A Housewife’s Duties A Housewife’s Duties Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Beer and Ale Food Household Management Housewifery Home Remedies Gender Women Education Science Herbal Remedies Medicine Published file. Updated metadata proofed updated author respStmt. Added date, pubPlace, and publisher tags to sources Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Women As Housewives

Almost all women were trained in the many skills necessary to be a housewife in early modern England. Women had to master a range of domestic production skills that encompassed cooking, cleaning, childcare, laundry, gardening, poultry and other animal keeping, dairy management, medicine, cloth-production, sewing, food preservation, candle-making, bee-keeping, and brewing, among others. Wealthier women also supervised servants who assisted with this long list of responsibilities.

John Fitzherbert’s 1525 A Book of Husbandry offers this advice:

When thou art up and ready, then first sweep thy house, dress up thy dish-board, and set all things in good order within thy house; milk thy kine cows, feed thy calves, sile strain up thy milk, take up thy children and array them, and provide for thy husband’s breakfast, dinner, supper, and for thy children and servants, and take thy part with them.

And to ordain organize corn and malt to the mill, to bake and brew withal when need is Thou must make butter and cheese when thou may; serve thy swine, both morning and evening, and give thy pullen fowl meat foodin the morning, and when time of the year cometh, thou must take heed how thy hen, ducks and geese do lay, and to gather up their eggs; and when they wax broody to set them thereas no beasts, swine or other vermin hurt them

And in the beginning of March, or a little before, is time for a wife to make her garden And also in March is time to sow flax and hempand thereof may thou make sheets, board clothes table-cloths, and other such necessaries, and therefore let thy distaff a small staff used in spinning thread to weave into cloth be always ready for a pastime, that thou not be idle

Extensive Responsibility

With his list of activities only half over, it is perhaps with some sympathy that Fitzherbert interrupts his account by remarking that it may fortune sometimes that thou shalt have so many things to do that thou shalt not well know where is best to begin. He continues with advice clearly intended for a farmer’s wife rather than a city dweller: It is a wife’s occupation to winnow sift all manner of corn grain like wheat, not maize, to make malt, wash and wring, to make hay, to shear harvest corn ; and in time of need to help her husband to fill the dung cart, to drive the plough, to load hay, corn and such other. Fitzherbert concludes that: our English housewife must be of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs household business, comfortable in her counsel, and generally skillfull in all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation.

Other writers such as Thomas Tusser published guides for housewives. Tusser’s 1557 book Five-hundred Points of Good Husbandry was expanded in 1573 to include a long section on housewifery was reprinted frequently throughout the period. Many books of household management techniques, which included content such as recipes, advice and prescriptions for home medical treatments, strategies for childrearing, and instructions ordering servants in their work, began to be published in the early modern period. These books perhaps reflect increasing female literacy in the era, a result of the Protestant Reformation.

Key Print Sources Eales, Rebecca. Women in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Routledge, 2005. Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare’s Wife. Harper, 2008. McDonald, Russ. Men and Women: Family, Gender, and Society. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 253–277. Thirsk, Joan. Daily Life in Town and Country. Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin. Oxford University Press, Apr. 2003, pp. 103–113.
Key Online Sources Alchin, L.K. Elizabethan Family Life. Elizabethan Era, https://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-family-life.htm. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023. Best, Michael. The Housewife’s Duties (a Long List). Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/duties.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023. Christensen, Ann C. Words about Women’s Work: The Case of Housewifery in Early Modern England. Early Modern Studies Journal, https://earlymodernstudiesjournal.org/review_articles/words-womens-work-case-housewifery-early-modern-england/. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023. Fitzherbert, John. A Boke of Husbandry. Early English Books Online Text Creation Project, https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A00884.0001.001. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023. Tusser, Thomas. Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A14064.0001.001?view=toc. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025.