Better a Shrew does a brilliant job of locating female jesting within a network of the social practices that made up the early modern neighborhood.... It is one of those rare scholarly books that combines thorough research in a new field with conclusions that make us reconsider long-held convictions. It will be a potent force in future discussions of both early modern jesting literature and the daily lives of women in the period.
Mary Bly
Renaissance Quarterly
Better a Shrew than a Sheep is an engaging read and sheds much-needed light on the seemingly divergent issues of women's literacy and the culture of jest in early modern England.
Jennifer Money
Women's Studies
Brown's book represents historicist analysis of the best possible kind. Chapters on Merry Wives, on the ale-house, cuckold jokes, female gossip as a way of countering domestic violence, cony-catching pamphlets, and the cultural reverberations around the idea of Patient Griselda fruitfully cross and recross the boundaries of literary and popular culture in early modern England.
Dympna Callaghan
Studies in English Literature
Brown's writing is clear and witty, her mission provocative, and her topic rich with unexpected nuance and variations.... The book is brilliantly structured so that topics discussed early on—such as gossip, neighborhoods, marriage, and horning—return with added significance in later chapters.
Donnalee Dox, Texas A and M University
Prolepsis: The Heidelberg Review of English Studies
While it may be the case that women's place in jesting culture has been overlooked up to this point, this book will assuredly persuade many other scholars to follow the evidentiary trail that Brown has blazed here.
Regina Buccola
Early Theatre
Witty and unruly women are all subjects of discussion in Pamela Allen Brown's engrossing and meticulously researched study of the ways in which women might resist, through jokes and ridicule, the models of virtuous and submissive behavior aimed at them from the pulpit, the theatre and the print-shop.... Tracing the connection between a female comic tradition and popular culture at large, she draws also on the lives of women such as Alice Mustian, contrasting dramas of everyday life with those presented on the stage.
Lucy Munro
Times Literary Supplement