Laura Gowing

Laura Gowing is professor of women’s history and early modern history at King's College London. She received her PhD from Royal Holloway, London, supervised by Lyndal Roper, where she was subsequently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. She lectured at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Essex before King’s, and is a member of the editorial board of History Workshop Journal. Gowing was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.

Research

Gowing's research relates to early modern England, women, gender, the body, sexuality, crime, and London. Much of her work uses legal records as a source for the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women, with a particular focus on language and the body. Her first book Domestic Dangers revealed high numbers of London women litigating and testifying about sex and marriage, arguing for a 'language of insult' that defined women through sexual reputation, and demonstrating women’s authoritative use of the law. In Common Bodies, Gowing recaptured the bodily experiences of ordinary women, critiquing the approaches of Thomas W. Laqueur and Michel Foucault to the history of the body in the early modern period in a book that was positively reviewed in The Guardian.

Selected publications

Ingenious Trade, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
"The manner of submission: gender and demeanour in 17th century London", Cultural and Social History 10:1.
Gender Relations in Early Modern England,
"Women’s bodies and the making of sex in seventeenth-century England", Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37: 4, pp. 813–822. ISSN 0097-9740.
"The politics of women's friendship in early modern England", in Gowing, Hunter and Rubin, 2005, Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe 1300-1800, pp. 131–149 .
Common bodies : women, touch and power in seventeenth-century England. New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 2003.
Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.