Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women

This collection, a testament to the work of Hilda L. Smith, confronts orthodoxy in social and cultural, scientific and intellectual, and political and legal traditions, to demonstrate how women of all social classes could challenge the conventional thinking of their time as well as the ways in which they have been traditionally portrayed by scholars. Subjects include women's relationship to guns and gunpowder, the law, religion, public finances, the new science in early modern Europe, and women and indentured servitude in the New World.