Alice Blackwood

Research Topic

"Lytul Maidens", Householding and Wardenship: Changing Perceptions of Female Leadership in English Parishes, 1540–1650

Supervisor: Professor Steven Gunn

For my doctoral research, I am investigating the impact of religious change, urbanisation & migration, and the rise of a market economy on the visibility of women in public life on a local (parochial/manorial & small town) scale. As part of this project, I hope to examine our extant sources critically, with an eye to what we cannot know about women's activity from what survives, and especially with the goal of uncovering all possible motives women had for either being in or staying out of the public eye. We discuss so often what women were allowed to do, but rarely to we attempt to uncover what they actually had reason to or wanted to do. It is my hope that this research on women's local political activities will serve to inspire a larger conversation about how small-scale political microcosms often serve as a test environment for minority groups such as women to have an outsized influence, and how this method of piecemeal change is still relevant in the way we tackle national and international politics today.