Books in the Women and Gender in the Early Modern World series

Examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. This study traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Focusing on early-modern France, with references to Switzerland and Germany, this work traces the symbolic use of the hermaphrodite across a range of disciplines and domains - medical, alchemical, philosophical, poetic, fictional, and political. It demonstrates how these seemingly disparate realms interacted with each other in this period.

Identifies some 30 works of art that originated from the convent of San Domenico of Pisa. This study examines those objects commissioned for and made by the nuns during the fifteenth century. It offers descriptions of and documentation for the process of patronage as it was practiced by cloistered women, and the making of art in such enclosures.

In this study, the author demonstrates that the related ideologies of anti-Semitism and antifeminism, which stand behind the stereotype of the effeminate Jewish male, emerged in the Renaissance but did not fully take shape and gain dominance within the culture until as late as the 19th century.

Analyzing the artistic patronage of famous and lesser known women of Renaissance Mantua, and introducing patronage paradigms that existed among those women, this title focuses on the social, cultural and religious impact of the cult of female mystics of that city in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

Telltale Women fundamentally reimagines the relationship between the history play and its source material as an intertextual one, presenting evidence for a new narrative about how--and why--these genres disparately chronicle the histories of royal women. Allison Machlis Meyer challenges established perceptions of source study, historiography, and the staging of gender politics in well-known drama by arguing that chronicles and political histories frequently value women''s political interventions and use narrative techniques to invest their voices with authority. Dramatists who used these sources for their history plays thus encountered a historical record that offered surprisingly ample precedents for depicting women''s perspectives and political influence as legitimate, and writers for the commercial theater grappled with such precedents by reshaping source material to create stage representations of royal women that condemned queenship and female power. By tracing how the sanctioning of women''s political participation changes from the narrative page to the dramatic stage, Meyer demonstrates that gender politics in both canonical and noncanonical history plays emerge from playwrights'' intertextual engagements with a rich alternative view of women in the narrative historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Allison Machlis Meyer is an associate professor of English at Seattle University.

Bronwyn Reddan challenges the idealization of fairy-tale romance as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue, the conteuses, used the genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage.

Dutch Golden Age scholar Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded throughout the seventeenth century as the most learned woman of her age. This book features her letters in several languages to the intellectual men and women of her time reveals her interests in theology, philosophy, medicine, literature, numismatics, painting, and more.

Examining innovations in Mary Magdalene imagery-including her dress-in northern art 1430 to 1550, Penny Jolly explores how the saint's widespread popularity drew upon her ability to embody oppositions and embrace a range of paradoxical roles: sinner-prostitute and saint, erotic seductress and holy prophet.

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.

Focuses on the developing gendered tension in gardening that stemmed from a shift from the garden as a means of feeding a family, to the garden as an aesthetic object imbued with status. This book looks at how men and women appropriated aesthetic uses of actual gardening in their poetry, and reveals a parallel gendered tension there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. This book re-configures our understanding of masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood.

Brings to light the significant influence of Boccaccio's text on the representation of classical heroines in Renaissance art. The author demonstrates that "Famous Women" was employed as a guide by patrons and artists to draw the teeth from the challenge of powerful women by co-opting their stories into the service of Italian standards.

Argues that women writers in Revolutionary America viewed civic participation as a key component of the social role of authorship, and used authorship as a means to contribute publicly to the evolving creation of the new nation's political and social identities. This book examines an often overlooked moment in American women's literary history.

A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history. It looks at depictions of reading in women's printed devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, and fiction, as well as manuscripts.

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.

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.