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  3. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World

This series provides a forum for studies that investigate the themes of women and gender in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays. Chronologically, we welcome studies that look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on Britain, Europe and Global transnational histories. We invite proposals including, but not limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power; construction of femininity and masculinities; gift-giving, diplomacy and the politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives and architectural spaces (court, salons, household); consumption and material culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.

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8 results in Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World

Non-Elite Women's Networks across the Early Modern World
  • Edited by Elizabeth Storr Cohen, Marlee J. Couling
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    20 February 2024
    Print publication:
    23 October 2023
  • Non-elite or marginalized early modern women - among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers - have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial records, administrative paperwork, letters, pamphlets, hagiography, and picaresque literature, this volume explores how, as social agents, these doubly invisible women built and used networks and informal alliances to supplement the usual structures of family and community that often let them down. Ten essays, ranging widely in geography from the eastern Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America and in time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, show how flexible, sometimes ad hoc relationships could provide crucial practical and emotional support for women who faced problems of livelihood, reputation, displacement, and violence.

Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England
  • Jennifer Evans
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    20 February 2024
    Print publication:
    13 November 2023
  • How did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? This vivid history investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In doing so, this study restores men's health to medical histories of reproduction, demonstrating how men's sexual self-identity was tied to their health. Charting genitourinary conditions across the life cycle, the book illustrates how fertility and potency were key to medical understandings of men's health. Men utilized networks of care to help them with ostensibly embarrassing and shameful conditions like hernias, venereal disease, bladder stones, and testicular injuries. The book thus offers a historical voice to modern calls for men to be alert to, and open about, their own bodily health.

Gifting Translation in Early Modern England
  • Women Writers and the Politics of Authorship
  • Kirsten Inglis
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    17 February 2024
    Print publication:
    14 August 2023
  • Translation was a critical mode of discourse for early modern writers. Gifting Translation in Early Modern England: Women Writers and the Politics of Authorship examines the intersection of translation and the culture of gift-giving in early modern England, arguing that this intersection allowed women to subvert dominant modes of discourse through acts of linguistic and inter-semiotic translation and conventions of gifting. The book considers four early modern translators: Mary Bassett, Jane Lumley, Jane Seager, and Esther Inglis. These women negotiate the rhetorics of translation and gift-culture in order to articulate political and religious affiliations and beliefs in their carefully crafted manuscript gift-books. This book offers a critical lens through which to read early modern translations in relation to the materiality of early modern gift culture.

Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy
  • Shannon McHugh
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    13 February 2024
    Print publication:
    07 June 2023
  • This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this upheaval exploited Petrarchism's capacity for subjective expression and experimentation - as well as its status as the most accessible of genres - in order to imagine new gendered possibilities in realms such as marriage, war, and religion. One of the first studies to examine writing by early modern Italian men and women together, it is also a revolutionary testament to poetry's work in the world. These poets' works challenge the traditional boundaries drawn around lyric's utility. They show us how poems could be sites of resistance against the pervading social order - how they are texts capable not only of recording social history, but also of shaping it.

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
  • Posthumous Fashioning in the Early Modern Hispanic World
  • Margo Echenberg
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    18 November 2023
    Print publication:
    24 April 2023
  • The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz traces the meteoric trajectory of the Mexican Tenth Muse's renown and studies how her worldly celebrity was altered posthumously by elegists in her Fama y obras póstumas [Fame and Posthumous Works] of 1700. In this study of a polyphonic, transatlantic volume, the didactic framework of early modern fame is pushed to its limits as panegyrists inscribe the nun into an evolving world-view that could trade in the fictions of the saintly exemplar, the Tenth Muse or a New World treasure, but could not preserve a woman's renown on the grounds of authorship. Only by making her legible could she vie for the promise of posthumous fame. In flushing out the machinations of Sor Juana's role as agent of her own celebrity as well as the negotiations of her contemporaries, this book opens new lines of inquiry in the study of early modern fame and print culture and the role of writers, panegyrists and editors as cultural agents in the transatlantic literary relationship between Mexico and Spain.

Genevra Sforza and the Bentivoglio
  • Family, Politics, Gender and Reputation in (and beyond) Renaissance Bologna
  • Elizabeth Bernhardt
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    14 November 2023
    Print publication:
    27 February 2023
  • Genevra Sforza (c. 1441-1507) lived her long life near the apex of Italian Renaissance society as wife of two successive de facto rulers of Bologna: Sante then Giovanni II Bentivoglio. Placed twice there without a dowry by Duke Francesco Sforza as part of a larger Milanese plan, Genevra served her family by fulfilling the gendered role demanded of her by society, most notably by contributing eighteen children, accepting many illegitimates born to Giovanni II, and helping arrange their future alliances for the success of the family at large. Based on contemporary archival research conducted across Italy, this biography presents Genevra as the object of academic study for the first time. The book explores how Genevra's life-story, filled with a multitude of successes appropriate for an elite fifteenth-century female, was transformed into a concordant body of misogynistic legends about how she destroyed the Bentivoglio and the city of Bologna.

Vittoria Colonna
  • Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact
  • Edited by Virginia Cox, Shannon McHugh
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 December 2021
    Print publication:
    06 November 2021
  • This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna's influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women's place in Italian literature; no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

Authorizing Early Modern European Women
  • From Biography to Biofiction
  • James Fitzmaurice, Naomi J. Miller, Sara Steen
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 December 2021
    Print publication:
    06 December 2021
  • The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of their own arts and for their accomplishments as creators. Whether they delivered infants or governed as monarchs, or produced embroideries, letters, paintings or poems, their visions, the authors argue, have endured across the centuries. As the title of the volume suggests, the essays gathered here participate in a wider conversation about the relation between biography, historical fiction, and the growing field of biofiction (that is, contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures), and explore the complicated interconnections between celebrating early modern women and perpetuating popular stereotypes about them.