This article explores the distribution of women witnesses in a selection of English church courts between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, in order to assess the extent to which women's participation as witnesses in these jurisdictions might be characterized as a form of legal agency. It shows that women's participation was highly contingent on their marital status and between places and over time and was shaped by the matters in dispute as well as the gender of the litigants for whom they testified. Although poverty did not exclude women witnesses (higher proportions of female witnesses than male claimed to be poor or of limited means), women were more vulnerable than were men to discrediting strategies that cast doubt on their authority in court. Such findings show that the incorporative dimensions of state formation did not deliver new forms of agency to women but depended heavily upon patriarchal norms and constraints.

中文翻译：

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无用的证人？早期现代英格兰的边缘声音和妇女​​的法律代理

本文探讨了 16 世纪中叶至 18 世纪早期英国教会法庭中女性证人的分布情况，以评估女性在这些司法管辖区作为证人参与的程度可能被视为一种法律代理形式。它表明，妇女的参与在很大程度上取决于她们的婚姻状况、地点和时间，并受到争议事项以及她们所代表的诉讼当事人的性别的影响。尽管贫困并不排除女性证人（女性证人的比例高于男性声称贫穷或收入有限），但女性比男性更容易受到质疑她们在法庭上的权威性的抹黑策略的影响。