Table of Contents

Introduction: households, marketplaces, and neighborhoods; Prescription, anxiety, and acceptance: representations of market women in popular culture; Cooperation and conflict: women, commerce, and the household economy; Traders, hucksters, and creditors: independent tradeswomen and the commerce of early modern towns; Conflicting interests, common interests: female traders, marital status, and town authorities; Women, commerce, and female reputation; When to give and when to gouge: bargaining, neighborliness, and the limits of the moral economy; The potency of women’s words: gossip, slander, and the enforcement of plain dealing; Women, protest, and marketplace politics; Conclusion: to ‘runneth & raveth’ after markets; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author

Dr David Pennington is an assistant professor of history at Webster University, St. Louis, where he teaches courses on early modern British history, early modern European history, world history, and women’s and gender history. His research focuses on how people in early modern England responded and adapted to economic change and commercialization. He has published peer-reviewed articles on the economic ideology of seventeenth-century members of Parliament, hucksters and the local politics of provision, and popular attitudes towards women’s participation in commerce.