This article reconfigures our understanding of female service in early modern England by examining the roles and spaces female servants occupied not only within their employers homes but outside and within the wider community. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to categorise and analyse the spaces in which female servants were recorded in church court depositions from the dioceses of Exeter, Gloucester and Winchester between 1550 and 1650, it argues that female servants were not confined to the domestic sphere either in their work or their social interactions. And further, it shows that female servants' links to the wider community gave them power and agency – limited perhaps, but significant nonetheless ‐ in their dealings with their employers.

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This article demonstrates, using evidence from church court depositions, that women's experience of service in early modern England was more varied than scholarship suggests. Moving beyond its conception as a life-cycle annual occupation, the article situates service within individual life-stories. It argues firstly, that service extended across the whole of women's working lives and secondly, that employment arrangements took a wide range of forms. Service for women is shown to have been flexible, varied and contingent, employing a diversity of individuals under a variety of different employment agreements.

is celebrated for many reasons.(1) Not least, it is recognised for its importance in rescuing ecclesiastical courts from previous unfavourable assessments that branded them corrupt and inefficient. By emphasising the achievements of the church courts in upholding accepted standards in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, Ingram paved the way for a burgeoning scholarship over the last few decades of the 'bawdy court' and its records. Importantly, this book also served as a critical study of how sexual behaviour in early modern England was controlled and regulated through ecclesiastical law. The fundamental questions of how, why and to what extent institutions regulated social behaviour in early modern England have remained at the heart of Ingram's work over the last 30 years. Carnal Knowledge: Regulating Sex in England, 1470-1600 represents an important culmination of this work. Ecclesiastical court records of the late 16th and early 17th centuries took centre stage in Ingram's earlier book. Carnal Knowledge sits alongside this work as a 'companion' (p. xi), shifting in chronology back to the late 15th century and adopting a comparative approach that assesses the policing of non-conformist sexual behaviour by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. This book makes a significant and definitive contribution to our understanding of sexual regulation in late medieval and early modern England.

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