This book got finished because the only “spheres” at my house are the plates we spin together. My decidedly present husband, Reagan Miller, and my “three gamesome children,” grown to be sweet teenagers, Wilson, Sam, and Elliot Miller, have endured my absent-presence and supported me in a million ways. Thanks, guys.
This project got started at the University of Illinois. Carol Thomas Neely, my dissertation advisor, has remained a friend and role model, as well as a shrewd reader of everything I’ve written, including at least two earlier drafts of this book. For her steady stream of needful questions conveyed lucidly over email, telephone, and conference breakfasts, she deserves my warmest and most abundant thanks. I was proud to share Carol with Barbara Sebek, my faithful friend, who engages fully in the present moment, and responds rapidly to sundry urgent requests. Lori Humphrey Newcomb is another Illinois compatriot, who has been available on short notice with insight, succor, and chocolate; Lori typed up the inaugural thesis statement of this book in our hotel room at University of Maryland, while we were attending to early modern women.
This work kept going, thanks to my enduring connections with supportive groups and individuals. Lena Cowen Orlin believed in this project for a long, long time, inviting me to present on panels, sharing her work, reading mine, and begetting two Folger Institutes that sharpened my skills, “Shakespeare in Performance,” funded by the NEH, and “Food Histories and Food Theories 1500–1700,” with the indomitable Joan Thirsk. I thank Lena for her faith, hope, and, indeed, charity. My intellectual debt to her is evident on every page. With Lena, Fran Dolan has been an ardent supporter and also a brilliant theorist of all the things I think about a lot, including murdered husbands, household order, and wine. I admire and thank you both.
I appreciate many generous colleagues who have read portions and versions of the book and given me direction: Richmond Barbour, John Bernard, Laura Dodd, Laurie Ellinghausen, Jonathan Gil Harris, Barbara Hodgdon, Jean Howard, Margaret Hunt, Lorna Hutson, Paula McQuade, Joe Messina, Cathy Patterson, Kate Pogue, Duncan Salkeld, Meredith Skura, Amy Tigner, Lyn Tribble, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks. Conferences improved my research, because smart people model the best ways to discuss such topics as women’s alliances, domestic dramas, marriage and markets, economic criticism, foodways, and pirates, to name just a few. Shakespeare Association of America seminars fostered fruitful opportunities for me to connect with Oliver Arnold, Mark Thorton Burnett, Brinda Charry, Katherine Conway, Steve Deng, Lars Engle, Anne Gill, Derrick Higginbotham, William Kerwin, Natasha Korda, Kent Lehnhof, Naomi Conn Liebler, Ania Loomba, Steve Mentz, Niamh O’Leary, Jennifer Panek, Jessica Slights, Katie Stavreva, Leslie Thomson, Mary Trull, and Deborah Uman, among so many other bright lights, some now sadly absent—Janet Adelman, Bernice Kliman, and Sasha Roberts. The late Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS), “Attending to Women in Early Modern Europe,” and the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, aka “The Berks,” advanced my thinking about women’s agency, identity formation, and the gender of “the economy.” I thank especially Michelle Dowd, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Karen Nelson, Allyson Proska, Adele Seeff, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks (again). Ariane Balizet, Liz Bohls, Clarissa Hinajosa, Coppelia Kahn, Naomi Liebler, Mary Beth Rose, and Jessica Slights have been thoughtful and gracious respondents and co-panelists.
I am happy to call the University of Houston my home institution, and happier yet to recognize my debt to accomplished and dedicated colleagues in the Empire Studies Research Collective, the Department of English, and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. For kindly enduring the early modern side of empire: Hosam Aboul-Ela, Margot Backus, Karen Fang, Dave Mazella, Auritro Mujumder, Kavita Singh, Cedric Tolliver, Jen Wingard, and Lauren Zentz. I owe a deep debt to Lynn Voskuil, whose keen eye for argument would give Occam a run for his money; she exemplifies the very best in academic friendship. The UH libraries lent me Lee Hilyer and Jesse Sharpe, whose expertise with Endnote saved me buckets of time. The absolutely invaluable Michael Osborne has been a masterful bibliographer and true friend, who often worked while I slept. The skilled support at UH from George Barr, Fang Fang, Taylor Fayle, Anthony Tello, and Rachel Weisz made it so that I could hear myself think. Phases of research and writing were funded by the University of Houston: the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Limited Grants-in-Aid supported research trips to the Folger; the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program awarded me a Faculty Summer Research Fellowship that paid my salary so that I could pay for child care and write; the Department of English Houstoun Professorship, along with the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Book Completion Grant supported the most recent facets of this project.
I value the many expressions of hospitality and humanity that have nurtured me: the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Kathleen Lynch and Carol Brobeck. Frank Whigham, who hosted me at the University of Texas at Austin twice, where he, his students, and his colleagues were welcoming and thoughtful audiences. Alan Armstrong invited me to God’s country to discuss domesticity in Romeo and Juliet, just when I thought that my own domestic life had sunk my career. My earliest literature teachers taught me Shakespeare, practiced feminism, and exemplified the best of humane learning: Mary McCormick at Lourdes High School in Chicago, and Joe Messina and Mary Ann Klein at Quincy University. I thank my families and friends, whose stamina and curiosity have soldered up separations: my dad, Jack “Whitey” Christensen; my best friend and sister, Kate, who was by my side when I got good news from Nebraska; and my other great siblings Tom and Judy and Connie and Bill; my absolutely dear Iowa in-laws, the Millers, Kieltys, Robys, and Allens, who, along with my stalwart friends ask, ever so gently, about the project: the Attais, Elaine Cali, Julie Paraguirre, Ana Rodrigues, Boone Suffern, Joanna Watson, Maggie White, Patti Zwick, and the Banks Street ladies. Wyndham Bailey, Marlene Bair, Julie Colantonio, Laura Mayo, and Ana Rodrigues kept me calm, and Covenant Church, the best little ecumenical, liberal Baptist congregation in Texas, kept me whole if not holy.
Earlier versions of some chapters appeared previously in print. I thank the readers and editors of that material, and also gratefully acknowledge the permissions to reprint. Portions of “Business, Pleasure, and Household Management in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness,” originally published in Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9, no. 2 (October 1997): 315–40, appear in chapter 3. Chapter 4 revises “Settling House in Middleton’s Women Beware Women” from Comparative Drama 29, no. 4 (1995): 493–518. Chapter 5 contains material from “‘Absent, Weak, or Unserviceable’: The East India Company and the Domestic Economy in The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman’s Honest Wife,” originally printed in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, edited by Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng, 117–36 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The introduction quotes from “Guides to Marriage and ‘Needful Travel’ in Early Modern England,” which originally appeared in Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World, edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks, 271–89 (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2015), along with “Words about Women’s Work: The Case of Housewifery in Early Modern England,” Early Modern Studies Journal (EMSJ), formerly Early English Studies (EES) 6 (2014).
The University of Nebraska Press senior acquisitions editor, Alisa Plant, and her predecessor, Kristen Elias Rowley, along with Ann Baker and Courtney Ochsner, welcomed and encouraged me. I thank them, along with the anonymous and very helpful readers, and Carole Levin and Marguerite Tassi, the Early Modern Cultural Studies Series editors. All these women helped make this a better book. Any lingering weaknesses and errors are mine, and any unthanked people are thanked in my heart.