Lindsay R. Moore
EDUCATION
2011 Ph.D. The George Washington University
2004 M. A. University of Oklahoma
2001 B. A. Southern Nazarene University
Lindsay Moore is a Lecturer in the Social Sciences Division in the College of General Studies at Boston University. Her current research looks at women’s legal capabilities and the circulation of legal knowledge in England, Massachusetts, and Maryland in the seventeenth century. She is currently working on a book project titled Women, Power, and Litigation in the English Atlantic World, 1630-1700. This project reveals that women who appeared before the courts comprehended their legal rights and privileges, possessed a sound understanding of the legal issues at stake in their cases, and protected their self-interest through legal recourse. Focusing on the causal role played by women in history and how they shaped, interpreted, and negotiated the structures of hierarchy and authority that governed them, this work examines how women initiated legal action as self-directed individuals working for their own benefit and the well-being of those close to them. While female litigants might draw from the advice of male lawyers and family members, their testimonies, petitions, and correspondence make clear that these women were the forces at work in the legal cases in which they were involved. In all, the actions of women before the courts directly challenged seventeenth-century notions of women’s natural passivity.
Moore’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Cosmos Club Foundation, and the North American Conference on British Studies. She has conducted research at the National Archives in London, the London Metropolitan Archives, the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford, England, the Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
She is the author of “Single Women and Sex in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 5, (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, 2010), pp. 223-228.