Bøger i Early Modern Cultural Studies serien

Rori Bloom demonstrates that Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy (1652-1705) and Henriette-Julie de Murat (1670-1716) changed the stakes of the fairy tale: instead of inviting their readers to marvel at the magic that changes rags to riches, they enjoined them to acknowledge the skill that transforms raw materials into beautifully made works of art.

This edited collection explores what trauma-seen through an analytical lens-can reveal about the early modern period and, conversely, what conceptualizations of psychological trauma from the period can tell us about trauma theory itself.

Misanthropoetics explores efforts by Renaissance writers to represent social flight and withdrawal as a fictional escape from the incongruous demands of culture.

Deza and Its Moriscos reframes historiographical debates about the so-called Morisco problem, a defining crisis for early modern Spain, by focusing on the lives and local context of a community that experienced it.

The title Age in Love is taken from Shakespeare's sonnet 138, a poem about an aging male speaker who, by virtue of his entanglement with the dark lady, "vainly" performs the role of "some untutor'd youth." Jacqueline Vanhoutte argues that this pattern of "age in love" pervades Shakespeare's mature works.

An early modern domestic and spiritual memoir, this book depicts the life of Alice Thornton (1626-1707), a complex, contradictory woman caught in the changing fortunes and social realities of the seventeenth century.

Examines New World plants - tobacco, amaranth, guaiacum, and the prickly pear cactus - and their associated Native myths as they moved across the Atlantic and into English literature. Edward McLean Test reinstates the contributions of indigenous peoples to European society, charting an alternative cultural history that explores the associations and assemblages of transatlantic multiplicity.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, and often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fibre.

Courage and Grief illuminates in a nuanced fashion Sweden's involvement in Europe's destructive Thirty Years' War (1618-48). Focusing on the various roles women performed in the bloody and extended conflict, Mary Elizabeth Ailes analyzes how methods of warfare and Swedish society were changing in profound ways. This study considers the experiences of unmarried camp followers and officers' wives as well as peasant women who remained in the countryside during times of conflict and upheaval.Women contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. On campaign they provided support services to armies in the field. On the home front they helped to minimize disruptions incurred within their frayed communities. As increasing numbers of men left to fight overseas, women took over local economic activities and defended their families' interests. Such activities significantly altered the fabric of Swedish society.Examining women's wartime experiences in the Thirty Years' War enhances our understanding of women's roles in society, the nature of female power and authority, and the opportunities and hardships that warfare brought to women's lives.

Research on European food culture has expanded substantially in recent years, telling us more about food preparation, ingredients, feasting and fasting rituals, and the social and cultural connotations of food. At the First Table demonstrates the ways in which early modern Spaniards used food as a mechanism for the performance of social identity.

This analysis of five exemplary domestic plays offers a new approach to the emerging ideology of the private and public, or what Ann C. Christensen terms "the tragedy of the separate spheres". Separation Scenes exposes the intimate and disruptive relationships between the domestic culture and business culture of early modern England.

A work of architectural history, Portrait of an Island explores the material culture and social relations of West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An examination of the built and natural landscape, Portrait of an Island deciphers the material culture involved in the ever-changing relationships among male, female, rich, poor, free, and slave.