In a culture in which marriage was the desirable norm, and virginity was particularly prized in females, the categories 'virgin' and 'widow' held particular significance. This book investigates the uses of the category 'single woman'. The law gave unmarried women legal rights and responsibilities that were generally withheld from married women. The pervasiveness of religion and the law in people's day-to-day lives led to a complex interplay between moral and economic concerns in how medieval women were seen. As a result they were marked out as 'single women' in very different contexts, and his study reveals the multiplicity of ways in which dominant cultural ideas impacted on them.

• Introduction


• Medieval classification schemes


• Single woman as a category of difference


• 1: Classification in Cultural Context


• Clean maids, true wives, and steadfast widows


• Femmes soles


• Marriage, social change, and the politics of classification


• 2: The Single Woman in a Penitential Discourse


• Penitential discourse, women, and sexual sin


• Fourteen degrees of active lechery


• Seven states of chastity


• 3: The Single Woman in a Fiscal Discourse


• The schedule for the 1379 tax and the classification process


• The Bishop's Lynn poll tax return of 1379


• Widows, daughters, and work


• Thinking with single women


• 4: The Single Woman in Guild Texts


• Single sisters and the guild returns of 1388-9


• Maidens and single men: the register of the guild of the Holy Cross, Stratford-upon-Avon (1406-1535)


• 5: 'Singlewoman' as a Personal Designation


• Early examples of 'singlewoman'


• York's civic records c.1475-c.1540


• From the medieval to the early modern


• Conclusion: Cultural Intersections