Doxies and Proxies: Cony Catching Pamphlets and the Crimninalization of Female Labor

• In Event: Reading Pamphlets in Early Modern England

Abstract

At least since Thomas Harmon’s “A Caveat for Common Cursitors” (1566), cony-catching pamphlets have included taxonomies of female criminal types corresponding to and supplementing the portraits of masculine rogues. Recent work on rogue literature has rightly called into question the truth claims of the genre and still found much of historical interest in its account of poverty and crime. This paper is less concerned with the secret professionalized “Fraternity of Vagabonds” than the account of female labor practiced in the open, where women as independent economic agents are systematically recast as bad actors. Cony-catching pamphlets don’t assert that all women practice the same nefarious activities as walking morts or bawdy baskets, et al., nonetheless, the systematic redescription of female work within a framework of fraud and malfeasance both reflects and supports the increasing criminalization of female labor in England in the late 16th century and early 17th century.

Author

• Marina Leslie, Northeastern University