Women Reform And Community In Early Modern England

"Katherine Willoughby, duchess of Suffolk, was one of the highest-ranking noblewomen in sixteenth-century England. She wielded considerable political power in her local community and at court, and her social status and her commitment to religious reform placed her at the centre of the political and religious developments that shaped the English Reformation." "By focusing on her kinship and patronage network, this book offers an examination of the development of Protestantism in the governing classes during the period. The importance of gender in the process of spiritual transformation emerges clearly from this study, showing how the changing religious climate provided new opportunities for women to exert greater influence in their society."--BOOK JACKET.

Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England is a study of the nature and extent of the education of women in the context of both Protestant and Catholic ideological debates. Examining the role of women both as recipients and agents of religious instruction, the author assesses the nature of power endowed in women through religious education, and the restraints and freedoms this brought.

Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England is a study of the nature and extent of the education of women in the context of both Protestant and Catholic ideological debates. Examining the role of women both as recipients and agents of religious instruction, the author assesses the nature of power endowed in women through religious education, and the restraints and freedoms this brought.

This ground-breaking book reveals the economic reality of ordinary women between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. Drawing on little-known sources, Amy Louise Erickson reconstructs day-to-day lives, showing how women owned, managed and inherited property on a scale previously unrecognised. Her complex and fascinating research, which contrasts the written laws with the actual practice, completely revises the traditional picture of women's economic status in pre-industrial England. Women and Property is essential reading for anyone interested in women, law and the past.

Offering a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing, the essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures across Italy, France, England, and the Low Countries. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers. The collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and in exploring familial, political, and religious communities.

Addressing a key challenge facing feminist scholars today, this volume explores the tensions between shared gender identity and the myriad social differences structuring women's lives. By examining historical experiences of early modern women, the authors of these essays consider the possibilities for commonalities and the forces dividing women. They analyse individual and collective identities of early modern women, tracing the web of power relations emerging from women's social interactions and contemporary understandings of femininity. Essays range from the late medieval period to the eighteenth century, study women in England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Sweden, and locate women in a variety of social environments, from household, neighbourhood and parish, to city, court and nation. Despite differing local contexts, the volume highlights continuities in women's experiences and the gendering of power relations across the early modern world. Recognizing the critical power of gender to structure identities and experiences, this collection responds to the challenge of the complexity of early modern women's lives. In paying attention to the contexts in which women identified with other women, or were seen by others to identify, contributors add new depth to our understanding of early modern women's senses of exclusion and belonging.

This is an original, accessible, and comprehensive survey of life as it was experienced by most Englishwomen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The authors examine virtually all aspects of women's lives: female life-stages from birth to death; the separate culture of women, including female friendship and feminist consciousness; the diverse roles of women in the religious and political movements of the day; and the effect of prevailing perceptions of gender differences. Comparisons are made between the makeshift economy of poor women and the occupational identities, and preoccupations, of the middling and elite classes. This fascinating and well-illustrated book reconstructs the mental and material world of Tudor and Stuart women. It will become the standard text on the subject.

Although in its infancy, the history of women in Wales and Scotland before and during the Reformation is now thriving. A longer tradition of historical studies has shed light on many areas of women's experience in England. Drawing on this historiography, Christine Peters examines the significance of contrasting social, economic and religious conditions in shaping the lives of women in Britain. Gender assumptions were broadly similar in England, Wales and Scotland, but female experience varied widely. Women in Early Modern Britain, 1450-1640 explores how this was influenced by various factors, including changes in clanship and inheritance, the employment of single women, the punishment of pregnant brides and scolds, the introduction of Protestantism, and the fusion of fairy beliefs with ideas of demonological witchcraft. Peters' text is the first comparative survey and analysis of the diversity of women's lives in Britain during the early modern period.

In Sappho in Early Modern England, Harriette Andreadis examines public and private expressions of female same-sex sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Before the language of modern sexual identities developed, a variety of discourses in both literary and extraliterary texts began to form a lexicon of female intimacy. Looking at accounts of non-normative female sexualities in travel narratives, anatomies, and even marital advice books, Andreadis outlines the vernacular through which a female same-sex erotics first entered verbal consciousness. She finds that "respectable" women of the middle classes and aristocracy who did not wish to identify themselves as sexually transgressive developed new vocabularies to describe their desires; women that we might call bisexual or lesbian, referred to in their day as tribades, fricatrices, or "rubsters," emerged in erotic discourses that allowed them to acknowledge their sexuality and still evade disapproval.