A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England

By Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey

A study of the depictions of women’s executions in Renaissance England
 
A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England provides critical insights on representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey draws on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, to explore not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance.

A significant part of the execution spectacle—one used to assess the victim’s proper acceptance of death and godly repentance—was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure their final words held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. The reception of women’s speeches, Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of accepted female behaviors and language as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society.

Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women’s bodies. The executed woman’s body, Lodine-Chaffey contends, functioned as a text, scrutinized by witnesses and readers for markers of innocence or guilt. The intense focus on the words and bodies of women facing execution during this period, Lodine-Chaffey argues, became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women’s roles not just as criminals but as subjects

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394127

Book preview

A WEAK WOMAN IN A STRONG BATTLE

STRODE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Michelle M. Dowd, series editor

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Dennis Austin Britton

Bradin Cormack

Mario DiGangi

Holly Dugan

Barbara Fuchs

Enrique García Santo-Tomás

Jessica Goethals

Karen Raber

Jyotsna G. Singh

Wendy Wall

A WEAK WOMAN IN A STRONG BATTLE

WOMEN AND PUBLIC EXECUTION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

JENNIFER LILLIAN LODINE-CHAFFEY

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Cover image by Vladimir Fedotov/Unsplash

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2132-1

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9412-7

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.

The English Execution Ritual in Early Modern England

2.

Gendering the Execution

3.

Martyrdom and the Female Body

4.

The Female Body on the Scaffold

5.

Women’s Last Dying Speeches: Critiquing Social Norms

6.

The Modesty Topos and Women’s Executions

Epilogue

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Figures

1. Frontispiece from A declaration from Oxford, of Anne Green a young woman that was lately, and unjustly hanged in the Castle-yard

2. The Martyrdome of Three Women

3. The Burnyng of Cicelie Ormes at Norwich

4. A lamentable spectacle of iii. Women, with a sely infant brastyng out of the Mothers Wombe

5. The Martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow

6. Mistris Turners Farewell to all women

Acknowledgments

I have benefited from the support, conversations, and assistance of numerous individuals and communities throughout the process of researching, drafting, editing, and publishing this investigation of early modern women’s executions. I am most grateful to Todd Butler and Rob Bauer for their willingness to read the entire manuscript and offer pointed and fruitful suggestions. Their kindness to me and attention to my work means a great deal. I also owe thanks to a number of colleagues for reading portions of this work or helping me think through my ideas, including: Rob Browning, Casey Charles, Margaret Cotter-Lynch, John Eglin, Will Hamlin, John Hunt, Ashby Kinch, Debbie Lee, Ken Lockridge, Kirk McAuley, Leslie Malland, Donna Potts, Randy Prus, Rebecca Quoss-Moore, Richard Snyder, and Patty Wilde. In particular, I would like to thank the members of my women’s faculty writing group—Stephanie Bauman, Vanessa Cozza, and Tracey Hanshew—for their feedback, support, and friendship. This project benefited as well from an especially thought-provoking seminar entitled Women Writers and Political Frameworks, which was facilitated by Joanne Wright and Mihoko Suzuki during the 2020 Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting. Megan Matchinske’s feedback on my project during this seminar was invaluable. I would also like to thank my editor, Daniel Waterman, for his generosity and help in navigating academic publishing, and the series editor, Michelle Dowd, for believing in and encouraging this project. I am furthermore indebted to the anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive criticism, Lisa Williams for her assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication, and librarians Harvey Gover and Darryl Rainbolt for their help in obtaining the books and articles needed for this study. Finally, I would like to thank my current institution, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, for its assistance with procuring images.

In many ways this study began when I was nine years old and my father gave me a book by Lozania Prole entitled The Two Queen Annes. This historical novel about two of Henry VIII’s wives sparked my curiosity about Tudor England and inspired my decision to study early modern literature and history. I would like to thank my parents, Mark Lodine and Gerel Goodman Lodine, for reading to me, encouraging my intellectual pursuits, and supporting my academic career. I am also thankful to my grandparents Wally and Nancy Lodine, who fostered my love of learning and educational goals from the time I was a child. Although they are no longer on this earth, their influence on my life remains powerful. Lastly, I would like to thank my immediate family members for their patience with me as I pursued this project. Jason, thank you for being proud of me and loving me. Darby Leigh and Hannah, thank you for attending my conferences, for watching Shakespeare performances with me, and most of all, for being my friends.

Introduction

In his 1635 collection of sensational tales of crime and punishment, John Reynolds includes the fictional execution of Caelestina, whom authorities beheaded and subsequently burned for her role in the murder of her father, Captain Benevente. In this moral tale, Caelestina, a young Italian lady, spends the night prior to her execution in prayer, still grieving for her sinnes and mourning for this her bloudy offence and crime. When brought to the place of execution, her demeanor is very humble, sorrowfull, and repentant, and with many showres of teares she begs forgiveness of her family. Then, following tradition, Caelestina requests prayers from the audience, and "when her sighs and teares so sorrowfully interrupted and silenced her tongue, as she recommending her soule into the hands of her Redemer, whom she had so heynously offended, shee with great humility and contrition, kneeling on her knees, and lifting up her eyes and hands towards heaven, the Executioner with his sword made a double divorce betwixt her head and her body, her body and her soule; and then the fire (as if incensed at so fiery a spirit) consumed her to ashes, and her ashes were throwne into the ayre, to teach her, and all the world by her example, that so inhumane and bloudy a daughter, deserved not either to tread on the face of this Earth, or to breathe this ayre of life."¹ While Reynolds’s rendering of Caelestina’s story has no factual basis and is set in Italy, this narrative reflects early modern English understandings of how condemned women should behave on the scaffold. Caelestina here exhibits traits commonly associated with virtuous and repentant women. She is sorrowful, which is verified by her tears and sighs; humble, as signified by her kneeling posture; and devout, as shown through her belief that God will save her soul, though not her body.

The focus in Reynolds’s story of Caelestina’s execution is twofold. First, the reader encounters the emotions of the condemned woman and receives numerous hints of her regret and repentance, both through the words she states at the scaffold and through her body language. Second, we confront her body; her head is removed, and her remains are burned so that they can serve as an example of the wages of sin. Reynolds, though, does not leave the reader simply with the image of Caelestina’s burning corpse. Instead, he notes the sorrow of all who either knew or saw her death and celebrates her godly repentance at the scaffold: "Thus albeit this wretched and execrable young Gentlewoman lived impiously, yet she died Christianly."²

Reynolds’s narrative, although fictitious, accurately echoes contemporary reports of women executed in England during the early modern period. While authors of narratives about women’s executions typically offer mediated and often fabricated reports of these events, the stories they tell reflect cultural concerns and audience expectations about women’s bodies, speeches, and deaths. Execution narratives focused on women, although adhering to many of the generic expectations found in accounts of men’s executions, also reflect significantly gendered approaches to the ritual. Women were punished by different methods, tried for different crimes, and occasionally allowed to escape punishment because of their pregnancies. Women’s suffering and executed bodies, as signs of innocence or guilt, demonic possession or sainthood, were scrutinized and interpreted by their contemporaries, who paid attention to their demeanor, beauty, grotesqueness, agony, and fear. Sometimes women’s executed bodies continued to offer messages to the public through the display of body parts or skeletons, which extended their punishments beyond their deaths.

Like other prisoners facing execution, women frequently gave last dying speeches³ that followed early modern feminine rhetorical practices such as using self-deprecating language and framing themselves as modest. Positioning themselves as repentant, humble, and submissive to male authorities, I argue, rather than weakening these women’s final words and posthumous reputations, allowed them a limited form of agency. Indeed, only by adhering to the expectations of early modern society—which demanded that they behave modestly, show signs of sincere repentance, and subject themselves to the authority of their husbands and monarchs—could women expect their words to carry weight and their deaths to be considered honorable. Observance of ritual conventions and gendered expectations also provided women with a chance to speak about, and sometimes critique, their social positions. Indeed, female victims frequently addressed their fellow women from the scaffold, offering them warnings of the dangers of promiscuity, disobedience to their spouses, and failure to tame their tongues. Yet many of these speeches as well as the comments of pamphlet writers and witnesses also offered subtle criticisms of the treatment of women at the hands of abusive husbands, unscrupulous masters, and unsympathetic parents. In short, women (and those writing about their executions) often used the space of the scaffold as a pulpit from which they exposed hypocrisy and encouraged submissive behavior as a route toward greater subjectivity.

The accounts of women’s executions, when examined closely, suggest that the words spoken at the scaffold and the representations of their bodies worked together to help audiences understand these spectacles not only as the punishments of deviant women but also as opportunities for women to form subject positions. The idea that the scaffold provided women with a chance to speak publicly and with authority is not new. Nor is the argument that narrative reports of women’s executions at times prompted questions about gender equality and highlighted the often-unequal treatment of women under the law. Scholarship over the last three decades has expanded our understanding of women’s executions during this era, particularly regarding their positions as subjects. Frances Dolan, emphasizing the generic slippage of executions, notes that the scaffold, as a liminal space where the victim is both an actor and acted upon, offered women possibilities for agency.⁴ Because the public execution ritual called for a speech, condemned women were, according to Dolan, represented as subjects in extant accounts and often used their final moments to fashion themselves as authors of their own endings. Yet, for Dolan, female martyrs and execution victims were allowed to truly assert themselves only by transcending bodily suffering.⁵ Thus, Dolan, while arguing that executions provided female offenders with a chance to challenge social constraints by communicating publicly, contends that the painful bodily experiences and sexuality of these women were omitted from textual accounts.

Other scholars of early modern women have also suggested that public executions and the narratives written about them provided women (or at least those writing about them) with an opportunity to control the crowd’s reactions to their deaths and a chance to voice societal concerns. Sandra Clark, in her study of female crime and punishment, explores the relationship between gender and agency in popular publications.⁶ She provides examples of execution narratives in which women displayed their agency by refusing to confess, expressing defiance, explaining extenuating circumstances that led to violent acts, and exhibiting exemplary penitence at the time of their deaths. Like Clark, Randall Martin also finds that the gallows confessions of female offenders varied greatly, noting that although submissive or terrorized co-operation between the condemned and state authorities was not uncommon, active defiance was not unusual either.⁷ What interests Martin most, though, is how news accounts of these women’s crimes and executions shifted over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, resulting in greater attention to female voices and a new focus on questions of gender equity. Martin contends that most accounts of women’s executions contained resistance in some form of reserved personal memory and agency, meaning that many narratives emphasized women’s subjectivity by highlighting not only their final words but also the fraught circumstances of their individual lives.⁸ Martin believes that by giving voice to women’s concerns about unequal legal treatment, abuse from spouses, and coerced sexual activity, these sources eventually generated a paralegal culture of equitable perspectives that altered the legal handling of women’s crimes.⁹

My work extends the arguments put forth by Dolan, Clark, and Martin by recognizing that the specific rhetorical practices used by women (or those penning accounts about their executions) allowed them to carve out a limited type of subjectivity. As I will show, though, such agency and the recognition and celebration of a woman’s last dying speech necessitated the woman’s adoption of conventional gendered language, physical posturing, and behavior. Indeed, the forms of language and bodily gestures expected of women dying on scaffolds are mirrored and upheld by examining other fraught situations early modern women found themselves in, such as appearing before courts, writing letters of petition regarding economic disputes, composing literary texts, and managing households. Employing a modesty topos, or language that positioned them as properly subservient, modest, and self-effacing, allowed women and their narrators opportunities to question the treatment of women by their husbands, lovers, and parents and sanctioned executed women’s ability to serve as godly examples to witnesses and readers.¹⁰

Just as important, though, and often working in conjunction with women’s use of the modesty topos in their execution speeches, are the descriptions of women’s bodies. Exploring representations of women’s bodily demeanor, attractiveness, physical deformities, and sexuality within these narratives provides a more complex view of how women (and their authors) could transform their executions into moments of limited agency. Of interest, then, are the accounts not only of women’s words but also of how women undergoing execution and those who recorded and responded to these events used the female body to carve out subjectivity. The body of the female execution victim, I argue, functioned as a text, meant to be read by the audience. It could signify feminine modesty and repentance or imply deviance and monstrosity. Building on the growing body of work about women’s bodily agency during this time, as well as contemporary understandings of beauty, deformities, and ugliness, I investigate how representations of women’s bodies impacted the execution narratives. On the one hand, positive depictions of women’s bodies on the scaffold allowed for greater female agency and acceptance of women’s words. On the other hand, authors using discrediting strategies focused on the less desirable characteristics and grotesque understandings of women’s bodies to cast doubt on their speeches, including their repentance and claims of discrimination or mistreatment.¹¹ These different readings of the female body on the scaffold point to not only the importance of the rhetorical oral strategies used by women and those who reported on or fictionalized their deaths but also the significance of women’s rhetorical bodily choices at the time of execution.

Women’s physical bodies on the scaffold provided witnesses and readers with clues about how to interpret their mortal ends. For the audience, the way women comported themselves and how they looked told a story either of proper penitence or of rebellion against social norms. Although traces of bodily agency are often fragmentary, many accounts do mention the attire, facial expressions, gestures, and demeanor of executed women and interpret subtle shifts in body language as signs of interior regeneration, innocence, or damnation. This is important because it revises our understanding of the execution ritual and reveals that the female body, rather than being absent from the execution narrative or simply an object of governmental control, was a vital component of the ritual and something that both women and those writing about them could use to influence reactions to individual executions. Furthermore, the reception of women’s speeches and the allowance of their claims to greater legal and social equity depended on their enactment of accepted female behavior, which was constructed both verbally and physically. Performances of modesty and repentance, then, rather than simply replicating contemporary ideologies of patriarchal control, opened up a space for women and those writing about them to subtly critique the treatment of women in early modern England.

The sources used in this study vary greatly in terms of reliability, audience expectations, purpose, and genre, but taken together these documents reveal how individual women and their authors deliberately framed execution narratives. During my research I found narratives about women’s executions across genres—both those obviously fictional and those purporting to provide readers with true or eyewitness accounts of events. The reasons for relying on not just chronicles, court proceedings, and official accounts but also on literary source materials are twofold. First, consulting representations of female victims in a wide range of sources broadens our understanding of how authors represented these women as well as the differing ways that women comported themselves on the scaffold, as each genre focuses on different aspects of the event. In her discussion of the source materials consulted in her study of petty traitors, Frances Dolan notes that official records during this time period are often pithy and lack detail, while broadsides, ballads, and pamphlets more frequently provide in-depth information about women’s motives, final speeches, and emotional states.¹² Dolan convincingly argues that consulting a range of sources provides researchers with a composite story that fills in the details of individual lives and deaths, allowing for a more complete picture of a woman’s movement from crime, to court, to gallows.¹³ I also found that different types of sources offered contrasting vantage points from which to view female execution victims. Ballads, for instance, provide affective depictions of women’s experiences on the scaffold and often represent the victim speaking directly to her readers, while martyrologies focus on religious symbols and rhetoric. Additionally, comparing differing accounts of these events in various genres can reveal the biases of authors and the expectations of the audience. By using evidence from different generic treatments of women’s executions, then, a more comprehensive understanding of the legal, religious, and emotional aspects of these women’s experiences emerges.

Second, literature and the actual lives of individuals at any given point in time exist in an interpenetrating relationship. In the early modern period, the accounts of executions within works alleged to be truthful, like pamphlets, chronicles, and martyrologies, often influenced fictional works and vice versa. Indeed, a number of dramatists based their plays on contemporary accounts of crimes, executions, and martyrdoms. Thomas Heywood’s A Warning for Faire Women (1599), for example, drew heavily from Arthur Golding’s 1573 pamphlet concerning Anne Saunders’s murder of her husband and subsequent execution. Likewise, John Webster and Thomas Dekker, in their historical play The Famous Historie of Sir Thomas Wyat (1607), rely on the historical record to reimagine the executions of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley. Many early modern texts we would classify as fiction, from poems to ballads to plays, were shaped by accounts of real-life martyrdom, murder, and execution. The awareness of the connections between the theater and public executions is also evident in the words purportedly spoken from the scaffold by execution victims, which include comparisons between the stage and the scaffold, and the condemned’s references to the performative nature of the execution ritual.¹⁴ David K. Anderson additionally points to the language of martyrdom that many individuals condemned to death for nonreligious reasons employed in their final moments, noting the common sacrificial ground shared between stage and scaffold.¹⁵ In short, literary sources, even though deemed unreliable or fictitious, provide useful information about how society operates and how people in the past thought about death, the ritual of execution, and the roles of the participants.

Chronicles, such as those written by Raphael Holinshed and Charles Wriothesley, provide broad, comprehensive descriptions of British history and often include reports of the executions of well-known individuals, such as queen consorts, noblewomen, and noteworthy religious figures like Anne Askew; these accounts were often composed for educated readers with an interest in history. While these works rely on letters, official documents, and eyewitness reports, government censorship or at least some level of state control of these works calls into question the authors’ ability to provide unbiased accounts.¹⁶ Therefore, within chronicles, the descriptions of women’s executions often show properly penitent speeches and typically uphold the official governmental position on the condemned’s guilt.

Hagiographies offer a different approach to the execution ritual. John Foxe’s famed Acts and Monuments, for example, sought not only to provide a history of martyrdom that extended into the early modern period but also to present readers with examples of how to live and die for their faith. Foxe, in particular, created a work that combined history and theology because he believed that in these events of the great and simple folk of society the purposes and plans of God are being worked through.¹⁷ The women that Foxe celebrates are presented as examples of godliness and constancy in the face of persecution. His martyrologies not only provide extensive textual accounts of the martyrdom of Protestants but also contain a number of woodcuts depicting the executions and punishments of martyrs, thereby extending the impact of his texts. Foxe’s work became immensely popular and was read by not only the elite but people from all walks of life. As Sharon Achinstein notes, aside from the Bible, this work was the key printed text that shaped English Protestantism.¹⁸ Foxe’s portrayals of female martyrs, while sympathetic and commemorative when depicting executions, often focus more on the religious debates these women engaged in than on their final speeches before the pyre, making it difficult to determine the range of last dying words offered by these women, although Foxe’s works frequently convey the physical sufferings of female martyrs through both textual and visual representations.

In addition to Foxe’s influential accounts of Protestant martyrs, Father John Mush’s biography of Margaret Clitherow offers an account of Catholic martyrdom.¹⁹ As Megan Matchinske notes, this narrative, written by a man without the input of a woman, represents one of the most common forms of early modern women’s history available to us and can be characterized as an unauthorized biography.²⁰ Mush’s purpose in composing his text included the encouragement of recusant Catholics and the construction of an ideal female Catholic martyr whom he represented in his text as humble, soft-spoken, and obedient.²¹ Clitherow’s characterization throughout the narrative, though, seems to negate the assertive qualities she probably needed in order to die for her faith. This stereotypically femininized portrayal of a female victim highlights a reoccurring problem with nearly all extant sources relating to women’s executions in this time period—the mediation of the female experience through the male writer.

In addition to chronicles and published accounts of martyrdom, contemporary news pamphlets provide detailed, although frequently embellished, accounts of women’s executions. Often written by prison chaplains who visited with and attempted to elicit confessions from the condemned, pamphlets typically appealed to mass audiences through sensational titles and through the use of woodcuts depicting murders or executions. Peter Lake even suggests that the pamphlets bordered on the pornographic and aimed not merely to edify but also to shock [and] titillate.²² Yet, as Sandra Clark notes, most of these accounts have been studied in terms of their strong emphasis on the providential and their didactic goals, including upholding the governmental authorities as agents of the Divine and encouraging proper behavior from citizens.²³ However, even though pamphlets typically included moralizing lessons about the dangers of sin and the importance of confession, and frequently incorporated sensational elements, such documents are also, as Randall Martin notes, more complex semiotic artifacts, due to their ability to present readers with legal and forensic evidence of crimes and to correct other less factual reports about the same events.²⁴ Additionally, David Stymeist contends that many crime pamphlets, because they directly depict inequitable and class-biased legal decisions were instrumental in the development of increasingly sceptical and resistant public attitudes towards the judicial status quo.²⁵ Martin’s work, in particular, assesses contemporary crime pamphlets about female violence and finds that discourses of equity supplied readers with the conceptual means of plausibly explaining, and in certain cases partially justifying or mitigating, the motives of women.²⁶ In analyzing pamphlets about female criminals, Stymeist likewise asserts that, at least in Henry Goodcole’s murder pamphlets, the author humanized the women convicted of witchcraft and murder by including details about their domestic lives and physical abuse, as well as the unique circumstances that motivated them to commit crimes.²⁷ Such pamphlets proved popular in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, offering a wide range of perspectives on individual women’s scaffold behaviors, including stereotypical confessions, as well as defiant denials of wrongdoing. Indeed, these texts often provide readers with a more nuanced way to understand the social and individual contexts that led to women committing crimes.²⁸

While pamphlets provided contemporary news and publicized the legal process involved in the punishment of female offenders, broadside ballads often ventriloquized the speeches and experiences of executed women. Typically, such publications were aimed at the least literate members of society, for not only were they cheap but they were also usually set to music and frequently delivered to audiences via song. Often displayed in inns and taverns, crime ballads became increasingly standardized in the seventeenth century as particular tunes became associated with scaffold speeches and violent crimes.²⁹ Una McIlvenna notes that the tune Fortune My Foe, for example, was used more than any other tune for ballads about murder, disaster, and execution.³⁰ Moreover, ballad printers usually commissioned woodcuts to aid in their sale and make these documents more accessible to the nonreading public. Common images in ballads included the execution of the condemned and a woman stabbing a man at the prompting of a nearby devil, which offered prospective readers titillating images of crime and its consequences.³¹ Usually didactic, ballads warned readers and listeners to adhere to societal rules while lamenting the downfall of the condemned; the sensationalism and exaggeration of these accounts, however, often inspired criticism, even during the early modern period.³² Finally, the messages of repentance and sadness, and sometimes the inclusion of social critique, were offered in first-person voice, which may have allowed the singer of the ballad to assume momentarily the persona of the condemned and thus experience vicariously the thrill of fear at the thought of imminent death.³³

Ballads, in particular, often highlighted the suffering body of the executed woman and attempted to elicit audience sympathy. In his consideration of female impersonation in ballads, Bruce Smith finds that there was a persistent association of ballads with women that offered singers an intense first-personhood.³⁴ Importantly, this identity was understand as embodied, due to the female singer’s focus on hands, knees, bosom, but above all a mouth.³⁵ Due to the embodied aspects of these works, Christopher Marsh argues that at least one popular ballad writer, Thomas Deloney, created broadsides that articulated compassion for women. Although Marsh notes that it is difficult to know whether Deloney was driven by a sympathy for the opposite sex . . . or by an eye for the main chance during an economic crisis, his mediated female voices allowed women singers and audience members to wrestle with the problems caused by their unequal status.³⁶

Finally, a number of literary sources drew from contemporary accounts of women’s executions, commented on the spectacle of a woman’s death on the scaffold, or considered the treatment of the female body after death. These include poems and plays about the beheadings of prominent women like Lady Jane Grey and Mary, Queen of Scots, domestic tragedies about husband murderers and their ignoble ends, and elegies written in response to watching women’s executions. While these sources are obviously less valuable as documentary evidence, they do reflect societal views of women’s executions and reveal the pervasive contemplation of these events. Dramatic representations of executions often sought to elicit emotional responses from viewers, including the typical cathartic release of fear and pity, but also sometimes feelings of anger toward and disapproval of the condemned. Additionally, plays that dealt with recent historical events such as the executions of women often sought to raise questions about contemporary issues, including the fears of women who rebelled against their husbands, the nature of the power of earthly rulers, and the meanings of religious martyrdom. Not all of these dramatic works offer simple didactic messages to their audiences; rather, many literary works that include women’s deaths or executions subtly critique the treatment of the victims and often provide executed women with some amount of limited personal agency.

It should also be noted that while writers usually reported on the charges, crimes, arraignments, and deaths of executed women, they sometimes omitted these women’s final speeches and physical demeanor. Therefore, for many individual women, records of their behavior on the scaffold or pyre and the final words they uttered remain unknown. However, some authors did include statements made by the condemned women prior to their deaths, provide details about final gifts they made to family members, or mention the treatment of their bodies before, during, and after their executions. And these narratives reveal the wide range of responses from not only the executed women but also from those who wrote about them and recorded their last words. Although constrained by convention, which dictated moralistic and didactic messages, women’s speeches could, through careful use of verbal and physical language, facilitate the formation of female subjectivity.

This study examines the execution narratives of women from roughly the start of the Reformation (1530) until the Restoration (1660). The reasons for focusing on this time period are threefold. First, attitudes toward death and execution altered considerably with the start of the English Reformation. As numerous scholars have noted, the early modern period witnessed a significant shift in the human accommodation of death.³⁷ The Protestant denial of purgatory, in particular, impacted how individuals imagined the afterlife and rendered the living’s intercession for the dead ineffectual.³⁸ Instead of focusing on intercessory prayers for the dead, ministers began to exhort mid-sixteenth-century individuals to look toward their own faith as they contemplated the