Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage

Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage PDF Author: Katja Pilhuj
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9789463722018
Category : Cartography in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In a late 1590s atlas proof from cartographer John Speed, Queen Elizabeth appears, crowned and brandishing a ruler as the map's scale-of-miles. Not just a map key, the queen's depiction here presents her as a powerful arbiter of measurement in her kingdom. For Speed, the queen was a formidable female presence, authoritative, ready to measure any place or person. The atlas, finished during James' reign, later omitted her picture. But this disappearance did not mean Elizabeth vanished entirely; her image and her connection to geography appear in multiple plays and maps. Elizabeth becomes, like the ruler she holds, an instrument applied and adapted. Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage explores the ways in which mapmakers, playwrights, and audiences in early modern England could, following their queen's example, use the ideas of geography, or 'world-writing', to reshape the symbolic import of the female body and territory to create new identities. The book demonstrates how early modern mapmakers and dramatists -- men and women -- conceived of and constructed identities within a discourse of fluid ideas about space and gender.

Travel and Travail

Travel and Travail PDF Author: Patricia Akhimie
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149621031X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women’s travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as “an absent presence.” The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.

The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern Stage

The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern Stage PDF Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.

Women In Early Modern England, 1500-1700

Women In Early Modern England, 1500-1700 PDF Author: Jacqueline Eales
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135367728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
This concise introduction provides an overview of the state of research on women's history in the early modern period. It emcompasses a guide to the historiography, an assessment of the major debates, and information about the varied sources available for women's history in this period. Arranged around familiar themes - the family, work, religion, education - the book presents a comprehensive survey of the social, economic and political position of women in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage PDF Author: Asuka Kimura
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance PDF Author: Deanne Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350343218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor. Whereas previous histories of the actress begin with the Restoration, this book demonstrates that the girl is actually a well-documented category of performer and a key participant in the drama of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It explores evidence of the girl actor in archival records of payment, eyewitness accounts, stage directions, paintings, and in the plays and masques that were explicitly composed for girls, and, in some cases, by them. Contradicting previous scholarly assumptions about the early modern stage as male-dominated, this evidence reveals girls' participation in medieval religious drama, Tudor civic pageants and royal entries, Elizabethan country house entertainments, and Stuart court and household masques. This book situates its historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including girls as singers, translators and authors. By examining the impact of the girl actor on constructions of girlhood in the work of Shakespeare – whose girl characters register and evoke the power of the performing girl – Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls' dramatic, musical and literary performances actively shaped medieval and early modern culture. It shows how the active presence and participation of girls shaped medieval and Renaissance culture, and it reveals how some of its best-known literary and dramatic texts address, represent, and reflect upon girl children, not as an imagined ideal, but as a lived reality.

Re-imagining Western European Geography in English Renaissance Drama

Re-imagining Western European Geography in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: M. Matei-Chesnoiu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137029331
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Matei-Chesnoiu examines the changing understanding of world geography in sixteenth-century England and the concomitant involvement of the London theatre in shaping a new perception of Western European space. Fresh readings are offered of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, Massinger, Marston, and others.

A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World

A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World PDF Author: Iain Ferris
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803277823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This study considers the relationship between geography and power in the Roman world, most particularly the visualisation of geographical knowledge in myriad forms of geography products: geographical treatises, histories, poems, personifications, landscape representations, images of barbarian peoples, maps, itineraries, and imported foodstuffs.

Mothers and meaning on the early modern English stage

Mothers and meaning on the early modern English stage PDF Author: Felicity Dunworth
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847796931
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Mothers and meaning on the early modern English stage is a study of the dramatised mother figure in English drama from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. It explores a range of genres: moralities, histories, romantic comedies, city comedies, domestic tragedies, high tragedies, romances and melodrama and includes close readings of plays by such diverse dramatists as Udall, Bale, Phillip, Legge, Kyd, Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. The study is enriched by reference to religious, political and literary discourses of the period, from Reformation and counter-Reformation polemic to midwifery manuals and Mother’s Legacies, the political rhetoric of Mary I, Elizabeth I and James VI, reported gallows confessions of mother convicts and Puritan conduct books. It thus offers scholars of literature, drama, art and history a unique opportunity to consider the literary, visual and rhetorical representation of motherhood in the context of a discussion of familiar and less familiar dramatic texts.

Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature

Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Paul D. Stegner
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113755861X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.