority in the early modern period. Yet it is difficult to discount the fact that archives can obscure our historical perspective of the past, and, as a consequence, either remove or place women outside our scholarly view. The story and history of Elizabeth Isham and her family offers illustration for this phenomenon. After all, there are only traces of her nearest female relations in the Isham papers and the one document – her ‘Booke of Rememberance’ that provides unprecedented access to the family household – appears to have found itself excluded from the family archive by patriarchal authority that did not or could not appreciate fully the value of a first-hand and layered account of a seventeenth-century family and world presented from the perspective of a never-married woman. The methodological foundation of the present study is to unite, if not reunite the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ with the Isham papers, essentially juxtaposing and linking two repositories of historical memory that, just on their own, do not provide us with the fullest portrait of the Ishams of Lamport or Elizabeth Isham, if not, more generally, gentry families or women of the early modern period.

As we view this portrait from multiple perspectives, another methodology will also prove important – microhistory. The goal of this book is not to produce a biography of Elizabeth Isham that traces her existence in a chronological and linear narrative simply because of her compelling life story. Of course, such a life story, in many ways, is what makes Elizabeth an attractive subject to study, but the intention is to utilize that story as an entryway into understanding not just her but also the early modern world in which she lived. Here we will follow in the footsteps of microhistorians who, since the late 1970s, have carved out a firmly established methodological and historiographical niche in academic history. Largely a reaction to the quantitative and model-based scholarship of social and political historians, microhistory has its origins in the approaches of the German Alltagsgeschichte, the Italian microstoria, and the French reaction to the Annales. Certainly the approaches of these historiographical and methodological traditions are distinctive, but they have nonetheless operated with common preconceptions and preoccupations. Perhaps the most striking similarity has been concern for everyday life or history ‘from below’, a concern often couched in a desire to offer qualitative perspectives that emphasize past peoples as subjects rather than objects of study, viewing them as active agents with real and genuine motives, feelings, and experiences. Put simply, microhistorians have often sought to place a ‘human face’ on the past. In doing so, they have commonly questioned or refuted broad teleological conceptions of history – such as Whig or Marxist interpretations – found in macrohistorical approaches that have relied on abstract categories of study like the ‘peasantry’, the ‘working class’, or the ‘gentry’. Fundamental to such questioning has been the notion that by combining a rigorous empiricism with a reduced scale of observation, a truer, deeper, and more compelling perspective of past societies emerges. Furthermore, by focusing on an individual, family, or small community, microhistory allows for the opportunity to view how people thought and conducted themselves within large social and cultural systems such as Puritanism, patriarchy, or the state. Thus microhistory, as a method, permits testing or re-examination of generally accepted notions of the past formulated and presented by macrohistorians, bringing to light factors or phenomena previously unobserved.¹⁸ Indeed, the application of microhistory by scholars has greatly increased our overall understanding of early modern European, if not English history, enlightening us on a whole range of themes like personal cosmologies, identity formation, peasant lives in villages, crime, gender ideals, women's lives, religion, and devotional practices.¹⁹

Yet microhistory – as a methodology and historiographical tradition – has not gone without its critiques or refutations. The scale of observation, with its close examination of sometimes less than mainstream individuals or communities, has led to microhistory being viewed as a practice overly concerned with the esoteric and verging on the antiquarian, centred on learning about unusual cases at the expense of fully addressing broader historical enquiries. From this premise emerges the inevitable question of how representative microhistorical subjects are of the past. If they are not representative, so it follows, then how valuable are they to increasing our overall understanding of general phenomena such as, for example, the rise of confessional states, the causes of the English Civil Wars, or the origins of the Enlightenment? Microhistorians have been sensitive to such critiques, and have offered serious response to them, with many working from Edoardo Grendi's premise of eccezionale-normale that holds that exceptions illustrate the rule, in the sense that they reflect and refract the predominate cultural conventions of a past society. Exceptions may look strange to us but their abstruseness becomes comprehensible when they are contextualized within their cultural framework and we then, in turn, learn more about this framework. In other words, people like Menocchio, Arnaud du Tilh (Martin Guerre), or Nehemiah Wallington were ultimately products of their contexts and they therefore tell us something about early modern Italy, France, or England, even if they appear not to have fully accorded to what historians feel were the dominant cultural conventions of these places. Moreover, not all who have engaged in microhistory seek out exceptions but look to something that may appear as insignificant or ‘normal’ as a means to gain insights of the bigger picture. Be they the exception or the rule, the key is to investigate a given individual, family, or village in the diversity of various contexts. Examined in this way, the contexts form components of the broader world under historical observation, and for the maximization of such observation the microhistorian's task must be as much small as large in scale, since only understanding the whole will allow insights of the particular and vice versa.²⁰ In what follows, these methods and considerations will find application, since the characteristics of the evidence employed and deployed in the examination of Elizabeth Isham and her world make a microhistorical approach more than appropriate.

In doing so, this microhistorical approach – combined with attentiveness to the role of archival custody in shaping historical memory – will throw into sharp relief our overall understanding of life-writing, reading, patriarchy, piety, singlehood, and the family in early modern England. With the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ as the central source of the present study, Chapter 1 begins the process of restoring the historical memory of Elizabeth by illustrating the remarkable characteristics of her narrative spiritual autobiography with an examination of both its rhetorical qualities and the motivations for its production. To Elizabeth, the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ was a spiritual meditation, an act of repentance and memory, a testament of intense godly self-examination, a defence of her marital status, a written model of instruction to later generations of Isham women, and a memorial to her mother, Lady Isham. For its style and structure, the reading of devotional literature proved important, with William Watt's translation of Augustine's Confessions serving as Elizabeth's primary literary model when producing an account of her life. In short, the autobiography has many hybrid qualities. Moreover, since her spiritual autobiography pre-dates the emergence of the genre of the seventeenth-century conversion narrative, it allows us to consider the long-standing scholarly debate over the connections between early modern life-writing and the birth of a modern subjective self centred on an intense interiority. Indeed, we find elements of both Elizabeth's interiority and exteriority expressed in the ‘Booke of Rememberance’, suggesting that to preference one over the other creates a false dichotomy that pays few, if any scholarly dividends.

While the rhetorical structure and qualities of the autobiography are crucial to acquiring reasons for its production and to viewing it from a literary standpoint, we must acknowledge that Elizabeth and the individuals whom she presents in its pages were actual people shaped and affected by a myriad of early modern contexts. Chapter 2 begins the process of situating Elizabeth in perhaps her most important and immediate contexts – her family and her county. Crucial to this endeavour is the recovery and construction of the historical memory of her life, which requires a juxtaposition of the perspectives that the Isham collection and the autobiography provide on her and her family. Such methodology illustrates the stark patriarchal history we find in the family papers, a history overwhelmingly skewed towards Sir John and Sir Justinian Isham because of the ample documentation on them in the collection. Both men simply cast a wide shadow over the history of the Ishams. To underscore this reality, the chapter begins with a thorough analysis of the two patriarchs, an analysis that initiates the reconstruction of essential elements of the world which Elizabeth Isham inhabited. It also creates a stark contrast that provides familial reasons for why the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ is such a unique and valuable source. The image of Sir John – as a county sheriff and then justice of the peace – that emerges is of a moderate caught in the political and religious extremes that existed between Puritans and anti-Calvinists in early Stuart Northamptonshire. Justinian arguably took a much more colourful path in life than his father, pursuing intellectual endeavours that eventually brought him into the orbit of the Royal Society, practising an intense royalism that eventually led to his imprisonment during the Interregnum, and experiencing widowerhood that threatened the continuation of the Isham line. When we attempt to similarly reconstruct detailed portraits of Sir John and Sir Justinian's female relations just from the Isham papers – including what we can glean about Elizabeth – the venture is impossible, particularly in the cases of Lady Isham and Judith Isham. Yet when we turn to the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ to learn about the family, all of these women appear in full scholarly light, and their historical memory is much fuller, if not restored, revealing their intimate and mutually supportive relationships as they faced spiritual, emotional, and physical trials and tribulations. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates the potential power that patriarchy exerts on our historical memory of past women, as well as maps essential contexts for fully analyzing Elizabeth Isham, her life-writing, and her world.

Significant to her world was her marital status as a never-married woman. To examine such significance, Chapter 3 gives pride of place to the interplay that existed in the early modern period between piety, marriage formation, singlehood and patriarchy by examining Elizabeth's relationships with her father and brother, and her negotiation with patriarchal authority. Evidence in both the ‘Booke of Rememberance’ and the Isham papers reveals that Elizabeth largely had a strong relationship with both her father and brother, two men to whom she was financially dependent as she spent nearly her entire existence at Lamport Hall. Yet, while she appeared to have been close to Sir John and Sir Justinian, there could be strains between Elizabeth and her patriarchs that stemmed from her singlehood. Of course, the failure of her match with John Dryden II was the primary circumstance that contributed to her never-married status, and the chapter considers the dissolution of the proposed marriage largely from her perspective as captured in the historical memory that exists in the ‘Booke of Rememberance’. Emotionally and religiously rocked by the experience, Elizabeth came out of the match determined to never marry, leading her to refuse successive suitors presented by her father in 1633 and 1634, all in order to wholly devote herself to a life of piety that accorded to what she perceived were the providential wishes of God. In the end, she chose to obey the desires of her heavenly father over those of her earthly father. Faced with this reality, Sir John conceded defeat, providing Elizabeth with a substantial annuity in 1636 and then allowing her to remain at Lamport Hall for the remainder of her days. It was a dramatic outcome, and it gives further nuance to our understanding of singlehood and patriarchy in early modern England, showcasing a significant demographic – one that represented approximately 20 per cent of women – and their possible avenues for negotiating male authority in the period. The ‘Booke of Rememberance’ leads us to this nuance, demonstrating how the marital status of a woman could challenge patriarchy, how providence and spiritual patriarchy could buttress this status, and how conventional historical wisdom has not fully appreciated the ambiguity that existed in Protestant thought on the prospect of never marrying.

Part of the motivation for the production of the autobiography was a desire to defend her never-married status, and crucial to