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…
Catching Up…
The last couple of months have been pretty hectic and I haven't had much time to post here, so let me give a brief rundown of recent developments. First, let me start with the stuff I'm missing out on, being here in Japan. I was sorry to miss a roundtable discussion on Violence, Victimhood and…
Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature
Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2002), makes the important point that 'the terms which constitute the heroics of endurance are precisely those terms used to construct the early modern idealization of women: patient suffering, mildness, humility, chastity, loyalty and obedience. Con…
The Terrifying Coldness of St. Agnes
In early modern literature, the powerful, dominating female is frequently depicted as a temptress, an agent of evil, enticing her victims to ruination, but torment and destruction can come at the hands of the virtuous as easily as at those of the wicked. A man loses his head to the righteous Judith just…
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…
Medieval sex
The History Blog has an amusing flow chart on medieval sex.…
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…
Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica and the Beginnings of the Pornography of Pain
Rather than developing from native English discourses, the association of Catholicism with sexual flagellation in late seventeenth-century England is mainly a product of the same southern/Latin/Catholic culture that produced the lives of the saints. Most of the same ingredients as are to be found in English writings – political and/or religious pol…
