The personal and the political? Reputation, sex and the power of words

As characterised by an anthropologist, honour represents ‘a nexus between the ideals of a society and their reproduction in the individual through his [sic] aspiration to personify them’.¹ Sexual practices, household and marital relations are explicitly regarded as issues of concern to the whole of society. There may be signs of shifting attitudes in the late seventeenth century: one of the themes in Richard Allestree’s Government of the tongue is a concern with the inappropriate ‘public’ exposure of ‘private crimes’.² They are not, however, reflected in the expanding business of defamation causes. In defamation, the ‘personal’ meets the ‘political’, and distinctions between ‘private’ and ‘public’ are erased. Defamers were censured and made to apologise for their malicious intentions, their lack of ‘charity’, rather than for speaking publicly of sex per se.³ And even where sexual defamation causes represent conflicts between individuals, they reflect the seriousness of contemporaries’ attitudes towards sex and underline the power of words about sexual conduct and ‘dishonesty’.

As has been emphasised in the course of this thesis, a defamation cause demonstrates both the power of defamatory words and their contestability. Sexual defamation cannot, therefore, be taken as a simple, repressive, instrument of moral regulation. It may be seen, however, as an important mechanism in the maintenance of ‘symbolic power’. A woman suing in court over an insult such as ‘whore’ was forcefully rejecting that accusation against herself, but she was accepting, and reinforcing, the ‘symbolic system’ in which the name ‘whore’ carried so much negative force against women.⁴ When a man sued a woman for speaking of his sexual transgressions, he demonstrated his concern for his sexual reputation and benefited from the patriarchal system that named women as deceitful, cunning liars.

It is this that underlines the limitations of the power and influence that women could wield. They could express grievances, exercise perceived moral responsibilities and assert their expectations; they could participate in informal communal sanctions, in circulation of gossip and processes of character-evaluation. But they were always vulnerable to being named and shamed, in terms that were only rarely, or simply not applied to men, for such activities - ‘scold’, ‘gossip’, ‘impudent whore’ - most of all, when they made men the targets of their criticisms. Anonymity and collectivity offered some protection; to be isolated and visible was a particularly vulnerable, powerless, situation. This may provide an additional insight onto the high proportion of married women amongst female plaintiffs, especially given the numbers of male defendants in this sample: however shadowy the husband’s presence and support, it was a male presence, lending an extra degree of authority that would not have been available to a single woman.

It has been a central argument in this thesis that early modern reputation needs to be understood primarily in terms of ‘the household’ rather than simply as a quality of individuals. That does not mean that its meanings were the same for every member of a household; the differences embody those of early modern hierarchies - especially gender and rank. The household was a highly important institution in the complex webs of early modern society, and the most ‘personal’ of all those institutions in a setting where authority was highly ‘personalised’.⁵ In such a context, it is hardly surprising that the most personal relationships between husband and wife could carry such social and political significance, nor that ideas and concerns about sexual relations should mirror ideas about gender relations more generally. Sex was not, could not be, a ‘private’ matter.

Words about sexual dishonour, then, were powerful weapons. They were not the only effective verbal weapons, however, and words about specifically sexual ‘dishonesty’ need to be understood as part of a wider range of dishonouring strategies. We also need to avoid assuming that the sexual components of defamation had an overwhelming, unvarying significance. The emphasis on sex is in part due to the priorities of, and the constraints upon, the church courts, creatively manipulated by those who used this particular legal institution; much work remains to be done on defamation in secular courts. And, as has been stressed throughout this thesis, we should not exaggerate the differences between female and male honour or the strategies by which women or men could be dishonoured. Chastity, with the effects of transgression marked out on the female face and body, was more important for women than for men; but that does not mean that chastity was women’s sole concern or that men (certainly, at least, respectable ‘middling’ men) could be promiscuous without censure.

Defamation tends to disrupt the overly-schematic frameworks of Michel Foucault’s history of sexuality, the supposed transformation from a ‘markedly unitary’ medieval discourse to ‘an explosion of distinct discursivities’ from the eighteenth century.⁶ Moreover, at the centre of defamation is a ‘technique’ for the production of truth that Foucault touched upon and then, unfortunately, neglected in his emphasis on the ‘confessional’: witnessing.⁷ And yet his insistence that models of sexual ‘censorship’ or ‘repression’ are inadequate, offers a number of insights onto the relationships between sex, defamatory linguistic practices and the deployment of power. What kind of discourse on sex and gender is sexual defamation? What kind of knowledge/power is being produced? It is not purely ‘legalistic’ nor ‘popular’; defamation causes were initiated and pursued by individuals, but as historically-situated members of complex social groupings, in a legal forum bound by complex rules. The verbal insults and the ensuing litigation very often need to be placed in the contexts of interpersonal disputes and rivalries; but the power of those insults, both in their content and the ‘modes’ in which they were communicated and contested, the specific choices made by individuals pursuing their concerns, have to be understood within social and cultural systems of belief.

And, even though the scales might be unevenly weighted by gender and rank, these are primarily contests between individuals of similar status, closely balanced ‘credit’, manoeuvring for quite small-scale - but intensely-felt - advantage. The discursive practices of defamation go far beyond those who actually appeared in court; in defamation causes, the ‘neighbourhood’ represents a set of largely anonymous background voices, but nonetheless is crucial for understanding the importance of reputation and individual decisions to litigate. Nevertheless, defamation focuses attention on the broadly ‘middling’ people who were the majority of litigants, and comprised a considerable proportion of the population, though they have often been neglected by historians. It offers crucial insights into understanding their attitudes and experiences, their anxieties and rivalries, that can take us beyond polarised models of homogeneous ‘popular’ and ‘elite’. Defamation is a highly gendered discourse, but it cannot be understood in terms of gender alone. It is a discourse of elusive, shifting balances of multi-faceted differentiation. It is an unstable discourse, a discourse without definitive versions; reputations are ‘on-going’, always being discussed, attacked, defended. And yet it is in many ways a ‘conservative’ discourse. The power of dishonouring words in early modern society depended largely on the manipulation, however creative, of existing structures and beliefs: about order and authority, about women and men, about virtue and vice. The elements and meanings of ‘honesty’ shifted over time, individual ‘credit’ varied; but the importance of ‘name’ and ‘good fame’ endured.