Gender and Representations of the Female Subject in Early Modern England

Gender and Representations of the Female Subject in Early Modern England PDF Author: Akiko Kusunoki
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137558938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book examines the interactions between social assumptions about womanhood and women's actual voices represented in plays and writings by authors of both genders in Jacobean England, placing the special emphasis on Lady Mary Wroth.

Gender and Representations of the Female Subject in Early Modern England

Gender and Representations of the Female Subject in Early Modern England PDF Author: Akiko Kusunoki
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137558938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book examines the interactions between social assumptions about womanhood and women's actual voices represented in plays and writings by authors of both genders in Jacobean England, placing the special emphasis on Lady Mary Wroth.

Love, Lust, and License in Early Modern England

Love, Lust, and License in Early Modern England PDF Author: Johanna Rickman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351921223
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Focusing on cases of extramarital sex, Johanna Rickman investigates fornication, adultery and bastard bearing among the English nobility during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Since members of the nobility were not generally brought before the ecclesiastical courts, which had jurisdiction over other citizens' sexual offences, Rickman's sources include collections of family papers (primarily letters), state papers, and literary texts (prescriptive manuals, love sonnets, satirical verse, and prose romances), as well as legal documents. Rickman explores how attitudes towards illicit sex varied greatly throughout the period of study, roughly 1560 - 1630. Whole some viewed it as a minor infraction, others, directed by a religious moral code, viewed it as a serious sin. seeks to illuminate the place of noblewomenin early modern aristocratic culture, both as historical subjects (considering personal circumstances) and as a social group (considering social position and status).She argues that two different gender ideals were in operation simultaneously: one primarily religious ideal, which lauded female silence, obedience, and chastity, and another, more secular ideal, which required noblewomen to be beautiful, witty, brave, and receptive to the games of courtly love.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture

Lying in Early Modern English Culture PDF Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192506595
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns PDF Author: Valerie Traub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
What do we know about early modern sex, and how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? In Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history. Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge. Based on the premise that producing sexual knowledge is difficult because sex itself is often inscrutable, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns leverages the notions of opacity and impasse to explore barriers to knowledge about sex in the past. Traub argues that the obstacles in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality. She also argues that these impediments themselves can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography: sex may be good to think with, not because it permits us access but because it doesn't.

England and Spain in the Early Modern Era

England and Spain in the Early Modern Era PDF Author: Óscar Alfredo Ruiz Fernández
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350133434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The early 17th century was a time of great literature the era of Cervantes and Shakespeare but also of international tension and heightened diplomacy. This book looks at the relations between Spain under Philip III and Philip IV and England under James I in the period 1603-1625. It examines the essential issues that established the framework for diplomatic relations between the two states, looking not only at questions of war and peace, but also of trade and piracy. Óscar Alfredo Ruiz Fernández expertly argues that the diplomatic relationship was vital to the strategic interests of both powers and also played a highly significant role in the domestic agendas of each country. Based on Spanish and English archival sources, England and Spain in the Early Modern Era provides, for the first time, a clear picture of diplomacy between England and Spain in the early modern era.

Elizabeth I and Her Circle

Elizabeth I and Her Circle PDF Author: Susan Doran
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191033561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This is the inside story of Elizabeth I's inner circle and the crucial human relationships which lay at the heart of her personal and political life. Using a wide range of original sources -- including private letters, portraits, verse, drama, and state papers -- Susan Doran provides a vivid and often dramatic account of political life in Elizabethan England and the queen at its centre, offering a deeper insight into Elizabeth's emotional and political conduct -- and challenging many of the popular myths that have grown up around her. It is a story replete with fascinating questions. What was the true nature of Elizabeth's relationship with her father, Henry VIII, especially after his execution of her mother? What was the influence of her step-mothers on Elizabeth's education and religious beliefs? How close was she really to her half-brother Edward VI -- and were relations with her half-sister Mary really as poisonous as is popularly assumed? And what of her relationship with her Stewart cousins, most famously with Mary Queen of Scots, executed on Elizabeth's orders in 1587, but also with Mary's son James VI of Scotland, later to succeed Elizabeth as her chosen successor? Elizabeth's relations with her family were crucial, but almost as crucial were her relations with her courtiers and her councillors (her 'men of business'). Here again, the story unravels a host of fascinating questions. Was the queen really sexually jealous of her maids of honour? What does her long and intimate relationship with the Earl of Leicester reveal about her character, personality, and attitude to marriage? What can the fall of Essex tell us about Elizabeth's political management in the final years of her reign? And what was the true nature of her personal and political relationship with influential and long-serving councillors such as the Cecils and Sir Francis Walsingham?

Family and Feuding at the Court of James I

Family and Feuding at the Court of James I PDF Author: Johanna Luthman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192865781
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In early 1618, Anne Cecil (nee Lake), Lady Roos, accused Frances Cecil, countess of Exeter, of having committed adultery and incest with her husband, the countess's step grandson, William Cecil, Lord Roos. The countess had attempted to poison her twice, first with a poisoned enema, and later with a poisoned syrup of roses. With the help of the countess, Lord Roos secretively fled England for Catholic Italy, leaving his wife and family behind. Now, the murderous countess was again planning to poison Lady Roos, and perhaps also her father, Sir Thomas Lake, the king's Secretary of State. The countess vehemently denied these sensational charges, fell on her knees before the king, and asked for justice and restoration of her damaged honour. The accusations and the countess's defence quickly became a public scandal. The king and council investigated and ordered the matter be solved in the Court of Star Chamber. The Lake and Cecil families promptly sued and counter-sued each other for slander. The trials attracted much attention, not least because Lake's position as Secretary hung in the balance, and because King James decided to emulate the Biblical King Solomon and sit as a judge himself. While the feud and entangled scandals make for sensational reading, they also offer unexplored windows into the culture, society, and politics of Jacobean England. These were events with resounding reverberations and profound impacts on the Jacobean court, involving both its domestic and foreign spheres. Here Johanna Luthman scrutinises the scandals in detail for the first time. Employing a diverse range of methodologies and critical lenses, including those from the history of medicine and gender, and an analysis of several court cases that have not yet been studied, Luthman demonstrates the importance of incorporating the history of these scandals into an understanding of complex and fraught world of the court of King James VI. In so doing, the book offers new perspectives from which to understand the period, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in Jacobean history, as well as the history of gender, family, medicine, and scandal more generally.

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici PDF Author: Una McIlvenna
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317059328
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron', the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress's own Machiavellian purposes. Branded a 'cabal of cuckoldry' by a contemporary critic, these women were involved in scandals that have encouraged a perception, which continues in much academic literature, of the late Valois court as debauched and corrupt. Rather than trying to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, Una McIlvenna here focuses on representations of the scandals in popular culture and print, and on the collective portrayal of the women in the libelous and often pornographic literature that circulated information about the court. She traces the origins of this material to the all-male intellectual elite of the parlementaires: lawyers and magistrates who expressed their disapproval of Catherine's political and religious decisions through misogynist pamphlets and verse that targeted the women of her entourage. Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici reveals accusations of poisoning and incest to be literary tropes within a tradition of female defamation dating to classical times that encouraged a collective and universalizing notion of women as sexually voracious, duplicitous and, ultimately, dangerous. In its focus on manuscript and early print culture, and on the transition from a world of orality to one dominated by literacy and textuality, this study has relevance for scholars of literary history, particularly those interested in pamphlet and libel culture.

White People in Shakespeare

White People in Shakespeare PDF Author: Arthur L. Little, Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350283657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a 'white people' and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity? Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeare's work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture. Featuring contributors from a wide range of disciplines, the collection moves across Shakespeare's plays and poetry and between the early modern and our own time to interrogate these relationships. Split into two parts, 'Shakespeare's White People' and 'White People's Shakespeare', it explores a variety of topics, ranging from the education of the white self in Hamlet, or affective piety and racial violence in Measure for Measure, to Shakespearean education and the civil rights era, and interpretations of whiteness in more contemporary work such as American Moor and Desdemona.

Essex

Essex PDF Author: Annaliese Connolly
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526110989
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
This collection of new essays about the earl of Essex, one of the most important figures of the Elizabethan court, resituates his life and career within the richly diverse contours of his cultural and political milieu. It identifies the ways in which his biography has been variously interpreted both during his own lifetime and since his death in 1601. Collectively, the essays examine a wealth of diverse visual and textual manifestations of Essex: poems, portraits, films; texts produced by Essex himself, including private letters, prose tracts, poems and entertainments; and the transmission and circulation of these as a means of disseminating his political views. As well as prising open long-held assumptions about the earl’s life, the authors provide a diachronic approach to the earl’s career, identifying crucial events such as the Irish campaign and the uprising, and re-evaluating their significance and critical reception. Collectively, the essays illuminate the reach and significance of the many roles played by the earl and the impact of his brief, dazzling life on his contemporaries and on those who came after, making this the first volume to offer a comprehensive critical overview of the Earl's life and influence.