Bücher der Reihe Women and Gender in the Early Modern World

Through a visually oriented investigation of historical (in)visibility in early modern Italy, this volume includes essays that recover those women-wives, widows, mistresses, the illegitimate - who have been erased from history in modern literature, rendered invisible or obscured by history or scholarship.

Analyzing the artistic patronage of famous and lesser known women of Renaissance Mantua, and introducing patronage paradigms that existed among those women, this title focuses on the social, cultural and religious impact of the cult of female mystics of that city in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

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.

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.

Features essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the possibilities of feminist criticism and theory. This book demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a rethinking of feminist aims, methods, and objects of study at this historical juncture.

Through archival documents, pictorial and historical accounts, literature, and correspondence, as well as cultural artefacts such as paintings, jewellery, and garments, this volume examines the impact of Habsburg royal women in the broader historical, political, and cultural contexts of early modern Europe.

Presents a study of Queen Henrietta Maria and her multi-faceted roles and responsibilities. This collection of essays sheds light on the Queen's various roles - a patron of performing and visual arts with taste and influence comparable to her husband's, and her salient political position between the French and English courts.

Focusing on cases of extramarital sex, this book investigates fornication, adultery and bastard bearing among the English nobility during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. It analyzes the cases of illicit sexuality from historical subjects and as a social group.

Applies tools from across a range of disciplines, including art history, literature, music, gender studies, anthropology, history and religious studies to assess creatively the broad range of sources which inform our understanding of the pre-modern Scottish family.

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. This book dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding.

A contribution to scholarship on women's participation in literary cultures. It focuses on cross-national communities of letters to offer a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing. It also focuses on multiple literatures from several countries, ranging from Italy and France to the Low Countries and England.

Focuses on the developing gendered tension in gardening that stemmed from a shift from the garden as a means of feeding a family, to the garden as an aesthetic object imbued with status. This book looks at how men and women appropriated aesthetic uses of actual gardening in their poetry, and reveals a parallel gendered tension there.

Contributing to the growing interest in early modern women and religion, this essay collection advances scholarship by introducing readers to recovered or little-studied texts and by offering paradigms for the analysis of women's religious literary activities.

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.

Examines the role of occasional verse in the works of the celebrated colonial Mexican nun. This book argues that they hold a particular interest for scholars of colonial Latin American literature. It demonstrates how this body of the famous nun's writings, previously overlooked by scholars.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marriage today is a prime social and legal institution. Historically, it was also the main economic institution. The essays presented here offer a wealth of original research into the economic, social and legal history of marriage in Northern Europe over a 500-year period.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.