ACCORDING TO MY TRUE MEANING: EMOTIONS AND WILL-MAKERS IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND DURING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

Early modern wills have often been dismissed by early modern social historians as sources for individual voice and perspective due to the collaborative nature of their creation and will-makers’ reliance on formulaic language. Historians of emotion, while making excellent use of other types of legal documents, have also left wills underutilized. This theses builds on the work of medieval historians to argue that early modern historians can and should draw on wills to improve understanding of the period’s emotional communities. As public documents written with an emphasis on the "true meaning” of the dying person, people living in seventeenth-century England often used their will to influence or control the future lives of their families and loved ones; how they were remembered by their communities; and to have the last word in disputes. Utilizing a wide variety of methodologies including performance theory, feminist bibliography, and those developed through the study of the history of emotions, this theses shows how emotional content in wills which may require reading along the archival grain may be drawn out and analyzed. Ultimately, it concludes that early modern will-makers included emotional content in their wills in a variety of ways; and that formulaic phrasing and standardized formats in fact assisted in this endeavor.