Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe: 1500 - 1700

by Penny Richards, Jessica Munns

Overview

Surveying court life and urban life, warfare, religion, and peace, this book provides a comprehensive history of how gender was experienced in early modern Europe.

Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe shows how definitions of sexuality and gender roles operated and more particularly, how such definitions--and the activities they generated and reflected--articulated concerns inside a given culture. This means that the volume embodies an interdisciplinary approach: literature as well as history, religious studies, economics, and gender studies form the basis of this cultural history of early modern Europe.

There are new approaches to understanding famous figures, such as Elizabeth I, James VI and I and his wife Anna of Denmark; Francis I; St. Teresa of Avila. Other chapters investigate topics such as militarism and court culture, and wider groups, such as urban citizens and noble families. The collection also studies ways in which gender and sexual orientation were represented in literature, as well as examinations of the theoretical issues involved in studying history from the angle of gender.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781317875505
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/30/2014
Series:	Women And Men In History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jessica Munns is Professor of Literature at the University of Denver. Her previous books include Restoration Politics and Drama: The Plays of Thomas Otway, 1675-1683 (1995), with Gita Rajan she has co-edited A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice (1996).

Penny Richards is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Gloucestershire. She has published widely on early modern history and has co-edited with Jessica Munns, The Clothes that Wear Us: Dressing and Transgressing, Essays in Eighteenth-Century Culture (1999).

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
List o f Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
List o f Contributors
Introduction
Jessica Munns and Penny Richards

1 Gender and sexuality in early modem England

2 Gender and early emancipation in the Low Countries

3 'So was theys castell layd wyde open': Battle for the phallus in early modern responses to Chaucer's Pardoner

4 The importnace of a name: Gender, power and the strategy of naming a child in a noble Italian family

5 'Our Trinity!': Francis I, Louise of Savoy and Marguerite d' Angouleme

6 Elizabeth I as Deborah: Biblical typology, prophecy and political power

7 Queen Anna bites back: Protest, effemiinacy and manliness at the Jacobean court

Privileges of the soul, pains of the body: Teresa de Jesus, the mystic beatas and the Spanish Inquisition after Trent

9 Allarme to England!; Gender and militarism in early modern England

10 The Guise women: Politics, war and peace

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

'This is a very clear introduction to the concept of gender, which could be usefully recommended to all undergraduates studying early modern England.'

Cordelia Beattie, European History Quarterly

From the Publisher