“I wold wyshe my doings myght be ... secret”: Privacy and the Social Practices of Reading Women’s Letters in Sixteenth-Century England

Recent scholarship has stressed the fluidity of the boundaries between the ‘state’ and the ‘private’, and the ‘public’ and the ‘domestic’.2 Work by feminist historians and literary critics has undermined the binary opposition of ‘separate spheres’—between male political and business spheres, and restricted female domestic spheres in which the household represents the sole locus of women’s lives and experiences-a binary that works to exclude women from male definitions of power and influence.3 Outstanding in this area is Barbara Harris’s important study of aristocratic women in Yorkist and early Tudor England,1 John Gamage to Dorothy Gamage, February 1576, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO) SP46/60/2. An earlier version of this chapter was delivered at the Renaissance MS colloquium held at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, March 2001.