Bøger i Women and Gender in the Early Modern World serien

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.

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.

Considering as evidence literary texts, historical documents and material culture, this study examines the entry into public political culture of women and apprentices in 17th-century England, and their use of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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Judy Kem looks at the writings of Christine de Pizan, Jean Molinet, Symphorien Champier, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and Marguerite de Navarre, examining the role of received medical ideas in the querelle des femmes.

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.

Dealing with critical discussions about gender, sexuality, and material culture in Renaissance England, this study analyzes female- and male-authored lyrics to illuminate how gender and sexuality inflected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets' conceptualization of relations among people and things, human and non-human subjects and objects.

A study that offers readings of the arguments and practices of four seventeenth-century Euro-American women: Anne Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and Marie de l'Incarnation.

Tells the story of how the idea of woman contributed to the emergence of modern science. This study focuses on the contradictory representations of women from roughly the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and depicts this period as one filled with epistemological anxiety and experimentation.

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.

The relation between procreation and authorship, between reproduction and publication, has a long history - indeed, that relationship may well be the very foundation of history itself. The essays in this volume bring into focus a remarkably important and complex phase of this long history. In this volume, some of the most renowned scholars in the field persuasively demonstrate that during the early modern period, the awkward, incomplete transition from manuscript to print brought on by the invention of the printing press temporarily exposed and disturbed the epistemic foundations of English culture. As a result of this cultural upheaval, the discursive field of parenting was profoundly transformed. Through an examination of the literature of the period, this volume illuminates how many important conceptual systems related to gender, sexuality, human reproduction, legitimacy, maternity, kinship, paternity, dynasty, inheritance, and patriarchal authority came to be grounded in a range of anxieties and concerns directly linked to an emergent publishing industry and book trade. In exploring a wide spectrum of historical and cultural artifacts produced during the convergence of human and mechanical reproduction, of parenting and printing, these essays necessarily bring together two of the most vital critical paradigms available to scholars today: gender studies and the history of the book. Not only does this rare interdisciplinary coupling generate fresh and exciting insights into the literary and cultural production of the early modern period but it also greatly enriches the two critical paradigms themselves.

While the relationships between parents and children have long been a staple of critical inquiry, bonds between siblings have received far less attention among early modern scholars. Indeed, until now, no single volume has focused specifically on relations between brothers and sisters during the early modern period, nor do many essays or monographs address the topic. The essays in Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World focus attention on this neglected area, exploring the sibling dynamics that shaped family relations from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries in Italy, England, France, Spain, and Germany. Using an array of feminist and cultural studies approaches, prominent scholars consider sibling ties from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including art history, musicology, literary studies, and social history. By articulating some of the underlying paradigms according to which sibling relations were constructed, the collection seeks to stimulate further scholarly research and critical inquiry into this fruitful area of early modern cultural studies.

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.

In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women's alliances in early modern Europe. This volume expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women's political alliances.

Drawing on art history, literary studies and social history, the essays in this volume explore a range of intersections between gender and constructions of childhood in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, England, France and Spain. The essays are grouped around the themes of celebration and loss, education and social training, growing up and growing old. Contributors grapple with ways in which constructions of childhood were inflected by considerations of gender throughout the early modern world. In so doing, they examine representations of children and childhood in a range of sources from the period, from paintings and poetry to legal records and personal correspondence. The volume sheds light on some of the ways in which, in the relations between Renaissance children and their parents and peers, gender mattered. Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood enriches our understanding of individual children and the nature of familial relations in the early modern period, as well as of the relevance of gender to constructions of self and society.

An important contribution to growing scholarship on women''s participation in literary cultures, this essay collection concentrates on cross-national communities of letters to offer a comparative and international approach to early modern women''s writing. The essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures from several countries, ranging from Italy and France to the Low Countries and England. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers; the collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and exploring familial, political, and religious communities. Taken together, these essays offer fresh ways of reading early modern women''s writing that consider such issues as the changing cultural geographies of the early modern world, women''s bilingualism and multilingualism, and women''s sense of identity mediated by local, regional, national, and transnational affiliations and conflicts.

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.

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.

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.

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture.

Examines the gendered nature of women's letter-writing in England and Ireland from the late-Elizabethan period through to the Restoration. This title builds upon recent approaches to the letter, both rhetorical and material, that have the power to transform the ways in which we understand, study and more.