Joseph P. Ward is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History of the University of Mississippi, USA.

"This timely collection of essays by a range of literary and cultural historians deftly explores the multivalent and sometimes conflictive uses of violence in early modern England - a period for which violence was a natural but by no means a transparent form of social expression. Early modern violence spoke volumes but the particular story any one act of violence might tell depended on its various agents, participants, and audience living the historical moment. One ringing refrain of this volume, however, is that violence more often than not told the story of 'the tenuous nature of patriarchal authority in early modern England.'" - Patricia Fumerton, Professor and Director, English Broadside Ballad Archive, Department of English, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Introduction; C.Levin & J.P.Ward PART I: VENERABLE PATRIARCHS/VULNERABLE PATRIARCHS Apprentice Riots in Early Modern London; P.S.Seaver But She Woulde Not Consent': Women's Narratives of Sexual Assault and Compulsion in Early Modern London; C.M.Varholy Writing Rape, Raping Rites: Shakespeare's and Middleton's Lucrece Poems; C.Daileader Eve as Thanatrix: Sabbatarianism and the Republican Politics of Death and Resurrection in Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder; K.Gillespie PART II: GENDER AND STATE VIOLENCE Women, Religious Dissent, and Urban Authority In Early Reformation Norwich; M.C.McClendon Power of the County: Sheriffs and Violence in Early Modern England; M.C.Noonkester Executing the Body Politic: Inscribing State Violence onto Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; S.Miller London's Bridewell: Violence, Prostitution, and Questions of Evidence; M.Mowry 'I will forgive you if the world will': Wife-Murder and the Limits on Patriarchal Violence in London, 1690-1750; J.Hurl-Eamon Afterword; F.E.Dolan