Bøker i Women and Gender in the Early Modern World-serien

Bringing to light material about early print, early modern gender discourses, and cultural contact between France and England in the revolutionary first phase of English print culture, this book focuses on many early Renaissance verse translations about women, marriage, sex, and gender relations.

The conventional female role in early modern England was governed by male authority figures who could, if need be, decide a woman's fate. This study explores female food refusal during that period linking it to gender, human agency, communal social practices and institutional power.

Considering as evidence literary texts, historical documents and material culture, this study examines the entry into public political culture of women and apprentices in 17th-century England, and their use of discursive and literary forms in advancing an imaginary of political equality.

The author examines the presentation and reception of early modern women's voices as they followed an uncharted pasage into print. In each instance, the writer's decision to launch her story initiates a complex series of responses from different readers.

The life of Marie-Madeline Jodin offers new pespectives on the world of 18th century women, on the feuds and politics of European court theatres and entailing the discovery of an important, previously unknown, French feminist.

Illuminates the relationships between visual culture, faith, and gender in the courtly, monastic, and urban spheres of the early modern Burgundian Netherlands. This book identifies and explores pictorial constructions of masculinity and femininity in regard to the expectations, experiences, and practices of devotion.

In the disciplines of women's studies and French literature Christine de Pizan has inspired intellectual debate. The goal of this book is to outline the political theory of Christine de Pizan and situate her ideas within the history of political ideas in general.

A collection of essays that explore the tensions between shared gender identity and the social differences structuring women's lives. This work considers the possibilities for commonalities and the forces for division between women. The essays contained herein range from the late medieval period to the eighteenth century.

Offering an analysis of the ways in which groups of non-aristocratic women circumvented a number of interdictions against female participation in the pamphlet culture of revolutionary England, this book is primarily a study of female agency. It also provides a more gender-sensitive picture.

Focusing on the century between the introduction of Christianity in Japan by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 1549 and the Japanese government's commitment to the eradication of Christianity in the mid 17th century, this book outlines how women provided leadership in the spread, nurture, and maintenance of the faith through apostolic ministries.

Explores the gender implications of the complex system of household management and public representation in which seventeenth-century Finnish women and men negotiated their positions. This work includes historiographical discussion on the history of witchcraft, on women's and gender history and on early modern social history.

Presents an analysis of normative masculinity in a specific corpus from pre-modern Europe. This text presents a set of questions: Why were early modern readers fascinated by the figure of cuckold? What was his relation to the real world of sexual behavior and gender relations? And, What effect did he have on construction of actual masculinities?

Juxtaposing life writing and romance, this study offers the first book-length exploration of the dynamic and complex relationship between the two genres. Through close analysis of a wide variety of life writings by early modern Englishwomen, Eckerle shows how deeply influenced these women were by the controversial romance genre.

Despite the status of Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) as one of the greatest and most creative poets and musicians of the Italian Renaissance, scholarship on Stampa has been surprisingly scarce and unsystematic. In this volume, scholars from various disciplines employ contrasting methodologies to explore different aspects of Stampäs work. The volume presents a rich introduction to, and interdisciplinary investigation of, Stampäs impact on Renaissance culture.

Documents the extent to which portrayals of women writers, rulers, and leaders in the Hebrew Bible scripted the lives of women in early modern England. Attending to a wide range of writing by Protestant men and women, this work investigates how the cultural requirement for feminine silence informs early modern readings of biblical women's stories.

Focusing on a largely unknown type of popular print culture that developed in the late 1600s - the coffee house periodical - the author offers evidence that the politics of gender, far from being a marginal topic, was an issue of general interest and widespread concern to the early modern reader.

Looking beyond Don Quixote and the popular theater, this study brings together non-canonical works from Spanish and Spanish American colonial writers in diverse genres, to illustrate the multi-faceted possibilities and the cultural limitations of representations of mothers and mothering in this period.

Drawing on art history, literary studies and social history, this title explores a range of intersections between gender and constructions of childhood in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, England, France and Spain. It covers the themes of celebration and loss, education and social training, growing up and growing old.

Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia draws on recent research to underscore the various ways Iberian women influenced and contributed to their communities, engaging with a broader academic discussion of women's agency and cultural impact in the Iberian peninsula.

Though recent scholarship has focused both on motherhood and on romance literature in early modern England, until now, no full length volume has addressed the notable intersections between the two topics. This collection contributes to the scholarly investigation of maternity in early modern England by scrutinizing romance narratives in various forms, considering motherhood not as it was actually lived, but as it was figured in the fantasy world of romance by authors ranging from Edmund Spenser to Margaret Cavendish. Contributors explore the traditional association between romance and women, both as readers of fiction and as tellers of ''old wives'' tales,'' as well as the tendency of romance plots, with their emphasis on the family and its reproduction, to foreground matters of maternity. Collectively, the essays in this volume invite reflection on the uses to which Renaissance culture put maternal stereotypes (the virgin mother, the cruel step-dame), as well as the powerful fears and desires that mothers evoke, assuage and sometimes express in the fantasy world of romance.

Investigating the gender and material culture, this book provides a fresh dimension to Renaissance patronage studies by considering domestic art as opposed to patronage of the fine arts (painting, sculpture and architecture). It looks at women as collectors of precious material goods, organizers of the modern home, and decorators of its interior.

Considering the presence and influence of educated women of letters in Spain and New Spain, this study looks at the life and work of early modern women who advocated by word or example for the education of women. The subjects include such familiar figures as Sor Juana and Santa Teresa de Jesus, and also some less well known women of their time.

Focusing on literary and material networks in early modern England, this book examines the nature of women's wealth, its peculiar laws of transmission and accumulation, and how a world of goods and favors, mothers and daughters was transformed by market culture. It also explores what early modern women might exchange with or leave to each other.

Offers an approach to evaluating the psychological 'loss' of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England by illustrating how, in the wake of Mary's demotion, re-inscriptions of her roles and meanings only proliferated, seizing hold of national imagination and resulting in configurations of masculinity.

Contributing to the growing interest in early modern women and religion, this essay collection advances scholarship by introducing readers to recently recovered or little-studied texts and by offering new paradigms for the analysis of women''s religious literary activities. Contributors underscore the fact that women had complex, multi-dimensional relationships to the religio-political order, acting as activists for specific causes but also departing from confessional norms in creative ways and engaging in intra-as well as extra-confessional conflict. The volume thus includes essays that reflect on the complex dynamics of religious culture itself and that illuminate the importance of women''s engagement with Catholicism throughout the period. The collection also highlights the vitality of neglected intertextual genres such as prayers, meditations, and translations, and it focuses attention on diverse forms of textual production such as literary writing, patronage, epistolary exchanges, public reading, and epitaphs. Collectively, English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 offers a comprehensive treatment of the historical, literary, and methodological issues preoccupying scholars of women and religious writing.