Love finding a petition in the wild at the Oxford Castle and Prison
Dr. Emily Rhodes
@erhodes.bsky.social
4.8K followers 1.2K following 54 posts
Recently completed PhD in Early Modern History at Christ's College, Cambridge Petitions, mothers, gender, family, community, crime and poverty in 17th and 18th century Britain
![Screenshot of the title and abstract for: 'A cordwainer’s wife in high politics: a microhistory of Mrs Caute'
Abstract: This article introduces a hitherto unstudied pair of seventeenth-century texts, by the cordwainer’s wife Sarah Caute, which exercised political influence at the highest levels. Caute relates how in 1683–4, whilst in London, she experienced a sudden desire for herself and her six-year-old son Mathew to be baptised by Thomas Ken (1637–1711), who was then the prebend of Winchester (he would soon, in January 1685, be consecrated Bishop of Bath and Wells). Since he was a year old, Caute narrates, Mathew did not speak or walk and suffered ‘violent fitt[s]’ which ‘took him of his leges and his teeth fell out of his head at the roots…till they were all out’. Caute’s story reached the ears of Charles II and James II; thereby, she participated personally and in absentia in elite negotiations of confessional identity. Caute’s texts challenge the notion that non-elite women’s writing is scarce and of limited political interest.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:44em43qq5kem43otrh3vejy5/bafkreiaaohhvegu3drvayykz5zhcwjwuckc54vtc5c6ozid7zh5kfrozsm)
