Download or read book Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman written by Lucinda M. Becker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Early Modern Englishwoman written by Betty Travitsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1996 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Death and Gender in the Early Modern Period written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen written by Carole Levin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe written by Andrea Pearson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts written by Arthur F. Marotti and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Mothers and meaning on the early modern English stage written by Felicity Dunworth and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Mother s Advice Books written by Betty S. Travitsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern works of advice can be typified by a number of texts by Erasmus falling into a variety of categories: advice on family conduct; manners; study plans and piety. A close relation to these works of advice was the parental advice book, usually written by a father to his son. It was not until the early 17th century that the mother's advice book evolved and even then these were often legitimated by the female authors claiming that sickness, or even impending death, made relaying their motherly advice by a means other than print impossible. The contents of the present volume, ordered chronologically by the date of the first edition of each advice book, are limited to works attributed to named mothers, even though information about these historical women is not always abundant. Miscellanea was the attempt of Elizabeth Grymeston to distill advice to her only surviving. It was first published in 1604. The text reproduced here is the 1608 edition which was the first to include the additional substantive Prayers. Even though listings indicate there were 19 editions of The Mother’s Blessing before 1640 very little is known of Dorothy Leigh. The first edition (1616), reproduced here, describes her as a gentle-woman, not long deceased and her dedicatory epistle to her three sons identifies her as a widow. Elizabeth Clinton wrote her advice book when she had become countess-dowager. It was dedicated to her daughter-in-law and addresses an area where she had apparently been deficient - the imperative directed at early modern women by domestic conduct books that mothers should nurse their own children. The edition reproduced here is the British Library copy. Elizabeth Brook Joceline composed her Legacy whilst awaiting the birth of her first child, having become convinced that she would die in childbirth. She died in 1622, nine days after the birth of a daughter. Possibly the most poignant of the mother's advice books, this was intended to stand in for her instructi

Download or read book Early Modern English Lives written by Ronald Bedford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World written by Lori Jones and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Re membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence written by Allison Levy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood.

Download or read book Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe written by Merry E. Wiesner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third edition of Merry Wiesner-Hanks' prize-winning book incorporates the newest scholarship and features a new chapter on gender and race in the colonial world; expanded coverage of eighteenth century developments including the Enlightenment; and enhanced discussions of masculinity, single women, same-sex relations, humanism, and women's religious roles.

Download or read book Biblical women in early modern literary culture 1550 1700 written by Victoria Brownlee and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 draws attention to the complex ways in which biblical women’s narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. Considering a confessionally diverse range of writers, working across a variety of genres, this volume reveals how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records. The essays explore how the Bible’s women are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comment on issues including female authority, speech and sexuality, and in discussions of doctrine, confessional politics, exploration and grief. As it explores the rich ideological currency of the Bible’s women in early modern culture, this volume demonstrates that the Bible’s women are persistently difficult to evade.

Download or read book The Sick Child in Early Modern England 1580 1720 written by Hannah Newton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sick Child in Early Modern England is a powerful exploration of the treatment, perception, and experience of illness in childhood, from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. At this time, the sickness or death of a child was a common occurrence - over a quarter of young people died before the age of fifteen - and yet this subject has received little scholarly attention. Hannah Newton takes three perspectives: first, she investigates medical understandings and treatments of children. She argues that a concept of 'children's physic' existed amongst doctors and laypeople: the young were thought to be physiologically distinct, and in need of special medicines. Secondly, she examines the family's' experience, demonstrating that parents devoted considerable time and effort to the care of their sick offspring, and experienced feelings of devastating grief upon their illnesses and deaths. Thirdly, she takes the strikingly original viewpoint of sick children themselves, offering rare and intimate insights into the emotional, spiritual, physical, and social dimensions of sickness, pain, and death. Newton asserts that children's experiences were characterised by profound ambivalence: whilst young patients were often tormented by feelings of guilt, fears of hell, and physical pain, sickness could also be emotionally and spiritually uplifting, and invited much attention and love from parents. Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, The Sick Child is of vital interest to scholars working in the interconnected fields of the history of medicine, childhood, parenthood, bodies, emotion, pain, death, religion, and gender.

Download or read book The Moment of Death in Early Modern Europe c 1450 1800 written by Benedikt Brunner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-05-06 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both in our time and in the past, death was one of the most important aspects of anyone’s life. The early modern period saw drastic changes in rites of death, burials and commemoration. One particularly fruitful avenue of research is not to focus on death in general, but the moment of death specifically. This volume investigates this transitionary moment between life and death. In many cases, this was a death on a deathbed, but it also included the scaffold, battlefield, or death in the streets. Contributors: Friedrich J. Becher, Benedikt Brunner, Isabel Casteels, Martin Christ, Louise Deschryver, Irene Dingel, Michaël Green, Vanessa Harding, Sigrun Haude, Vera Henkelmann, Imke Lichterfeld, Erik Seeman, Elizabeth Tingle, and Hillard von Thiessen.

Download or read book Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on responses to material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany trace how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of deprivation through a spectrum of activities, often turning loss into gain and acquiring agency.

Download or read book Daily Life of Women in Shakespeare s England written by Theresa D. Kemp and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Delve into the often-overlooked lives and legacies of everyday women in Tudor and Stuart England. Owing to their privilege and social stature, much is known about the elite women of 16th- and 17th-century England. Historians know far less, however, about the everyday women from the middle and lower classes from the 1550s to 1650 who left behind only scattered bits and pieces of their lives. Born into a narrow class and gender hierarchy that placed women second to men in almost all regards, women from the poor and middling ranks had limited social and economic opportunities beyond what men and the church afforded them. Yet, as Theresa D. Kemp shows in this addition to the Daily Life through History series, many of these women, most of them illiterate by modern standards, found creative ways to assert agency and push back against social norms. In an era when William Shakespeare debuted his plays at the Globe Theatre in London, everyday English women were active in religious movements, wrote literature, and went to court to protest abuse at home. Ultimately, a close examination of the lives of these women reveals how instrumental they were in shaping English society during a transformative and dynamic period of British history.