The records of the consistory court of early modern London have emerged in recent scholarship as a rich source for the lives of ordinary people; and they are especially informative about women, who brought cases to this court in large numbers. Dealing with the small-scale disturbances of the local community — defamation, neighborhood disputes, problems of love and marriage — the court provided women with a space in which to defend their reputations or their rights without requiring huge financial resources or legal knowledge. Many cases never came to a formal conclusion, serving more to air and resolve grievances than to achieve judgment and penalty. But the witness statements gathered in the process record both basic personal information (age, place of birth, marital status, work) and their testimonies (what happened, who said what, where they were at the time). The archive teems with stories of everyday life.

This is the material Eleanor Hubbard draws on in City Women to present a strikingly vivid and evocative picture of the lives of London women from girlhood to old age. Many London women began life elsewhere, coming to London in their teens. The book follows them as they attempt to establish themselves: finding work; saving money; hoping for stable, solvent, and ideally loving marriages; and arguing over the precise significance of gifts exchanged and words spoken in order to hold a man to a promise of marriage or extricate themselves from one. After marriage, in the crowded alleyways where leatherworkers, fishmongers, washerwomen, and seamstresses lived side by side, arguments erupt and insults are exchanged; couples fight and reconcile, maidservants and apprentices are impertinent, promises are broken, debts unpaid, infidelity suspected; all these conflicts find their way into Hubbard’s account. But in addition to the matter of disputes, the stories told in the court records illuminate a far wider range of activities, and Hubbard uses this material to build up a detailed and fascinating account of women’s lives, as maidservants, mistresses, mothers, working women, and in old age, exploring their ambitions and desires, what they took pride in and what they hoped to avoid (destitution, above all).

These records were studied some years ago by Laura Gowing, whose book Domestic Dangers (1996), covers some very similar ground, and it is perhaps surprising that Hubbard does not explicitly engage with Gowing’s work (although it appears in the odd reference) or clarify the difference in their approaches and interpretations. Gowing’s book focuses on the tensions and grievances that bring people to court, and the language they use, to gain insight into early modern culture and mentalities (in particular relating to gender). Hubbard uses the archives more as windows into the busy streets of the past, trawling for information about working lives, household structures, and family relationships. She also asserts the centrality of economic rather than ideological motivations in the lives of early modern Londoners, arguing that concern for financial and community stability generally trumps gender. Thus a wife’s adultery, however undesirable, was less of a problem for the community than the separation that could leave her dependent on the parish, and efforts are directed to keeping the couple together, rather than sticking to patriarchal principle and insisting that an erring wife should be cast out.

This focus on pragmatism and the importance of communal stability is broadly persuasive, but perhaps less distinctive than she implies. Other historians of early modern women (including Gowing) have emphasized the close links between financial and moral anxieties, as well as the gap between theory as exemplified in the prescriptions of contemporary household books, and practice in women’s actual daily lives. The widespread assertion that good women stayed indoors, for example, did not actually mean that they did so, nor that they were generally regarded as bad wives when they went into the streets. Hubbard herself, indeed, does not seem entirely clear whom she is arguing against. The observation that “we ought not to make the mistake of investigating women’s lives through a narrow lens that excludes everything but gender” (274) would be hard to disagree with; in the absence of any named scholar making this claim, it seems at times that she is attacking straw historians.

Overall, though, this is a rich and fascinating picture of the lives of London women, full of lively vignettes and details, as well as substantive information on patterns of migration, work, and life cycle. It is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of these communities, which brings their fears, hopes, and fortunes vividly to life.