Bücher von Lisa Vollendorf

In a time when few women in Europe were educated and even fewer spoke out against the status quo, Maria de Zayas (1590-?) published novellas filled with criticism about gender relations. Her best-selling Novelas amorosas (1637) and Desenganos amorosos (1647) explore the pleasures and, more frequently, the perils of sex and marriage. Condemned as lewd, Zayas's work was excised from the literary canon by nineteenth-century scholars. But with the feminist revolution of the 1970s came a renewed interest in her fiction. Zayas's contemporary appeal is easily explained: through graphic images of violence against women and poignant examples of women's exclusion from social justice, she speaks to important issues of our own times.Lisa Vollendorf illuminates this compelling author, using contemporary feminist theory to decipher the nuances of Zayas's complex ideologies. Revealing Zayas as a critical figure in European women's literary history, Vollendorf delineates the strategies and impulses behind early modern feminism.

The ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the lives, places, and stories of women in the Iberian Atlantic between 1500 and 1800. Distinguished contributors such as Ida Altman, Matt D. Childs, and Allyson M. Poska utilize the complexities of gender to understand issues of race, class, family, health, and religious practices in the Atlantic basin. Unlike previous scholarship, which has focused primarily on upper-class and noble women, this book examines the lives of those on the periphery, including free and enslaved Africans, colonized indigenous mothers, and poor Spanish women.Chapters range broadly across time periods and regions of the Atlantic world. The authors explore the lives of Caribbean women in the earliest era of Spanish colonization and gender norms in Spain and its far-flung colonies. They extend the boundaries of the traditional Atlantic by analyzing healing knowledge of indigenous women in Portuguese Goa and kinship bonds among women in Spanish East Texas. Together, these innovative essays rechart the Iberian Atlantic while revealing the widespread impact of women's activities on the emergence of the Iberian Atlantic world.