| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

John Ruston Pagan. Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. 222. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.
John Ruston Pagan's book is a concise and readable study of lust, law, social climbing, and society in seventeenth-century Virginia. These themes overlap and merge in the four legal cases discussed, cases that began with the pregnancy of Anne Orthwood. Twenty-three-year-old Orthwood emigrated from England in 1662 as an indentured servant. In November 1663, she became pregnant with twins, fathered by the nephew of her former master. The situation of a single female servant, seduced with promises of marriage and left pregnant, was not an unusual story in this time and place. What is unusual is that this particular incident, Orthwood's pregnancy, led to four separate but interrelated court cases. The extant documentation permits Pagan to reconstruct the lives of the participants and analyze the transformations of English legal traditions and practice in seventeenth-century Virginia.	1
Pagan notes that case studies are valuable "because they facilitate the exploration of large themes through specific examples" (p. 8). In this book, the four court suits serve as windows into the workings of colonial Virginia social and political life, and "the process by which Virginians created their own legal identity" (p. 10).	. . .

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