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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This first critical collection to focus on seventeenth-century women's life writing in a specifically Irish context provides an original perspective on both new and familiar texts. By making Ireland and Irishness the focus of their essays, the contributors resituate women's narratives in a powerful and revealing landscape.

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.

Written by leading scholars in the field, the essays in this book address the relationships between gender and the built environment, specifically architecture, in early modern Europe. In recent years scholars have begun to investigate the ways in which architecture plays a part in the construction of gendered identities. So far the debates have focused on the built environment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the neglect of the early modern period. This book focuses on early modern Europe, a period decisive for our understanding of gender and sexuality. Much excellent scholarship has enhanced our understanding of gender division in early modern Europe, but often this scholarship considers gender in isolation from other vital factors, especially social class. Central to the concerns of this book, therefore, is a consideration of the intersections of gender with social rank. Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe makes a major contribution to the developing analysis of how architecture contributes to the shaping of social relations, especially in relation to gender, in early modern Europe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Looking at the competition and collaboration among different groups of men involved in childbirth, and between men and women, this work demonstrates that arguments about history were as important as arguments about the merits of different designs of forceps.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.