In 1615 Englishman Gervase Markham published a handbook for housewives that contains "all the virtuous knowledges and actions both of the mind and body, which ought to be in any complete housewife". Markham instructs and advises on everything from the plague to baldness and bad breath. Woodcut illustrations add a richness to this look at life during the Renaissance.
This is one of a series of bibliographical guides designed to meet the needs of undergraduates, postgraduates and their teachers in universities and colleges of further education. All volumes in the series share a number of common characteristics. They are selective, manageable in size, and include those books and articles which are considered most important and useful. All are editied by practising teachers of the subject in question and are based on their experience of the needs of students. The arrangement combines chronological with thematic divisions. Most of the items listed receive some descriptive comment.
A novel and female empowering interpretive approach to these artistic archetypes in her analysis of Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age.
Begun in 1690, this diary of a forty-four-year-old German Jewish widow, mother of fourteen children, tells how she guided the financial and personal destinies of her children, how she engaged in trade, ran her own factory, and promoted the welfare of her large family. Her memoir, a rare account of an ordinary woman, enlightens not just her children, for whom she wrote it, but all posterity about her life and community. Gluckel speaks to us with determination and humor from the seventeenth century. She tells of war, plague, pirates, soldiers, the hysteria of the false messiah Sabbtai Zevi, murder, bankruptcy, wedding feasts, births, deaths, in fact, of all the human events that befell her during her lifetime. She writes in a matter of fact way of the frightening and precarious situation under which the Jews of northern Germany lived. Accepting this situation as given, she boldly and fearlessly promotes her business, her family and her faith. This memoir is a document in the history of women and of life in the seventeenth century.
This book analyzes the political, aesthetic, moral and religious developments in the period 1606-1660 and discusses the works of Donne, Jonson, Milton and early modern women's writing. Brady combines Literary Theory, social and cultural History, Psychology and Anthropology to produce exciting and original readings of neglected source material.
This monograph, the first detailed study of seventeenth-century popular medicine, depicts the major role which lay or popular medical practitioners played in the provision of seventeenth-century health care in England.
Originally published in 1966, this work by G. E. Fussell is a thorough examination of the role played by the English dairy farmer over the past four hundred years. Beginning his study with the cow he gives an account of the improved breeding and feeding methods that make today's cow a totally different beast to that of the Tudor farmer. A chapter is devoted to the cultivation of fodder crops and another to the comfort of the cow for, as the author states, pleasant conditions are an important factor in encouraging its productivity. The dairy industry, no less than any other in the nineteenth century, was the scene of numerous devices and inventions designed to improve milking methods. This, together with the development of the sale of milk in a liquid form, is discussed in later chapters. The practical difficulties of transporting milk had until about 1850 caused the major part of the milk produced to be turned into butter and cheese and the varying products of differing regions are fully described. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the number of dairies prepared to retail milk grew in number to accommodate an ever increasing rate of milk consumption. Numerous farming textbooks published during the period and contemporary descriptions of the farming scene form the background for this scholarly appraisal. No other book has treated the English dairy farmer in such detail and, in drawing upon such a wealth of illustrative material to support his conclusions, G. E. Fussell has produced a work which will be valued by all agricultural historians.
Featuring detailed analyses of clothing culture in 17th-century provincial Sussex, this original study draws on previously unexploited sources to create an intimate and nuanced portrait of people and their clothes. An introductory chapter uses 17th-century literature to identify and explore contemporary ideas about clothing, the individual and society, as well as the relationship between London and the provinces and the causes and consequences of conspicuous clothing consumption. Subsequent chapters look at the production, distribution and acquisition of clothing in Sussex and the participation of consumers in these processes; the role of London as a centre of fashionable clothing consumption and the experience of wealthier consumers in shopping there; the clothing worn by individual men, women and older children of the 'middle' and 'better' sort and the extent to which they participated in contemporary, London-driven, fashion culture. A final chapter examines the clothing worn by the poor, including vagrants, parish paupers and the 'labouring' poor. With over 40 images Clothing in 17th-Century Provincial England offers a new window onto early modern experiences of clothing.
