Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman

Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman PDF Author: Lucinda M. Becker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351946099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This study explores the female experience of death in early modern England. By tracing attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, it advances our understanding of the construction of femininity in the period. Becker illustrates how dying could be a positive event for a woman, and for her mourners, in terms of how it allowed her to be defined, enabled and elevated. The first part of the book gives a cultural and historical overview of death in early modern England, examining the means by which human mortality was confronted, and how the fear of death and dying could be used to uphold the mores of society. Becker explores particularly the female experience of death, and how women used the deathbed as a place of power from which to bestow dying maternal blessings, or leave instructions and advice for their survivors. The second part of the study looks at 'good' and 'bad' female deaths. The author discusses the motivation behind the reporting of the deaths and the veracity of such accounts, and highlights the ways in which they could be used for religious, political and patriarchal purposes. The third section of the book considers how death could, paradoxically, liberate a woman. In this section Becker evaluates the opportunity for female involvement in dying and posthumous rituals, including funeral rites and sermons, commemorative and autobiographical writing and literary legacies. While accounts of dying women largely underpinned the existing patriarchy, the experience of dying allowed some women to express themselves by allowing them to utilise an established male discourse. This opportunity for expression, along with the power of the deathbed, are the focus for this study.

Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman

Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman PDF Author: Lucinda M. Becker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351946099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book

Book Description
This study explores the female experience of death in early modern England. By tracing attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, it advances our understanding of the construction of femininity in the period. Becker illustrates how dying could be a positive event for a woman, and for her mourners, in terms of how it allowed her to be defined, enabled and elevated. The first part of the book gives a cultural and historical overview of death in early modern England, examining the means by which human mortality was confronted, and how the fear of death and dying could be used to uphold the mores of society. Becker explores particularly the female experience of death, and how women used the deathbed as a place of power from which to bestow dying maternal blessings, or leave instructions and advice for their survivors. The second part of the study looks at 'good' and 'bad' female deaths. The author discusses the motivation behind the reporting of the deaths and the veracity of such accounts, and highlights the ways in which they could be used for religious, political and patriarchal purposes. The third section of the book considers how death could, paradoxically, liberate a woman. In this section Becker evaluates the opportunity for female involvement in dying and posthumous rituals, including funeral rites and sermons, commemorative and autobiographical writing and literary legacies. While accounts of dying women largely underpinned the existing patriarchy, the experience of dying allowed some women to express themselves by allowing them to utilise an established male discourse. This opportunity for expression, along with the power of the deathbed, are the focus for this study.

The Early Modern Englishwoman

The Early Modern Englishwoman PDF Author: Betty Travitsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Mary Sidney (1562-1620), Countess of Pembroke, was born into one of England's most prominent literary and political families. She was fluent in at least three languages and was an accomplished translator and poet. Her two translations from the French, A Discourse of Life and Death, by Philippe de Mornay, and Antonius, a TragÅ"die, by Robert Garnier were published together in 1592 by William Ponsonby. That combined volume is reprinted here.

Death and Gender in the Early Modern Period

Death and Gender in the Early Modern Period PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004244468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
IIn premodern Europe, the gender identity of those waiting for Doomsday in their tombs could be reaffirmed, readjusted, or even neutralized. Testimonies of this renegotiation of gender at the encounter with death is detectable in wills, letters envisioning oneself as dead, literary narratives, provisions for burial and memorialization, the laws for the disposal of those executed for heinous crimes and the treatment of human remains as relics.

A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen

A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen PDF Author: Carole Levin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315440709
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 903

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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 of power and agency found in these pages are indeed worth knowing, and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in early modern studies. Rather than using the conventional alphabetical format of the standard biographical encyclopedia, this volume is divided into categories of women. Since many women will fit in more than one category, each woman is placed in the category that best exemplifies her life, and is cross referenced in other appropriate sections. This structure makes the book an interesting read for seasoned scholars of early modern women, while students need not already be familiar with these subjects in order to benefit from the text. Another unusual feature of this reference work is that each entry begins with some incident from the woman’s life that is particularly exciting or significant. Some entries are very brief while others are extensive. Each includes a source listing. The book is well illustrated and liberally sprinkled with quotations of the time either by or about the women in the text.

Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe

Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Andrea Pearson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351872265
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
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. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.

Women and Murder in Early Modern News Pamphlets and Broadside Ballads, 1573-1697

Women and Murder in Early Modern News Pamphlets and Broadside Ballads, 1573-1697 PDF Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351872354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 627

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Book Description
As voyeuristic and prurient as today's tabloid newspapers, early modern crime pamphlets and broadside ballads about women murderers tell of furtive love affairs and domestic poisonings, of battered wives who kill their abusive husbands, and of troubled mothers who murder their children. On first acquaintance, many pamphlets leave an impression of shallow sensationalism yoked to idealised repentance, and for that reason modern critics and historians have often discounted their importance as culturally significant artifacts. This volume presents a selection of over forty texts and is intended to encourage a reconsideration of these views. In his Introductory Note to the volume, Randall Martin discusses the narrative content and social commentary of these ballads, pamphlets and trial reports, and the contribution that they make to the discursive construction of the early modern female murderer through their representational strategies and evolving legal and gender contexts.

Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts

Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts PDF Author: Arthur F. Marotti
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814339565
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
In Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions, editors Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt present thirteen essays that examine the complex religious culture of early modern England. Emphasizing particularly the marginalized discourses of Catholicism and Judaism in mainstream English Protestant culture, the authors highlight the instability of an official religious order that was troubled not only by religious heterodoxy but also by feminist and secular challenges. North American and Israeli scholars present essays on a wide range of subjects all assumed to be "marginal" but which in a real sense were central to the religious and cultural life of the Protestant English nation. Using critical methods ranging from historical analysis, deconstruction, feminist inquiry, and intertextual interpretation to pedagogical experimentation, contributors offer analyses in five sections: Minority Catholic Culture, Figuring the Jew, Hebraism and the Bible, Women and Religion, and Religion and Secularization. Essays reveal new aspects of familiar texts such as Shakespeare's King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, the psalm translations by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, Christopher Marlowe's dramas, George Herbert's poetry, Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, and John Milton's Samson Agonistes. They also call attention to works such as the mid-sixteenth-century play The Historie of Jacob and Esau, William Blundell's Catholic antiquarian writing, the series of paintings portraying the religious institute of Mary Ward, and funeral sermons for religiously active women. Contributors show that we cannot understand a culture without attending to its repressed, marginalized, and unacknowledged elements. Scholars of religious, literary, and cultural history will enjoy this illuminating collection.

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.

Early Modern English Lives

Early Modern English Lives PDF Author: Ronald Bedford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351942409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
How did early modern English people write about themselves, and how do we listen to their voices four centuries later? The authors of Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500-1660 argue that identity is depicted through complex, subtle, and often contradictory social interactions and literary forms. Diaries, letters, daily spiritual reckonings, household journals, travel journals, accounts of warfare, incidental meditations on the nature of time, death and self-reflection, as well as life stories themselves: these are just some of the texts that allow us to address the social and historical conditions that influenced early modern self-writing. The texts explored in Early Modern English Lives do not automatically speak to our familiar patterns of introspection and self-inquiry. Often formal, highly metaphorical and emotionally restrained, they are very different in both tone and purpose from the autobiographies that crowd bookshelves today. Does the lack of emotional description suggest that complex emotions themselves, in all the depth and variety that we now understand (and expect of) them, are a relatively modern phenomenon? This is one of the questions addressed by Early Modern English Lives. The authors bring to our attention the kinds of rhetorical and generic features of early modern self-representation that can help us to appreciate people living four hundred years ago as the complicated, composite figures they were: people whose expression of identity involved an elaborate interplay of roles and discourses, and for whom the notion of privacy itself was a wholly different phenomenon.

Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World PDF Author: Lori Jones
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1914049098
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Juxtaposing and interlacing similarities and differences across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions, the collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease.