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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.

Features essays by scholars in the field of early modern studies on the possibilities of feminist criticism and theory. This book responds to anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline by attending to, instead of ignoring debates and differences that have emerged in light of scholarly work on race, affect, and sexuality.

Though recent scholarship has focused both on motherhood and on romance literature in early modern England, until now, no full length volume has addressed the notable intersections between the two topics. This collection contributes to the scholarly investigation of maternity in early modern England by scrutinizing romance narratives in various forms, considering motherhood not as it was actually lived, but as it was figured in the fantasy world of romance by authors ranging from Edmund Spenser to Margaret Cavendish. Contributors explore the traditional association between romance and women, both as readers of fiction and as tellers of ''old wives'' tales,'' as well as the tendency of romance plots, with their emphasis on the family and its reproduction, to foreground matters of maternity. Collectively, the essays in this volume invite reflection on the uses to which Renaissance culture put maternal stereotypes (the virgin mother, the cruel step-dame), as well as the powerful fears and desires that mothers evoke, assuage and sometimes express in the fantasy world of romance.

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.

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.

This text presents a study of the women of the Medici family of republican Florence in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Natalie Tomas critically examines the changing contribution of the women in the Medici family to the eventual success of the Medici regime and their exercise of power within it.

This collection of essays by specialist authors addresses women's activities as patrons and as "patronized" artists over the course of the 18th century. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera; Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin; and the Duchess of Osuna and Goya.

This collection of essays explores why procreative metaphors were so effective for articulating a range of emergent relations within the early English book trade that had been radically transformed by the invention of the printing press.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These essays tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices. By showing that the benefits and the risks of friendship are magnified when gender roles and relations are unsettled, the volume highlights the relevance of early modern friend-making to friendship in the contemporary 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.

Chronicling the history of the Daughters of Charity through the seventeenth century, this study examines how the community's existence outside of convents helped to change the nature of women's religious communities and the early modern Catholic Church. It places the Daughters of Charity within the context of early modern poor relief in France.

Through her analysis of how the seventeenth century salon has been defined and transmitted to posterity, the author illuminates facets of France's collective memory, and the powers that constituted it in the past. The author argues that many women were not only writers, they also served as critics for the literary sphere as a whole.

With a focus on the gender and sibling relations, the essays in this work, explore 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, it considers sibling ties from varied perspectives.

An essay collection examining the relation between text and gender in Spain from a broad geographical, social and cultural perspective across more than 300 years. It focuses on two main themes: gender relations in the shaping of family and community life, and women's authority in spheres of power.

Whereas many studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of widows within society, the essays here consider the distinct relationship between ritual and representation.

Explores how women's participation in publication culture in the period from the introduction of print medium in Paris to the end of the 16th century differed from that of men. The author explores the particular contexts and strategies of the work and focuses on thematic issues.

The author examines the presentation and reception of early modern women's voices as they followed an uncharted pasage into print. In each instance, the writer's decision to launch her story initiates a complex series of responses from different readers.

The life of Marie-Madeline Jodin offers new pespectives on the world of 18th century women, on the feuds and politics of European court theatres and entailing the discovery of an important, previously unknown, French feminist.

Through an examination of the role of nuns and the place of convents in both the spiritual and social landscape, this book analyzes the interaction of gender, religion and society in late medieval and early modern Spain.

The conventional female role in early modern England was governed by male authority figures who could, if need be, decide a woman's fate. This study explores female food refusal during that period linking it to gender, human agency, communal social practices and institutional power.