Anne Laurence

Women investors, 'that nasty south sea affair' and the rage to speculate in early eighteenth-century England

Abstract The excursions of the five unmarried Hastings sisters and their widowed friend Jane Bonnell into the stock market show how changes in the availability of credit and the services offered by banks in the early eighteenth century had an impact on ordinary citizens. At the time of the South Sea Bubble all six bought South Sea shares through their bank. But their trading activities and investment strategies differed and had different outcomes, showing there are no easy associations between gender and ideas of risk or safe investment.

The Emergence of a Private Clientele for Banks in the Early Eighteenth Century: Hoare's Bank and Some Women Customers

The records of Hoares Bank and the correspondence of six of its women customers show how these women started to use the new banking services both for transferring money and for trading in the stock market. It is clear that alongside their use of the new facilities, older systems of money transfer remained important for customers. Much of the business of the bank and its customers, including their ventures into the stock market, took place within groups of people united by kinship, religion, and politics.

John Bunyan and his England 1628-88

This volume of original essays is designed to be of interest to students not only of Bunyan, but of the history, religion and literature of the seventeenth century

Lady Betty Hastings, Her Half‐sisters, and the South Sea Bubble: family fortunes and strategies 1

This article is concerned with the ways in which Lady Betty Hastings (1682–1739) and her half‐sisters managed their finances in the context of the financial revolution of the early eighteenth century. In particular it is concerned with the involvement of the sisters in the South Sea Bubble and with the ways in which the Hastings sisters’ final dispositions of money and property reflected their sense of kin in different ways according to their situations. The richest of the sisters, Betty, was risk averse; the poorer of the sisters, Anne, Frances and Catherine, had less to lose and were more willing to risk what they had in the emerging financial market. Ann and Frances even borrowed money to buy shares. That their financial affairs are visible at all is because the women were not married. While these women were operating in a new financial dispensation, it is not clear whether their involvement in their finances was genuinely different in spirit from what might have taken place a generation earlier. The correspondence on which this article is based does challenge a feature of the financial revolution of which economists have made much, which is that credit relationships become anonymous in a larger market. It is absolutely clear here that, though the market may have been anonymous, the participation of individuals in it was mediated by close personal relationships.

Women, Godliness and Personal Appearance in Seventeenth‐Century England 1

Women in early modern England were expected in their personal apparance to conform to notions of gender, class and godliness. Women did credit to their husbands and families by presenting a comely appearance in which there was no possibility of confusion as to gender or class. This article explores how the literature of the period tried to manage the paradox of these expectations alongside concerns about vanity, excess and the mutability of fashion. It concludes that even godly women were subject to considerable pressures about dressing and presenting themselves to meet expectations of how they should look rather than the beauty of their souls.

Women using building in seventeenth-century England: a question of sources?

Documentary sources for studying buildings commissioned by women tend to conceal their involvement in building projects. Historians could usefully give greater attention to the formal elements of womens commissions to show how women used buildings and building projects to make statements to a wider world about their wealth, ancestry, social aspirations, taste, religious preferences and their ability to deal with directing builders, managing money and the other practical details that go with building projects. Architectural historians could benefit from an understanding of buildings that do not survive and of buildings which exist in literary works which allow some reconstruction of the spaces occupied by men and women and illuminate their domestic relations.

Woman in her Place: essays on women in pre‐industrial society in honour of Mary Prior

Taylor and Francis RWHR_A_463895.sgm 10.1080/09612021003633861 Women’s History Review 0961-2 25 (pri t)/1747-583X (online) Original rt cle 2 10 & Francis 0 00Ap il 2010 AnneL urence e. .laure ce@ pen ac.uk The articles in this special issue of Women’s History Review were originally collected by Anne Summers and John Shaw as a festschrift for Mary Prior and were presented to her for her eightieth birthday in 2002. Sadly, two of the original contributors have died since then, but their work remains current and is a testimony to the regard in which Mary is held. Mary Prior’s influence on the history of women in early modern Britain has been both pioneering and profound. 1 She has been equally influential in the field of local studies, transforming ways of looking at English local history over the longue durée . She has been prominent among those who have bridged the gap between the heroic early generations of women social and economic historians—Alice Clark, Eileen Power, Ivy Pinchbeck—and the feminist historians of the 1970s onwards. The impact of her writing and scholarship has been felt in Britain and continental Europe, in America and Canada, in Australia and her native New Zealand, and in Japan. The articles presented here celebrate the confluence of women’s history and local history so well represented in Mary Prior’s work, a concern shared with Joan Thirsk,

Lady Betty Hastings (1682–1739): godly patron

Lady Betty Hastings (1682–1739) was extremely well known in her lifetime as a philanthropist, making a speciality of supporting godly causes. It has always been supposed that she made benefactions for religion and education out of her landed wealth. This article explores how she engaged with the stock market to make money for worthy causes and considers how charitable, religious, educational, political and financial concerns came together in the circles of her friends and family.

‘This Sad and Deplorable Condition’: An Attempt towards Recovering an Account of the Sufferings of Northern Clergy Families in the 1640s and 1650s

This essay is concerned with the chronicling of the sufferings and with the economic and psychological plight of the familes of the clergy ejected in the 1640s and 1650s.

Daniel’s Practice: The Daily Round of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England

Book description: For the Christian Church and its members, time is always pressing, both for this life and for the anticipated afterlife. In this life it is precious, to be valued and used; but in reality also misused and abused. The twenty-seven essays in this volume reflect Christian attitudes to time from the period of the early church through to the twentieth century, considering differing views on labour, the role and importance of recreation, the use of time for devotional purposes and preparation for the afterlife, and reactions to its wasting or sinful exploitation.