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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.

The female-dominated medical discipline of midwifery in Shakespeare's day led to male-dominated tales of female incompetence and physiological obfuscation. In this study Caroline Bicks shows how Shakespeare pointed to a history of the discipline in which women wielded considerable power.

This volume correlates women's musical endeavors to their lives, offering a glimpse of early modern women from the home, stage, work and convent, from many classes and from culturally diverse countries including France, Spain, Italy, England, Austria, Russia and Mexico. It proves that early modern women did participate in musical activities with enthusiasm, diligence, and success.

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.

By looking in a new way at works of art and acts of patronage, the volume restores to visibility some women who were previously invisible in the historical record, and offers a more nuanced understanding of the place of women and gender in early modern Italy.

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.

Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) commissioned elaborate artistic and architectural works, and collected a dazzling array of clothing, jewelry, and household goods. This book investigates Sforza's cultural endeavors, and explores the ways in which gender, culture, and consumption practices were central to the invention of the self in early modern Italy.

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.

A study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the 17th and 18th centuries, this book explores the correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is driven by conceptual questions, and seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the social production of space.

Captured in Russia at the age of twelve, Hadice Turhan Sultan first served the reigning sultan's mother in Istanbul. She gradually rose through the ranks of the Ottoman harem, bore a male child to Sultan Ibrahim, and came to power as a valide sultan, or queen mother, in 1648. This work examines this historical figure.

Examines the role of occasional verse in the works of the celebrated colonial Mexican nun. This book argues that they hold a particular interest for scholars of colonial Latin American literature. It demonstrates how this body of the famous nun's writings, previously overlooked by scholars.

These essays tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices. By showing that the benefits and the risks of friendship are magnified when gender roles and relations are unsettled, the volume highlights the relevance of early modern friend-making to friendship in the contemporary world.

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.

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.

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.

Through an examination of the role of nuns and the place of convents in both the spiritual and social landscape, this book analyzes the interaction of gender, religion and society in late medieval and early modern Spain.

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.