1There has been a somewhat steady, though not overwhelming, flow of publications on the history of service and domestic labour since the mid-twentieth century. However, a comprehensive history of female service in early modern England has long been overdue, and Charmian Mansell provides just that. One of the main reasons for the delay lies in the availability of source material and the oft-cited difficulty of finding women, and servants, in the archives. Mansell offers a solution: by basing the study on church court records, specifically witness testimony, large numbers of female servants can be discovered in archival material as participants in the legal process. The court setting required women to give evidence about their working and personal lives, routines, obligations, or finances. With this source basis, the book is able to shed light on many aspects of women’s and servants’ lives, including the structure of their daily work, and their relationships with employers, family, and neighbours. The amount of data allows for representative conclusions without losing sight of the individual.

2This choice of source material naturally directs the investigation towards the legal discourse, an initial hurdle for a study that strives to be comprehensive, and certainly social and economic in nature. Mansell demonstrates awareness of potential limitations and addresses pitfalls throughout. The reader is reminded that depositions were not verbatim records and that legal language obscured women’s actual voices and stories. Nevertheless, Mansell argues convincingly that while individual and unique details may be missing from these records, the depositions “broadly reflect the behaviours, practices, and experiences that were familiar” (p. 14) to these women. This is achieved by comparing quantitative data drawn from a database of “almost 9000 cases, over 15,000 litigants, and more than 27,000 witnesses” (p. 14), and qualitative data that zooms into individual cases and lives. The results of this approach help to mitigate the “flattening effect” (p. 283) that the legal framework inevitably had on the emotions and personalities of the people behind the witness statements. Instead, the study shows “the embeddedness of female servants in communities” (p. 249), and the opportunities as well as limiting factors in a female servant’s life.

3The study shows convincingly how law court documents can be used to illuminate not only disputes and crimes but also the foils against which these problems were evaluated. These foils were shared legal, social, and moral understandings of how society should work and how women fit in. Mansell shows the detail and richness of the source material by discussing not only the cases but also devoting space to clothes, food, financial arrangements, and health. This makes it possible to use the witness testimony beyond the legal context and study early modern women’s lives in the way that contemporaries would have recognised as familiar. Diving into individual cases, the analysis explores women’s working lives as they were actually perceived by servants and employers rather than the regulated, sanitised, versions one might be presented with in early modern labour laws or other prescriptive textual evidence.

4Female Servants in Early Modern England is structured in three parts, each comprising three chapters. The geographical focus is on southern and western England, specifically the counties of Somerset, Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Hampshire. This corresponds with the territories of the five diocesan courts of Bath and Wells, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, and Winchester which provide the data for this analysis. The study covers the timeframe from 1532 to 1649. Part I focuses on who the titular women were and how they appeared in the church court records. Part II delves deeper into these women’s daily lives, how, where, and how long they worked, and what these findings tell us about the nature of early modern domestic labour. Part III widens the analysis to include female servants’ social and geographical communities. The bibliography demonstrates a broad foundation that strengthens the comprehensiveness of the study. The index is helpfully divided into the three categories of subject, person, and place, making it easier to navigate the richness of the data presented.

5Each part balances between the bigger picture of early modern English society and individual people’s experiences. Throughout the nine chapters, Mansell introduces the reader to individual actors through a richness of biographical data and traces how these women and men found themselves recorded in court documents. All chapters provide a compelling mix of in-depth analysis and wider ranging thoughts on women’s relationships, work patterns, and the effect a life of service – as well as an appearance in court – had on individual women’s lives. While many women and men are only mentioned once, some case studies make recurring appearances across chapters, thereby illustrating the many facets of individual cases. Some chapters stand out particularly as they elevate seemingly familiar discourses towards new insights. Chapter 2 (Tracing Lives) explores female servants’ ways of fashioning identity from literacy and personal wealth to marriage prospects. Chapter 6 (Working Lives) answers the question what servants actually did, what kinds of work kept them busy, how they spent their time each day. Chapter 9 (Remembering Service) discusses the ways service was remembered, how labour shaped identities, and how servants, or women who once had been in service, could provide a living household memory. This adds a layer to the research on servants which has rarely been considered. The nature of the source material necessitates some contextual overlap between chapters, such as the sections on hiring in chapters 2 and 4 which perhaps could have benefited from more connection within the overarching structure. However, these are minor details and the study is overall very well-balanced, structured and interconnected.

6The book offers new and comprehensive discussions of many deceptively familiar aspects of early modern life. Additionally, Mansell reevaluates terminology that has long been in use in the history of service and often goes unquestioned. A good example is the treatment of “life-cycle servants”, a term that has often been applied with much more certainty and rigidity than it perhaps deserves. Mansell’s discussion, supported by primary source evidence, shows the limits as well as the flexibility of the concept, thereby proving that early modern life cycles were less prescriptive than we might imagine. Similarly, concepts of mobility are reconsidered as the analysis shows that female servants’ lives were less stationary than perhaps assumed. Mansell rightly criticises the equation of “female service” and “domestic labour”, pointing towards the lack of historical evidence for this terminology, and urges historians to reflect on the way familiar concepts colour historical analysis. Secondary literature is used efficiently to provide context for these discourses without being overbearing and diluting the focus on the source material at hand. Images, tables and graphs accompany the analysis and visualise these reconsidered aspects. For example, the reproduction of women’s marks or signatures in Chapter 2 illustrates the corresponding discussion of women’s literacy levels which were not as closely tied to social rank as one might expect.

7A closer look at the example of Chapter 7 (The Home and Beyond) helps to illustrate Mansell’s approach. Mansell makes good use of her source material to point towards female servants’ presence not only in the home but also in the streets or fields. For instance, if insults were hurled that led to court proceedings, and therefore to witness testimony, “[a]udience, not place, was key” (p. 225). Female servants can be imagined in more places than just the kitchen or a chamber, however, crucially, they “weren’t expected to belong, they were expected to behave” (p. 231, emphasis in original). Power and patriarchial structures determined much of female servants’ lives and Mansell’s evidence suggests convincingly that it determined the lives of masters and mistresses as well. Many female servants were at the receiving end of power abuses, including sexual assault, however, Mansell presents evidence that they also played a role in policing spaces and relations as part of the household. While servants were dependants, they were not living “a shadowy existence” (p. 245). It is one of the book’s shorter chapters, but overall, it shows convincingly that our ideas of “domestic” service are reductive, “anachronistic and misleading” (p. 245). Mansell demonstrates that female servants’ labour was located as much in the home as beyond it. This also meant that female servants’ access to a range of spaces and places invariably shaped their relationships with the people they encountered there.

8The book has the potential to become a staple in the diet of early modern history’s readers. While it is ostensibly about female servants, it offers insights into the wider society of early modern England, of how people, male and female, related to each other as well as to the institutions that structured and governed their lives. The source material’s court setting provides an initial legal context but the analysis shows convincingly the layers of early modern life underneath, ranging from data on milking cows to the understanding of how women and servants related to community and belonging. While the starting point considers legal history, economic and social historians can likewise find a wealth of information here. This makes it interesting to a range of academic readers and useful in research and teaching. For instance, Chapter 3 (Time for Service) could be an accessible addition to undergraduates’ reading lists as it traces the role service played in girls’ and women’s lives and sheds light on female agency and choice in early modern England.