To enjoy social privilege is to risk the loss of that privilege; the threat of that loss brings to the forefront the coerciveness of precaution. Similarly, to reduce the consideration of a person or a character to their marital status—she has a husband or she lacks a husband—leaves the person at a greater risk of being undone by that same category and neglects the dynamic social relations that may prove equally or more central to every day life. Elizabeth Bourne’s marriage to Anthony Bourne placed her in such a precarious position: her identity as a wife provided her with an assumed cultural advantage, but in reality it trapped her in a relationship that caused emotional trauma and threatened her and her children’s economic well-being. Rather than suffer the continued precarity of life as the wife of Anthony Bourne, Elizabeth petitioned the Privy Council in 1582 to request a divorce a mensa et thoro. In the petition she constructs a narrative that reflects a history of adultery, abandonment, and attempted violence. She underlines the need to separate herself and what remains of her estate from her husband. In requesting a legal separation, Elizabeth asserts her right to an identity and life separate from her husband, thereby troubling the imagined ideal of the category of wife; and she defines Anthony as an unfit and intolerable companion, thereby calling into question the infallible position of husband within the early modern household.

—Emily Sherwood, The Graduate Center, CUNY