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Throughout seventeenth-century England the widow often appeared a contradictory figure. The social realities of women who had lost their spouses commonly reenforced both the biblical image of the suffering widow and the word's etymological meaning, destitute and desolate.1 While the Old and New Testaments assured early modern contemporaries that divine providence blesses the afflicted, as it did the widow of Zarephath, scriptural passages emphasizing the desolation also led them to conclude that "widowehood is a plague of God vpon the vngodly."2 Municipal and local parish records further suggest isolation and deprivation: women were less likely to remarry than men, and widows depended more than other needy upon poor relief.3 Yet the object of pity and charity was also commonly seen as a threat to male security and patriarchal society.4 Along with their redefined social position and, in some cases, their economic gains from a former marriage, widows were in fact free from constraints that limited other woman. Some, though not all, seemed to enjoy an independence recognized by both their seventeenth-century contemporaries and modern scholars. For the financially secure woman, widowhood may well have been, as Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford contend, "a time of maximum female autonomy."5 Freed from the legal restraints of coverture, which gave the husband control of the property his wife brought to the marriage, the widow in seventeenth-century England was entitled during her lifetime to at least one third of the estate's real property as well as any designated property held in trust; and as an executrix her control of the estate further increased significantly.6 The declining rate of remarriage documented in the century has led scholars to conclude that even less wealthy widows benefited from "female agency in a patriarchal culture."7 The reasons an increasing number of women chose not to remarry are, however, uncertain; and the extent to which widowhood was liberating is debatable.8 Among the seventeenth-century women's diaries, memoirs, and remembrances written after the death of a spouse, the account of Katherine Austen (1628-1683) in particular presents both a conventional and contradictory picture, one that confirms and challenges established impressions of the widow and her daily lot.
In a century during which upwards of half the married women would be widowed by the age of fifty,...