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

Laurence, Anne (2003). Women using building in seventeenth-century England: a question of sources? Royal Historical Society Transactions, 13 pp. 293–303.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080440103000161

Abstract

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 women's 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.