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Leonie James, Love, Madness, and Scandal: The Life of Frances Coke Villiers, Viscountess Purbeck, by Johanna Luthman, The English Historical Review, Volume 133, Issue 564, October 2018, Pages 1310–1312, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cey225
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Extract
While the fields of gender and women’s history continue to flourish for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, unique stories such as that of Frances Coke Villiers (1602–45) have a special part to play in enriching our understanding of the collective female experience through a study of the individual. In nine, relatively short, chronologically organised chapters, Frances Coke Villiers’s life is reconstructed here by Johanna Luthman, through the careful stitching together of archival material with printed primary sources and select secondary literature. The result is a largely engaging narrative of an elite early modern woman, whose path intersected with some of the most prominent legal, political and ecclesiastical careers of Jacobean and Caroline England, but whose turbulent history has almost entirely escaped the attention of modern scholars.
The book opens in August 1598 with a vignette of the funeral of William Cecil (Elizabethan Secretary-of-State and great-grandfather of Coke Villiers) and the first chapter does a good job of charting Frances’ ‘contentious origins’, from her parents’ marriage in late 1598 to the eve of her own wedding in 1617. The colourful account of the toxic union of her parents, Edward Coke, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and the much younger Elizabeth Cecil, Lady Hatton, is not only entertaining but also perhaps explains why their younger daughter did not conform to contemporary expectations of gendered behaviour.
