Zooming into 2026
A class will run on a Monday afternoon at 3.00pm (London time) for 1 ½ hours. Please be in the waiting room at least five minutes before the class starts so that you are ready to be admitted into the virtual class room.
The presentation will be recorded and can be viewed for a limited time after the live session (subject to the technology.)
Some Remarkable Women of the Seventeenth Century
The general view was that women should be restricted to the home. Last year theHistory Jar explored the life of Celia Fiennes who clearly hadn’t received the instruction that a woman’s place was entirely domestic. In practice many women were politically or religious involved throughout the century. And of course, more famously during the reign of Charles II there were many women who took to the stage. This class explores some remarkable women of the 17th century – though we shall not be venturing as far as any of the Windsor Beauties this term. Charles II’s mistress’s and the powerful women of his court are, in the main, for another day.
2 February.
Some women of the Jacobean period – Women were expected to be chaste, obedient and silent -this week we will be looking at Lady Ann Clifford, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford and Esther Inglis. It’s a journey that takes from a woman determined to gain her inheritance no matter what the cost via a patron of poets to a woman who earned her living as a calligrapher.
9 February.
Mary Ward, Mary Hooton, Lady Eleanor Davies and the radical religious women of the 17th century. A look at the women whose religious beliefs drove them.
16 February would usually be half term. In order to fit the seven sessions into the block there will be no half term on this occasion. Instead we will explore some of the paintings of women of the seventeenth century to consider what women wore and how fashions changed (excluding the Windsor Beauties).
23 February
Lady Mary Vere and her six daughters. An overview of the female members of the family known as the ‘Fighting Veres’ – The story of women, raised as Puritans, who lived in the shadows of the Thirty Years War and the English Civill War. Elizabeth’s husband was known for his dubious neutrality in the civil war while her sister Anne was married to General Sir Thomas Fairfax.
2 March
Brilliana Harley, Mary Somerset and Charlotte Stanley, Countess of Derby – women who defended their homes during the English Civil War but who were so much more, Mary Somerset is remembered as a gardener while Brilliana is known for her many letters and political insights. The last, left widowed with five children, having taken on Parliament during the war continued to fight them in the court room.
9 March
Lucy Hutchinson, Christina Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Jane Cavendish – Seventeenth century women of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The first wrote a biography of her husband, the second raised her son, ensured his estates remained in tact and was also a member of the Sealed Knot while the third preserved the family silver and a parliamentarian garrison. If there’s time we will also explore other females who worked on behalf of the Sealed Knot.
16 March
Bathsua Makin, Aphra Benn, Alice Thornton and Lady Ann Middleton – A cross section of women taking in mathematics, playing writing and spying and the life of conventionally pious women in Yorkshire.