Custome is an Idiot
Custome is an Idiot

Author: Susan Gushee O'Malley

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9780252071287

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Containing the complete and annotated texts of six pamphlets written between 1609 and 1620, "Custome Is an Idiot" makes an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on early modern British cultural history, specifically on competing opinions about the role of women in society. During the early seventeenth century a fierce debate raged in British intellectual society regarding the role of women, how much is ordained by God, and how much is merely custom. The pamphlets that circulated at the time reveal a great deal about the terms of the debate, and these six constitute a significant body of primary literature, allowing the contending voices to be heard anew. Included here are two pamphlets about gossips by Samuel Rowlands, William Heale's treatise against wife-beating, Christopher Newstead's argument for the superiority of women, and Hic Mulier and Haec Vir, two pamphlets that address the theme of cross-dressing. Introductions by Susan Gushee O'Malley place each pamphlet in a wider context, and detailed annotations shed light on the individual texts.

Vernacular Bodies
Vernacular Bodies

Author: Mary Elizabeth Fissell

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0199269882

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized early modern England.

A Last Elizabethan Journal V3
A Last Elizabethan Journal V3

Author: G.B. Harrison

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1136355928

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First Published in 1999. This is Volume III of a collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean journals from 1591 to and 1610 and includes an Elizabethan journal, being a record of those things most talked of during the years 1599–1603.

Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy
Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy

Author: Iman Sheeha

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 100007451X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy considerably advances existing scholarship on the institution of service in early modern culture and as represented on the early modern stage. With its focus on the homes of the middling sorts, to whom the protagonists of domestic tragedy belong, the book expands our understanding of employer-servant relationships beyond elite and aristocratic circles, the focus of previous studies. Drawing on early modern advice literature, household guides, domestic manuals, sermons, treatises, proverbs, mothers’ legacies, funeral sermons, diaries, letters, and jest books as well as making use of the recent findings by social and cultural historians of early modern England, the book examines the consequences of disordered domesticity for the master-servant relationship. This study nuances the picture of domestic servants constructed by both early modern moralists and modern scholarship, arguing against overarching, reductive narratives. The book argues that the experience of household service as depicted in domestic tragedy, like in real life, was complex and varied and that there was no typical experience of service.