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Author: Laurel Amtower
Publisher: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS)
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
"During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, single women in England might occupy one or more categories in accordance with their life stages, lifestyles, and economic status. Under the rubric of the single woman are found widows; well-born 'spinsters' provided for by their families; entrepreneurs; wage earners, many of whom were servants or farm workers; nuns and the handicapped (the latter also often sheltered by the church); unwed mothers; cross-dressers, some of whom may have been lesbians; kept women; and prostitutes. This anthology mirrors the negotiations between the actual life circumstances of women and their ideological constructions on the page and stage. These multivalent negotiations in some ways sustain, in others contradict, the received notion of an increasingly vehement patriarchialism limiting opportunities for women's independence and offering few fictional models of women who found happiness outside marriage. The contributions here are divided between those who discuss the stifling effects of misogyny and those who uncover not only significant pockets of resistance to inequality but also a sheer disregard of misogynous traditions on the part of English institutions as well as individuals. This anthology will be of interest to graduate students and advanced scholars in English medieval and Renaissance studies, including social history and economics, the visual arts, and especially literature." --
Author: Laurel Amtower
Publisher: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS)
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book Here
Book Description
"During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, single women in England might occupy one or more categories in accordance with their life stages, lifestyles, and economic status. Under the rubric of the single woman are found widows; well-born 'spinsters' provided for by their families; entrepreneurs; wage earners, many of whom were servants or farm workers; nuns and the handicapped (the latter also often sheltered by the church); unwed mothers; cross-dressers, some of whom may have been lesbians; kept women; and prostitutes. This anthology mirrors the negotiations between the actual life circumstances of women and their ideological constructions on the page and stage. These multivalent negotiations in some ways sustain, in others contradict, the received notion of an increasingly vehement patriarchialism limiting opportunities for women's independence and offering few fictional models of women who found happiness outside marriage. The contributions here are divided between those who discuss the stifling effects of misogyny and those who uncover not only significant pockets of resistance to inequality but also a sheer disregard of misogynous traditions on the part of English institutions as well as individuals. This anthology will be of interest to graduate students and advanced scholars in English medieval and Renaissance studies, including social history and economics, the visual arts, and especially literature." --
Author: Carole Levin
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803229682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
In Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England, Carole Levin and Robert Bucholz provide a forum for the underexamined, anomalous reigns of queens in history. These regimes, primarily regarded as interruptions to the ?normal? male monarchy, have been examined largely as isolated cases. This interdisciplinary study of queens throughout history examines their connections to one another, their constituents? perceptions of them, and the fallacies of their historical reputations. The contributors consider historical queens as well as fictional, mythic, and biblical queens and how they were represented in medieval and early modern England. They also give modern readers a glimpse into the early modern worldview, particularly regarding order, hierarchy, rulership, property, biology, and the relationship between the sexes. Considering topics as diverse as how Queen Elizabeth?s unmarried status affected the perception of her as a just and merciful queen to a reevaluation of ?good Queen Anne? as more than just an obese, conventional monarch, this volume encourages readers to reexamine previously held assumptions about the role of female monarchs in early modern history.
Author: Amy M. Froide
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199270600
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England investigates a paradox in the history of early modern England: although one third of adult women were never married, these women have remained largely absent from historical scholarship. Amy Froide reintroduces us to the category of difference called marital status and to the significant ways it shaped the life experiences of early modern women. By de-centring marriage as the norm in social, economic, and cultural terms,her book critically refines our current understanding of people's lives in the past and adds to a recent line of scholarship that questions just how common 'traditional' families really were.This book is both a social-economic study of singlewomen and a cultural study of the meanings of singleness in early modern England. It focuses on never-married women in England's provincial towns, and on singlewomen from a broad social spectrum. Covering the entire early modern era, it reveals that this was a time of transition in the history of never-married women. During the sixteenth century life-long singlewomen were largely absent from popular culture, but by the eighteenth century theyhad become a central concern of English society.As the first book of original research to focus on singlewomen on the period, it also illuminates other areas of early modern history. Froide reveals the importance of kinship in the past to women without husbands and children, as well as to widows, widowers, single men, and orphans. Examining the contributions of working and propertied singlewomen, she is able to illustrate the importance of gender and marital status to urban economies and to notions of urban citizenship in the early modernera. Tracing the origins of the spinster and old maid stereotypes she reveals how singlewomen were marginalized as first the victims and then the villains of Protestant English society.
Author: Judith M. Bennett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
When we think about the European past, we tend to imagine villages, towns, and cities populated by conventional families—married couples and their children. Although most people did marry and pass many of their adult years in the company of a spouse, this vision of a preindustrial Europe shaped by heterosexual marriage deceptively hides the well-established fact that, in some times and places, as many as twenty-five percent of women and men remained single throughout their lives. Despite the significant number of never-married lay women in medieval and early modern Europe, the study of their role and position in that society has been largely neglected. Singlewomen in the European Past opens up this group for further investigation. It is not only the first book to highlight the important minority of women who never married but also the first to address the critical matter of differences among women from the perspective of marital status. Essays by leading scholars—among them Maryanne Kowaleski, Margaret Hunt, Ruth Mazo Karras, Susan Mosher Stuard, Roberta Krueger, and Merry Wiesner—deal with topics including the sexual and emotional relationships of singlewomen, the economic issues and employment opportunities facing them, the differences between the lives of widows and singlewomen, the conflation of singlewomen and prostitutes, and the problem of female slavery. The chapters both illustrate the roles open to the singlewoman in the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries and raise new perspectives about the experiences of singlewomen in earlier times.
Author: Leah Knight
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131095
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women’s reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women’s Bookscapesin Early Modern Britain brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women’s figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women’s readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women’s libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume’s three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence—lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example—as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship. Interdisciplinary, timely, cohesive, and concise, this collection’s fresh, revisionary approaches represent substantial contributions to scholarship in early modern material culture; book history and print culture; women’s literary and cultural history; library studies; and reading and collecting practices more generally.
Author: J. Daybell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230598668
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
This landmark book of essays examines the development of women's letter writing from the late fifteenth to the early eighteen century. It is the first book to deal comprehensively with women's letter writing during the Late Medieval and Early Modern period and shows that this was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has generally been assumed. The essays, contributed by many of the leading researchers active in the field, illustrate women's engagement in various activities, both literary and political, social and religious.
Author: Edith Snook
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230302238
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals.
Author: Sara D. Luttfring
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317534468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
This volume examines early modern representations of women’s reproductive knowledge through new readings of plays, monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, court records, histories, and more, which are often interpreted as depicting female reproductive bodies as passive, silenced objects of male control and critique. Luttfring argues instead that these texts represent women exercising epistemological control over reproduction through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance into what Luttfring calls 'bodily narratives.' The power of these bodily narratives extends beyond knowledge of individual bodies to include the ways that women’s stories about reproduction shape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and kings. In the popular print and theater of early modern England, women’s bodies, women’s speech, and in particular women’s speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. This book joins growing critical discussion of how female reproductive bodies were used to represent socio-political concerns and will be of interest to students and scholars working in early modern literature and culture, women’s history, and the history of medicine.
Author: Anne M. Scott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317137868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Exploring a range of poverty experiences-socioeconomic, moral and spiritual-this collection presents new research by a distinguished group of scholars working in the medieval and early modern periods. Collectively they explore both the assumptions and strategies of those in authority dealing with poverty and the ways in which the poor themselves tried to contribute to, exploit, avoid or challenge the systems for dealing with their situation. The studies demonstrate that poverty was by no means a simple phenomenon. It varied according to gender, age and geographical location; and the way it was depicted in speech, writing and visual images could as much affect how the poor experienced their poverty as how others saw and judged them. Using new sources-and adopting new approaches to known sources-the authors share insights into the management and the self-management of the poor, and search out aspects of the experience of poverty worthy of note, from which can be traced lasting influences on the continuing understanding and experience of poverty in pre-modern Europe.
Author: Anne M. Scott
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409441083
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503
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Book Description
Exploring a range of poverty experiences-socioeconomic, moral and spiritual-this collection presents new research by a distinguished group of scholars working in the medieval and early modern periods. Using new sources - and adopting new approaches to known sources - the authors share insights into the management and the self-management of the poor, and search out aspects of the experience of poverty worthy of note, from which can be traced lasting influences on the continuing understanding and experience of poverty in pre-modern Europe.
