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A cordwainer’s wife in high politics: a microhistory of Mrs Caute*
The Seventeenth Century, Volume: 40, Issue: 3, Pages: 511 - 529
Swansea University Author:
Laura Seymour
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DOI (Published version): 10.1080/0268117x.2025.2477132
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 hersix-year-old son Mathew to...
| Published in: | The Seventeenth Century |
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| ISSN: | 0268-117X 2050-4616 |
| Published: |
Informa UK Limited
2025
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa69304 |
| 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 hersix-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 andsuffered ‘violent fitt[s]’ which ‘took him of his leges and his teeth fellout of his head at the roots. . .till they were all out’. Caute’s storyreached 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. |
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| Keywords: |
women’s writing; winchester; restoration; disability |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Funders: |
Research funded by Leverhulme Trust award (held by PI Susan Wiseman at Birkbeck University of London) |
| Issue: |
3 |
| Start Page: |
511 |
| End Page: |
529 |