Download or read book Women and Culture At the Courts of the Stuart Queens written by Clare McManus and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-11-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did the Stuart queens create their own courts, and can these courts shed new light on women's poetry, drama and performance? This book investigates the literature, theater, patronage and commissioning of the courts of Anna of Denmark (1603-19) and Henrietta Maria (1625-42). Unearthing the neglected history of the Stuart queens, these essays look afresh at the early modern European female elite to create a new picture of femininity for students and scholars of early modern culture.

Download or read book Three Seventeenth Century Plays on Women and Performance written by Hero Chalmers and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-19 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time.The Wild Goose Chase (1621) and The Bird in a Cage (1633) were both performed in the commercial London theatres in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a so-called 'closet' drama, designed primarily for reading but drawing on a tradition of aristocratic theatricals. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor in the Restoration.The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a rich sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture.

Download or read book Women on Stage in Stuart Drama written by Sophie Tomlinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Dance Spectacle and the Body Politick 1250 1750 written by Jennifer Nevile and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging overview of dance from the Medieval era through the Baroque

Download or read book Women on the Renaissance Stage written by Clare McManus and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through detailed historicized and interdisciplinary readings of the performances of Anna Denmark in the Scottish and English Jacobean Courts, Women on the Renaissance Stage fundamentally reassesses women's relationship to early modern performance. It investigates the staging conditions, practices, and gendering of Denmark's performances, and brings current critical theorizations of race, class, gender, space, and performance to bear on the female court of the early 17th century.

Download or read book Queens Consort Cultural Transfer and European Politics c 1500 1800 written by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics examines the roles that queens consort played in dynastic politics and cultural transfer between their natal and marital courts during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This collection of essays analyses the part that these queens played in European politics, showing how hard and soft power, high politics and cultural influences, cannot be strictly separated. It shows that the root of these consorts’ power lay in their dynastic networks and the extent to which they cultivated them. The consorts studied in this book come from territories such as Austria, Braunschweig, Hanover, Poland, Portugal, Prussia and Saxony and travel to, among other places, Britain, Naples, Russia, Spain and Sweden. The various chapters address different types of cultural manifestation, among them collecting, portraiture, panegyric poetry, libraries, theatre and festivals, learning, genealogical literature and architecture. The volume significantly shifts the direction of scholarship by moving beyond a focus on individual historical women to consider ‘queens consort’ as a category, making it valuable reading for students and scholars of early modern gender and political history.

Download or read book Women Royalisms and Exiles 1640 1669 written by Sonya Cronin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a range of royalist women’s cultural responses to war, dislocation, diaspora and exile through a rich variety of media across multiple geographies of the archipelago of the British Isles and as far as The Hague and Antwerp on the Continent, thereby uniquely documenting comparative links between women’s cultural production, types of exile and political allegiance. Offering the first full length study to therorize the royalist condition as one of diaspora, it chronologically charts a series of ruptures beginning with initial displacement and dispersal due to civil war in the early 1640s and concludes with examination of the homecoming for royalist exiles after the restoration in 1660. As it retrieves its subjects’ varied experiences of exile, and documents how these politically conscious women produce contrasting yet continuous forms of cultural, personal and political identities, it challenges conventional paradigms which all too neatly categorize royalism and exile during this seminal period in British and European history.

Download or read book Anna of Denmark written by Jemma Field and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the Stuart courts through the lens of the queen consort, Anna of Denmark, this study is underpinned by three key themes: translating cultures, female agency and the role of kinship networks and genealogical identity for early modern royal women. Illustrated with a fascinating array of objects and artworks, the book follows a trajectory that begins with Anna’s exterior spaces before moving to the interior furnishings of her palaces, the material adornment of the royal body, an examination of Anna’s visual persona and a discussion of Anna’s performance of extraordinary rituals that follow her life cycle. Underpinned by a wealth of new archival research, the book provides a richer understanding of the breadth of Anna’s interests and the meanings generated by her actions, associations and possessions.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood written by D. Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors.

Download or read book Dancing Queen written by Melinda Gough and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under glittering lights in the Louvre palace, the French court ballets danced by Queen Marie de Médicis prior to Henri IV’s assassination in 1610 attracted thousands of spectators ranging from pickpockets to ambassadors from across Europe. Drawing on newly discovered primary sources as well as theories and methodologies derived from literary studies, political history, musicology, dance studies, and women’s and gender studies, Dancing Queen traces how Marie’s ballets authorized her incipient political authority through innovative verbal and visual imagery, avant-garde musical developments, and ceremonial arrangements of objects and bodies in space. Making use of women’s "semi-official" status as political agents, Marie’s ballets also manipulated the subtle social and cultural codes of international courtly society in order to more deftly navigate rivalries and alliances both at home and abroad. At times the queen’s productions could challenge Henri IV’s immediate interests, contesting the influence enjoyed by his mistresses or giving space to implied critiques of official foreign policy, for example. Such defenses of Marie’s own position, though, took shape as part of a larger governmental program designed to promote the French consort queen’s political authority not in its own right but as a means of maintaining power for the new Bourbon monarchy in the event of Henri IV’s untimely death.

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 Queenship and Counsel in Early Modern Europe written by Helen Matheson-Pollock and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discourse of political counsel in early modern Europe depended on the participation of men, as both counsellors and counselled. Women were often thought too irrational or imprudent to give or receive political advice—but they did in unprecedented numbers, as this volume shows. These essays trace the relationship between queenship and counsel through over three hundred years of history. Case studies span Europe, from Sweden and Poland-Lithuania via the Habsburg territories to England and France, and feature queens regnant, consort and regent, including Elizabeth I of England, Catherine Jagiellon of Sweden, Catherine de’ Medici and Anna of Denmark. They draw on a variety of innovative sources to recover evidence of queenly counsel, from treatises and letters to poetry, masques and architecture. For scholars of history, politics and literature in early modern Europe, this book enriches our understanding of royal women as political actors.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women s Writing in English 1540 1700 written by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on—and challenges—the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

Download or read book The Matter of Song in Early Modern England written by Katherine R. Larson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'songscape', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque or a play, however, the tendency is to engage with it as poem rather than as musical performance. Opening up the notion of song from a performance-based perspective The Matter of Song in Early Modern England considers the implications of reading song not simply as lyric text but as an embodied and gendered musical practice. Animating the traces of song preserved in physiological and philosophical commentaries, singing handbooks, poetic treatises, and literary texts ranging from Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalmes to John Milton's Comus, the book confronts song's ephemerality, its lexical and sonic capriciousness, and its airy substance. These features can resist critical analysis but were vital to song's affective workings in the early modern period. The volume foregrounds the need to attend much more closely to the embodied and musical dimensions of literary production and circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It also makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of women's engagement with song as writers and as performers. A companion recording of fourteen songs featuring Larson (soprano) and Lucas Harris (lute) brings the project's innovative methodology and central case studies to life.

Download or read book Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters written by Julie D. Campbell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important contribution to growing scholarship on women's participation in literary cultures, this essay collection concentrates on cross-national communities of letters to offer a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing. The essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures from several countries, ranging from Italy and France to the Low Countries and England. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers; the collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and exploring familial, political, and religious communities. Taken together, these essays offer fresh ways of reading early modern women's writing that consider such issues as the changing cultural geographies of the early modern world, women's bilingualism and multilingualism, and women's sense of identity mediated by local, regional, national, and transnational affiliations and conflicts.

Download or read book Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance written by Deanne Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor. Whereas previous histories of the actress begin with the Restoration, this book demonstrates that the girl is actually a well-documented category of performer and a key participant in the drama of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It explores evidence of the girl actor in archival records of payment, eyewitness accounts, stage directions, paintings, and in the plays and masques that were explicitly composed for girls, and, in some cases, by them. Contradicting previous scholarly assumptions about the early modern stage as male-dominated, this evidence reveals girls' participation in medieval religious drama, Tudor civic pageants and royal entries, Elizabethan country house entertainments, and Stuart court and household masques. This book situates its historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including girls as singers, translators and authors. By examining the impact of the girl actor on constructions of girlhood in the work of Shakespeare – whose girl characters register and evoke the power of the performing girl – Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls' dramatic, musical and literary performances actively shaped medieval and early modern culture. It shows how the active presence and participation of girls shaped medieval and Renaissance culture, and it reveals how some of its best-known literary and dramatic texts address, represent, and reflect upon girl children, not as an imagined ideal, but as a lived reality.

Download or read book Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger written by Joanne Rochester and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly staged plays-within and other metatheatrical inserts. Such works present fictionalized spectators as well as performers, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of the interpretive work of a spectator as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about early modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. This study examines on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Philip Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Each play presents a different form of metatheatrical inset, from the plays-within of The Roman Actor (1626), to the masques-within of The City Madam (1632) to the titular miniature portrait of The Picture (1629), moving thematically from spectator interpretations of dramatic performance, the visual spectacle of the masque to staged 'readings' of static visual art. All three forms present a dramatization of the process of examination, and allow an analysis of Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.