Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England

Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England

Author: Sarah E. Johnson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1317050657

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Though the gender-coded soul-body dynamic lies at the root of many negative and disempowering depictions of women, Sarah Johnson here argues that it also functions as an effective tool for redefining gender expectations. Building on past criticism that has concentrated on the debilitating cultural association of women with the body, she investigates dramatic uses of the soul-body dynamic that challenge the patriarchal subordination of women. Focusing on two tragedies, two comedies, and a small selection of masques, from approximately 1592-1614, Johnson develops a case for the importance of drama to scholarly considerations of the soul-body dynamic, which habitually turn to devotional works, sermons, and philosophical and religious treatises to elucidate this relationship. Johnson structures her discussion around four theatrical relationships, each of which is a gendered relationship analogous to the central soul-body dynamic: puppeteer and puppet, tamer and tamed, ghost and haunted, and observer and spectacle. Through its thorough and nuanced readings, this study redefines one of the period’s most pervasive analogies for conceptualizing women and their relations to men as more complex and shifting than criticism has previously assumed. It also opens a new interpretive framework for reading representations of women, adding to the ongoing feminist re-evaluation of the kinds of power women might actually wield despite the patriarchal strictures of their culture.


Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance

Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance

Author: Kim Solga

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-09-29

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0230274056

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Examining some of the most iconic texts in English theatre history, including Titus Andronicus and The Changeling, this book, now in paperback with a new Preface, reveals the pernicious erasure of rape and violence against women in the early modern era and the politics and ethics of rehearsing these negotiations on the 20th and 21st century stages.


Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe

Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe

Author: Lisa Hopkins

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789462987500

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This book examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, especially when they were expected to occupy the spheres society believed their gender should.


The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England

The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England

Author: Christina Luckyj

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017-12

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1496202805

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2018 Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women’s alliances in early modern Europe. The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women’s political alliances. Grouped into three sections—domestic, court, and kinship alliances—these essays investigate historical documents, drama, and poetry, insisting that female alliances, much like male friendship discourse, had political meaning in early modern England. Offering new perspectives on female authors such as the Cavendish sisters, Anne Clifford, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips, as well as on male-authored texts such as Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, and The Maid’s Tragedy, the essays bring both familiar and unfamiliar texts into conversation about the political potential of female alliances. Some contributors are skeptical about allied women’s political power, while others suggest that such female communities had considerable potential to contain, maintain, or subvert political hierarchies. A wide variety of approaches to the political are represented in the volume and the scope will make it appealing to a broad audience.


Approximate Bodies

Approximate Bodies

Author: Maurizio Calbi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-05-02

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1134282354

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Approximate Bodies examines, in fascinating detail, the changing representation of the body in early modern drama and in the period's anatomical and gynaecological treatises.


Images of the Muslim Woman in Early Modern English Drama

Images of the Muslim Woman in Early Modern English Drama

Author: Öz Öktem

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1793625239

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Early modern scholarship often reads the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which sees an organic relationship between the West’s historical domination of the East and the Western discourse on the East. This book problematizes the above trajectory by arguing that the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the context of the political and historical realities of early modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire remained as a dominant superpower throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was perceived by Protestant England both as a military and religious threat and as a possible ally against Catholic Spain. Reading a series of early modern plays from Marlowe to Beaumont and Fletcher alongside a number of historical sources and documents, this book re-interprets the image of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances, as well as the intricate dynamics of England’s intensified contact with Islam in the Mediterranean.


Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama

Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama

Author: Andrew J. Majeske

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13:

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Justice, Women, and Power in English Reniassance Drama is a collection of essays that explores the relationship of gender and justice as represented in English Renaissance drama. Many of the essays are concerned with interrogating the ways that women relied upon and/or reacted to the legal (and overarching political) systems in early modern England. Other essays examine issues involving the role of narrative, evidence, and gendered expectations about justice in the plays of this time period. An implicit concern of these essays is whether women were empowered or dis-empowered in this interaction with the legal/political system.


Travel and Travail

Travel and Travail

Author: Mary C. Fuller

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 1496210298

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Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.


Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe

Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe

Author: Penny Richards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-30

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1317875516

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Surveying court life and urban life, warfare, religion, and peace, this book provides a comprehensive history of how gender was experienced in early modern Europe. Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe shows how definitions of sexuality and gender roles operated and more particularly, how such definitions--and the activities they generated and reflected--articulated concerns inside a given culture. This means that the volume embodies an interdisciplinary approach: literature as well as history, religious studies, economics, and gender studies form the basis of this cultural history of early modern Europe. There are new approaches to understanding famous figures, such as Elizabeth I, James VI and I and his wife Anna of Denmark; Francis I; St. Teresa of Avila. Other chapters investigate topics such as militarism and court culture, and wider groups, such as urban citizens and noble families. The collection also studies ways in which gender and sexual orientation were represented in literature, as well as examinations of the theoretical issues involved in studying history from the angle of gender.