The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama
The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama

Author: Ursula A. Potter

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-04-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 3110662019

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This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She analyzes how playwrights employed visual and verbal clues to identify the sexual status of female characters to engage their audiences with popular concepts of women’s health; and how they satirized the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite, suggesting that men who fear it have been duped. But the study also recognizes that, as these dramatists were fully aware, merely by bringing such material to the stage so frequently, they were complicit in perpetuating such theories.

Enclosure Acts
Enclosure Acts

Author: Richard Burt

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-06-07

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1501733591

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Enclosure—the conversion of peasants' commonly held lands to privately owned pasture—has long been considered a critical stage in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This book is the first, however, to treat in detail the literary and cultural implications of enclosure in early modern England. Bringing together the work of both senior and younger scholars who represent a wide range of critical orientations, Enclosure Acts focuses not only on the historical fact of land enclosure, but also on the symbolic containment of sexuality in Elizabethan and Jacobean literary works. The first type of enclosure frequently has been treated by materialists and new historicists; feminists and theorists concerned with issues of gender have tended to concentrate on the second. The fourteen essays collected here explore the relationships between these two ways of perceiving enclosure in the context of cultural studies. Individual chapters examine the creation of territorial and social boundaries as well as the consequences of enclosure acts.

Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620-1660
Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620-1660

Author: Ann Hughes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-05-16

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9780521520157

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This book discusses the origins, impact and aftermath of the Civil War in Warwickshire, examining administration, religion and politics in their social context. The focus is mainly on the landed élite, but the importance of relationships between members of the élite and their social inferiors is also stressed. Early chapters discuss the economic and social character of Warwickshire; a middle section examines the onset of the Civil War in 1642; and finally there is a discussion of the economic impact of the war and the administrative, political and religious changes of the 1640s and 1650s, culminating in an assessment of the significance of the Restoration. Dr Hughes takes a critical approach to recent historiography, and challenges the concept of a 'county community'. The book is intended as a contribution to a general understanding of the Civil War, rather than as a study of one particular county.