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This collection offers a variety of approaches to aspects of women’s lives. It moves beyond men’s prescriptive pronouncements about female nature to women's lived experiences, replacing the singular woman with plural women and illuminating female agency. The contributors show that women’s lives changed over the life course and differed according to region and social class. They also demonstrate that in the early modern period the largely private spaces in women’s lives were not enclosed worlds isolated from the public spaces in which men operated. Contributors to this important collection are leading international scholars and offer strong, substantial, and archival-based research.
The culmination of a lifetime's scholarly work, this study by Sister Prudence Allen traces the concept of woman in relation to man in Western thought from ancient times to the present. This volume is the second in her study, in which she explores claims about sex and gender identity in the works of over fifty philosophers (both men and women) in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods.
What do the physical characteristics of the books acquired by elite women in the late medieval and early modern periods tell us about their owners, and what in particular can their illustrations—especially their illustrations of women—reveal? Centered on Anne, duchess of Brittany and twice queen of France, with reference to her contemporaries and successors, The Queen's Library examines the cultural issues surrounding female modes of empowerment and book production. The book aims to uncover the harmonies and conflicts that surfaced in male-authored, male-illustrated works for and about women. In her interdisciplinary investigation of the cultural and political legacy of Anne of Brittany ...
The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France provides the first comprehensive comparison of the printed debates in the 1500s over the superiority or inferiority of woman - the Querelle des femmes - and the dignity and misery of man. Analysing these writings side by side, Lyndan Warner reveals the extent to which Renaissance authors borrowed commonplaces from both traditions as they praised or blamed man or woman and habitually considered opposite and contrary points of view. In the law courts reflections on the virtues and vices of man and woman had a practical application-to win cases-and as Warner demonstrates, Parisian lawyers employed this developing rhetoric in family disputes over ...
Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural view on authority construction among early modern female intellectuals The complex relation between gender and the representation of intellectual authority has deep roots in European history. Portraits and Poses adopts a historical approach to shed new light on this topical subject. It addresses various modes and strategies by which learned women (authors, scientists, jurists, midwifes, painters, and others) sought to negotiate and legitimise their authority at the dawn of modern science in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe (1600–1800). This volume explores the transnational dimensions of intellectual networks in France, Italy, Britain, the German states and the Low Countries, among others. Drawing on a wide range of case studies from different spheres of professionalisation, it examines both individual and collective constructions of female intellectual authority through word and image. In its innovative combination of an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, this volume contributes to the growing literature on women and intellectual authority in the Early Modern Era and outlines contours for future research.
"Mirrors for Princes is a history of the business book. Predating modern leadership and management literature by thousands of years, common to cultures throughout the world, mirrors for princes, as this genre was known, taught kings, queens, sultans, and other rulers how to lead their subjects. Machiavelli's The Prince and Aristotle's tips for tyrants in The Politics are but the best-known examples. Often written for general audiences, this literature also taught readers to copy the virtues of fabled leaders and to follow the lead of their own rulers. After falling out of favor for the last two centuries, the genre found new life in modern mirrors for managers, which are riddled with the same self-serving clichés. This book seeks to familiarize readers with the clichés of mirrors for princes, so they can more easily recognize them in both academic and popular literature on leadership"--
English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood uncovers a tradition of women’s utopianism that extends back to medieval women’s monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures. The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Lit...
In All the King’s Women Jan Rüdiger investigates medieval elite polygyny and its ‘uses’ in Northern Europe with a comparative perspective on England and France as well as Iberia.
This is the first volume in a series of studies on the late Middle Ages, covering the period from around 1300 to 1550. Each volume aims to provide exhaustive and diverse treatments of one significant example of late medieval culture. Volume one explores the late medieval epistle.