Jenny Kermode is Senior Lecturer in Local History and Director of the MA in Women’s History at the University of Liverpool. Garthine Walker studied history at the University of Liverpool where she is completing a doctoral dissertation on crime, gender and social order in early modern Cheshire. She was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London and is currently lecturing in history at the University of Warwick.

• Notes on contributors, Acknowledgements, 1 Introduction, 2 Language, power, and the law: women's slander litigation in early modern London, 3 Scolding women cucked or washed: a crisis in gender relations in early modern England?, 4 Women, theft and the world of stolen goods, 5 Women, witchcraft and the legal process, 6 Witchcraft and power in early modern England: the case of Margaret Moore, 7 Negotiating for blood money: war widows and the courts in seventeenth-century England, 8 Women, custom and equity in the court of requests, Glossary, Bibliography, Subject index