Welsh Journals

on the position of Tudor bishops' wives, the other on women in the urban economy, taking Oxford between 1500 and 1800 as a case study. Marie B. Rowlands examines in detail a topic whose importance has long been acknowledged in general terms, but which has attracted little close scrutiny, that of recusant women, while Sara Heller Mendelson contributes a wide-ranging study of Stuart women's diaries and occasional memoires. The collection is introduced by an essay by Joan Thirsk, which includes, among other things, a discussion of early women historians, and is rounded off by a check-list of women's publications in the seventeenth century, compiled by Patricia Crawford. All of the essays are well-written, incisive, and soundly based on relevant evidence: they deserve to be widely read, and doubtlessly will be. Obviously, given the nature of the volume, it is inevitable that some of them should lie uneasily together. Those still attached to the old-fashioned notion that class might be a more useful tool of social analysis than gender might find it difficult to relate the experiences of Tudor bishops' wives to aristocratic lady diarists or women from the middling sort or early modern Oxford. Similarly, little by way of a clear pattern of chronological change in women's experience over the period emerges from these essays. Women grew more confident about publishing after 1640, but by that date women recusants had largely been con- fined to a domestic role, although more Oxford women took apprentices as the late- seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progressed. What this all means, however, is that the work of synthesis on the history of women in early modern England is still some way off: Lady Antonia Fraser has not said it all. All of the contributors to this volume are actively working in the field, and it is to be hoped that this volume constitutes the vanguard of a number of essays and books to be written by them and other scholars, from which a synthesis may one day emerge. Inspection of recent numbers of The Welsh History Review suggests that the history of early modern Welsh women is not an overdeveloped field, and it is to be hoped that this collection will encourage work on the subject. Several of the individual topics studied by Prior and her fellow essayists could be approached by parallel Welsh local studies, while a number of other matters (for example, the implementation of English law after the Act of Union on women's property rights or on their status within the family) come readily to mind. Certainly, the implications of this collection go far beyond its main subject area. J. A. SHARPE York RADICAL RELIGION IN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. Edited by J. F. McGregor and B. Reay. Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. 219. £ 19.50. In recent years, volumes of essays on particular historical themes have become an indispensable tool for students. The best examples have served to distil the results of recent research and to present them in a digestible form. 'Radical Religion in the