Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England

Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England PDF Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England

Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England PDF Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

Female Transgression in Early Modern Britain

Female Transgression in Early Modern Britain PDF Author: Richard Hillman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317135873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Presenting a broad spectrum of reflections on the subject of female transgression in early modern Britain, this volume proposes a richly productive dialogue between literary and historical approaches to the topic. The essays presented here cover a range of ’transgressive’ women: daughters, witches, prostitutes, thieves; mothers/wives/murderers; violence in NW England; violence in Scotland; single mothers; women as (sexual) partners in crime. Contributions illustrate the dynamic relation between fiction and fact that informs literary and socio-historical analysis alike, exploring female transgression as a process, not of crossing fixed boundaries, but of negotiating the epistemological space between representation and documentation.

Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England

Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England PDF Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

Taking Exception to the Law

Taking Exception to the Law PDF Author: Donald Beecher
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442616857
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Taking Exception to the Law explores how a range of early modern English writings responded to injustices perpetrated by legal procedures, discourses, and institutions. From canonical poems and plays to crime pamphlets and educational treatises, the essays engage with the relevance and wide appeal of legal questions in order to understand how literature operated in the early modern period. Justice in its many forms – legal, poetic, divine, natural, and customary – is examined through insightful and innovative analyses of a number of texts, including The Merchant of Venice, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. A major contribution to the growing field of law and literature, this collection offers cultural contexts, interpretive insights, and formal implications for the entire field of English Renaissance culture.

True Relations

True Relations PDF Author: Frances E. Dolan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
In the motley ranks of seventeenth-century print, one often comes upon the title True Relation. Purportedly true relations describe monsters, miracles, disasters, crimes, trials, and apparitions. They also convey discoveries achieved through exploration or experiment. Contemporaries relied on such accounts for access to information even as they distrusted them; scholars today share both their dependency and their doubt. What we take as evidence, Frances E. Dolan argues, often raises more questions than it answers. Although historians have tracked dramatic changes in evidentiary standards and practices in the period, these changes did not solve the problem of how to interpret true relations or ease the reliance on them. The burden remains on readers. Dolan connects early modern debates about textual evidence to recent discussions of the value of seventeenth-century texts as historical evidence. Then as now, she contends, literary techniques of analysis have proven central to staking and assessing truth claims. She addresses the kinds of texts that circulated about three traumatic events—the Gunpowder Plot, witchcraft prosecutions, and the London Fire—and looks at legal depositions, advice literature, and plays as genres of evidence that hover in a space between fact and fiction. Even as doubts linger about their documentary and literary value, scholars rely heavily on them. Confronting and exploring these doubts, Dolan makes a case for owning up to our agency in crafting true relations among the textual fragments that survive.

A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle

A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle PDF Author: Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817321322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
"A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle provides a new perspective on the representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. A significant part of the execution spectacle-one used to assess the victim's proper acceptance of death and godly repentance-was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure that their words on the scaffold held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women's bodies. Drawing on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, this study explores not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance. The reception of women's speeches, Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of accepted female behaviors and words as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society. The first part of this study investigates the early modern execution, including the behavioral expectations for condemned individuals, the medieval tradition that shaped the ritual, and the gender specific ways English authorities legislated and carried out women's executions. Depictions of the female body are the focus of the second part of the book. The executed woman's body, Lodine-Chaffey contends, functioned as a text, scrutinized by witnesses and readers for markers of innocence or guilt. These signs, though, were related not just to early modern ideas about female modesty and weakness, but also to the developing martyrdom tradition, which linked bodies and behavior to inner spiritual states. While many representations of women focused on physical traits and behaviors coded as godly, other accounts highlighted the grotesque and bestial attributes of women deemed unrepentant or evil. Part Three considers the rhetorical strategies used by women and their authors, highlighting the ways that women positioned themselves as stereotypically weak in order to defuse criticism of their speeches and navigate their positions in society, even when awaiting death on the scaffold. The greater focus on the words and bodies of women facing execution during this period, Lodine-Chaffey argues, became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women's roles not just as criminals but as subjects"--

A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen

A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen PDF Author: Carole Levin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315440717
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 661

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Book Description
From the exemplary to the notorious to the obscure, this comprehensive and innovative encyclopedia showcases the worthy women of early modern England. Poets, princesses, or pirates, the women found in these pages are indeed worth knowing and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in the field. The book is well illustrated and liberally sprinkled with quotations either by or about the women in the text.

Debauched, Desperate, Deranged

Debauched, Desperate, Deranged PDF Author: Carolyn A. Conley
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198863039
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book examines the over 1400 trials of women accused of homicide in London from 1674-1913, using trial records as well as newspaper, pamphlets and other media to analyse the changing image of the female killer.

Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Mary Floyd-Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107276845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.

Learning and Literacy in Female Hands, 1520-1698

Learning and Literacy in Female Hands, 1520-1698 PDF Author: Elizabeth Mazzola
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317106725
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Focusing on the unusual learning and schooling of women in early modern England, this study explores how and why women wrote, the myriad forms their alphabets could assume, and the shape which vernacular literacy acquired in their hands. Elizabeth Mazzola argues that early modern women's writings often challenged the lessons of their male teachers, since they were designed to conceal rather than reveal women's learning and schooling. Employed by early modern women with great learning and much art, such difficult or ’resistant’ literacy organized households and administrative offices alike, and transformed the broader history of literacy in the West. Chapters treat writers like Jane Sharp, Anne Southwell, Jane Seager, Martha Moulsworth, Elizabeth Tudor, and Katherine Parr alongside images of women writers presented by Shakespeare and Sidney. Managing women's literacy also concerned early modern statesmen and secretaries, writing masters and grammarians, and Mazzola analyzes how both the emerging vernacular and a developing bureaucratic state were informed by these contests over women's hands.