rgely on a household level. The noblewoman was as subordinate to men in law and custom as women of humbler station, but a household-based society might thrust her to the fore. The American colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, largely English or English-descended, could scarcely forget that the most notable of post-medieval English monarchs, the great champion of Protestant England, had been Queen Elizabeth I.
It was the rising tide of republicanism, its parliamentary roots reinforced by the example of the classical past, that began to enlarge the (exclusively
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