Early modern women
Mary Astell, Magdalene College, gender inequality in the early modern period and today, and a few resources for scholars in the field.…
Two Recent Books on Gender and Violence in the Early Modern Period
1. Jennifer Feather and Catherine E. Thomas, eds., Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). As the blurb has it, "During the early modern period in England, social expectations for men came under extreme pressure; the armed knight went into decline and humanism appeared. Here, original ess…
The Sufferings of the Martyrs and the Transgressive Female Gaze
Sharon Howard, 'Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth Century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World', Social History of Medicine, 16:3 (2003), pp. 367-382, is one of those articles that appeared some years ago, but which I have only just come across. (The link, by the way, is to…
Conference Podcast: Pain, Piety and Ageing: Sacred Suffering in Early Modern Portraits of Old Women
Dr. Erin Campbell gives a paper at Pain and Old Age: Three Centuries of Suffering in Silence?, a conference held by the Birkbeck Pain Project and Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on October 27, 2012. Here's the link. To listen directly to the podcast, click here. a…
New Book on Early Modern Perceptions of the Male and Female Body
Helen, King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Ashgate, 2013).This has only just come out, and I have not yet read it, but it looks as if it may turn out to be a significant contribution to early modern gender studies. Since a large part of my own work hinges…
Seventeenth-Century Tidbits #5: Sex and the City in 17th-century England
Women's gossip about their sex lives in seventeenth-century England:Sex & The c17th City…
The Dominatrix in Early Modern Times
Saint Jerome tells a queer story of a Christian captured by the Romans. To destroy his soul, rather than his body he was (as the Catholic translation of 1630 has it) taken and … led aside into a most delicious garden & there in the middest of pure lyllies, and blushing roses, (where also a…
On Mary Wroth’s _Urania_
Mary Wroth's Urania (London, 1621) poses profound problems for feminist critics; here we have the first major full-length work of fiction in English by a woman and it contains some of the most graphically sadomasochistic scenes of male domination and female submission that the seventeenth century has to offer. ‘What, then, to make of this…
