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Focusing on cases of extramarital sex, Johanna Rickman investigates fornication, adultery and bastard bearing among the English nobility during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Since members of the nobility were not generally brought before the ecclesiastical courts, which had jurisdiction over other citizens' sexual offences, Rickman's sources include collections of family papers (primarily letters), state papers, and literary texts (prescriptive manuals, love sonnets, satirical verse, and prose romances), as well as legal documents. Rickman explores how attitudes towards illicit sex varied greatly throughout the period of study, roughly 1560 - 1630. Whole some viewed it as a minor ...
This book examines how early Stuart queens navigated their roles as political players and artistic patrons in a culture deeply conflicted about the legitimacy of female authority. Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria both employed powerful female archetypes such as Amazons and the Virgin Mary in court performances. Susan Dunn-Hensley analyzes how darker images of usurping, contaminating women, epitomized by the witch, often merged with these celebratory depictions. By tracing these competing representations through the Jacobean and Caroline periods, Dunn-Hensley peels back layers of misogyny from historical scholarship and points to rich new lines of inquiry. Few have written about Anna’s religious beliefs, and comparing her Catholicism with Henrietta Maria’s illuminates the ways in which both women were politically subversive. This book offers an important corrective to centuries of negative representation, and contributes to a fuller understanding of the role of queenship in the English Civil War and the fall of the Stuart monarchy.
This volume examines analogies between marital and political ideology in early modern culture, analyzing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marriage tracts and the appropriation of their rhetoric by Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and John Webster. Just as the marriage tracts draw explicitly on political metaphors to prescribe marital decorum, early modern political treatises adopt the language of the marriage tracts, using their construction of the family unit as a model for exercising power. on important, often subversive, meanings when they are redeployed in prose fiction and drama. The woman's place within these marital and political discourses and how she fares within early modern domestic and political hierarchies are the book's primary concerns. Included here are detailed discussions of Wroth's Urania, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Othello, and The Tempest, Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Sid Ray is Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York.
Most of today's familiar fairy tales come from the stories of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, but this innovative study encourages us to explore the marvelous tales of authors from the early modern period Giovanni Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Madame Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy, and others whose works enrich and expand the canon. As author Jo Eldridge Carney shows, the queen is omnipresent in these stories, as much a hallmark of the genre as other familiar characteristics such as the number three, magical objects, and happy endings. That queens occupy such space in early modern tales is not surprising given the profound influence of so many powerful queens in the political landscapes of early modern England and Europe. Carney makes a powerful argument for the historical relevance of fairy tales and, by exploring the dynamic intersection between fictional and actual queens, shows how history and folk literature mutually enrich our understanding of the period.
High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England is a truly interdisciplinary anthology of essays including articles on such actual queen regnants as Mary I and Elizabeth I, and queen consorts such as Anne Boleyn, Anna of Denmark, and Henrietta Maria. The collection also deals with a number of literary representations of earlier historical queens such as Cleopatra, and semi-historical ones such as Gertrude, Tamora, and Lady Macbeth, and such fictional ones as Hermione and the queen of Cymbeline, all of them Shakespeare characters. This fascinating look at Renaissance queens also examines myth and folklore, Romantic or Victorian representations, and the depictions of queens like Catherine de Medici of France in twentieth century film.
The life of King James VI who united England and Scotland under one crown and became James I in 1603 is marked by contradictions. Generally praised as a good king of Scotland and a poor English one, James was a deep theological thinker, but he also inspired a superstitious frenzy which resulted in the North Berwick witch hunt and trials in the 1590s. Scholar and pedant, he was in his own view Godâs appointed ruler, yet also a foul mouthed sloven and forever tarnished with the title of the Wisest Fool in Christendom. The most glaring contrast in his personal life was between his image as a married family man and as a ruler who lavished indiscreet affection on a series of men whom he inve...
From the exemplary to the notorious to the obscure, this comprehensive and innovative encyclopedia showcases the worthy women of early modern England. Poets, princesses, or pirates, the women found in these pages are indeed worth knowing and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in the field. The book is well illustrated and liberally sprinkled with quotations either by or about the women in the text.
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, ...
This collection of new essays seeks to define the unique qualities of female heroism in literary fantasy from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s through the present. Building upon traditional definitions of the hero in myth and folklore as the root genres of modern fantasy, the essays provide a multi-faceted view of an important fantasy character type who begins to demonstrate a significant presence only in the latter 20th century. The essays contribute to the empowerment and development of the female hero as an archetype in her own right.
Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry and novels (by for instance Langland, Erasmus, Sidney, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Eliot and Lowell). But only in the last twenty years or so has it received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader cultural significance. Contributors to this book focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and soc...