... which they seemed domed to belong in. The roles of women were limited. This can be a difficult subject to study objectively, as women had few rights in the early modern period. There is the danger of supposing that because women were very much confined to the domestic sphere that they were unhappy, oppressed, and abused by tyrannical husbands. While tyrannical husbands certainly existed, there is no evidence to suggest that they were the norm and that women were generally mistreated and unhappy. Yet in the mid-sixteenth Century there were female queens ruling England, Mary Tudor, her sister Elizabeth and their cousin Mary Queen of Scots. The contention that as women they could not rule was ancillary to wider political and confessional debate between Protestants and Catholics3 The issue here was not just their gender but their religion too. As a woman could they rule England as well as a man, ...

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