A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle

“In A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle, Professor Lodine-Chaffey leads readers through the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century’s paradoxical world of women on the scaffold. The book’s many illustrative examples show women who are weak yet divinely empowered. They exhibit culturally endorsed female traits while framing themselves as subjects subverting the theater of death’s ritual. In the gendered execution, they display modesty even as they critique society’s conventions concerning gender roles. And they are often submissive while still establishing limited agency to take partial control of the narratives of their deaths. This study raises the portrayal of women’s executions in such genres as plays, ballads, and poems, with particular attention to the ways in which these events are portrayed in the various genres but with particular attention to newsbooks and pamphlets. Focusing on the role of women’s bodies on the scaffold, where they are transformed into texts to be interpreted, Lodine-Chaffey’s exceptionally well-researched book chronicles the transition of women’s punishments in early modern to eighteenth-century executions.”
—P. J. Klemp, author of The Theatre of Death: Rituals of Justice from the English Civil Wars to the Restoration and senior editor of Milton Quarterly
 

“Lodine-Chaffey skillfully examines descriptions of women executed in Tudor-Stuart England as well as their recorded final words to better understand the execution ritual and its meanings for the accused and the witnesses. She convincingly argues that women who displayed proper early modern feminine virtues, such as modesty, humility, submissiveness, and contrition, received acceptance from their audience and therefore gained a voice, which they could use to question the very gender norms they embodied. Lodine-Chaffey also analyzes the gendering of the ritual itself, deftly addressing the problem that most texts reflect the female experience through a male lens. In addition, she contrasts the experience of women deemed martyrs with those viewed as dangerous criminals, who were compared to witches. As part of this aspect of the study, the author discusses how contemporaries ‘read’ the women’s bodies as texts, searching for signs of redemption or damnation. Ultimately, Lodine-Chaffey posits that the early modern interest in these texts helped generate a deeper concern with women’s fraught societal roles and created a better understanding of why some female criminals might be victims themselves.” Recommended.
—CHOICE