Bücher der Reihe The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions

Talks about a source of material by and about English nuns living in exile in the Low Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume draws upon several sets of papers, which show that religious women developed an astute system of auto/biographical practice within a protean political situation.

Presents the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts that describes female servants' experiences of work in early modern London. This title shows that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour.

A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman''s experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author''s manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode. The edition will also give a modernized version of the original text. Katharine Hodgkin supplies a substantial introduction that places this autobiography in the context of current scholarship on early modern women, addressing the overarching issues in the field that this text touches upon. In an appendix to the volume, Hodgkin compares the two versions of the text, considering the grounds for the occasional exclusion or substitution of specific words or passages. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England adds an important new dimension to the field of early modern women studies.

This critical edition of two early modern marriage sermons provides an important resource for students and scholars of early modern literature and history, allowing them to experience firsthand the competing and historically layered ideas about marriage that circulated in the wake of the English Reformation. Read in their entirety these sermons, by turns engaging and infuriating, resist easy characterization. The edition includes an extended critical introduction to the sermons. In the introduction Robert Matz offers evidence for a view of post-Reformation marriage advice that neither overstates nor minimizes historical change. He shows that if some earlier scholars exaggerated the break between Protestant and earlier ideas of marriage, so the criticism of this view has sometimes exaggerated the continuities-especially with regard to writing about marriage. The introduction also provides biblical, theological, political and discursive contexts for the sermons, including the place of the sermon in English early modern print culture, biographies of each of the sermon''s authors, and an account of the textual differences among the editions of each sermon. The texts follow the spelling and punctuation of the originals. Annotations are provided to identify references, gloss words with unfamiliar or altered meanings, clarify difficult syntax, and mark variations between editions.

The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts presented here describe female servants'' experiences of work in early modern London. Domestics'' court depositions offer qualitative evidence that female servants were an important support of emergent capitalism in the early modern metropolis. Exposed here are the contractual underpinnings of domestic service for women; the mobility that domestic servants enjoyed; and the concern that this mobility generated in the authorities. Paid domestic work has traditionally been regarded by historians simply as a pre-marital phase of women''s lives. In fact, the depositions in this volume show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour. While some women left service once they married, others relied on domestic positions as an avenue to generating income as life-long single women, as married women, and as widows. Even though they usually lived in poverty, labouring women who worked as servants in London had considerably more agency than has earlier been recognized. Female servants who deposed before London ecclesiastical and parish courts three centuries ago were mostly non-literate. Strikingly, their individual voices are clear and distinct as they present information about their working and personal circumstances.