This collection of essays contains a wealth of information on the nature of the family in the early modern period. This is a core topic within economic and social history courses which is taught at ...most universities. This text gives readers an overview of how feminist historians have been interpreting the history of the family, ever since Laurence Stone's seminal work FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE IN ENGLAND 1500-1800 was published in 1977.The text is divided into three coherent parts on the following themes: bodies and reproduction; maternity from a feminist perspective; and family relationships. Each part is prefaced by a short introduction commenting on new work in the area.This book will appeal to a wide variety of students because of its sociological, historical and economic foci.
Sex before Sex Bromley, James M; Stockton, Will
02/2013
eBook
What is sex exactly? Does everyone agree on a definition? And does that definition hold when considering literary production in other times and places?Sex before Sexmakes clear that we cannot simply ...transfer our contemporary notions of what constitutes a sex act into the past and expect them to be true for the people who were then reading literature and watching plays. The contributors confront how our current critical assumptions about definitions of sex restrict our understanding of representations of sexuality in early modern England.
Drawing attention to overlooked forms of sexual activity in early modern culture, from anilingus and interspecies sex to "chin-chucking" and convivial drinking,Sex before Sexoffers a multifaceted view of what sex looked like before the term entered history. Through incisive interpretations of a wide range of literary texts, includingRomeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Paradise Lost, the figure of Lucretia, and pornographic poetry, this collection queries what might constitute sex in the absence of a widely accepted definition and how a historicized concept of sex affects the kinds of arguments that can be made about early modern sexualities.
Contributors: Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Will Fisher, CUNY-Lehman College; Stephen Guy-Bray, U of British Columbia; Melissa J. Jones, Eastern Michigan U; Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College; Nicholas F. Radel, Furman U; Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt U; Christine Varnado, U of Buffalo-SUNY.
This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early ...modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life.
Acknowledgments Introduction, Rebecca Totaro Section One: Making the Plague Serve Form and Function, 1563-1666 1: Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire, William Kerwin 2: Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604, Kelly J. Stage 3: Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality, Erin Sullivan Section Two: Governing Bodies in Plague-Time 4: Contagious Figurations: Plague and the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth, Richelle Munkhoff 5: "Thinking to pass unknown": Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I, James D. Mardock Section Three: Performances, Playhouses, and the Sites of Re-Creation 6: "Sweet recreation barred": The Case for Playgoing in Plague-time, Nichole DeWall 7: Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague: Infections in Speech and Space, Paula S. Berggren 8: "A plague on both your houses": Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama, Barbara H. Traister Section Four: Contemporary Turns 9: Plague in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta, Matthew Thiele 10: Dekker’s and Middleton’s Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature, Charles Whitney Afterword: Plague and Metaphor, Ernest B. Gilman Notes on Contributors Index
Rebecca Totaro is Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. She is the author of Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton .
Ernest Gilman is Professor of English at NYU. He is the author of Plague Writing in Early Modern England .
In early modern English medicine, the balance of fluids in the body was seen as key to health. Menstruation was widely believed to regulate blood levels in the body and so was extensively discussed ...in medical texts. Sara Read examines all forms of literature, from plays and poems, to life-writing, and compares these texts with the medical theories.
This is the first scholarly study in which the production, trade and political effects of opium and its derivatives are shown over many centuries, and in many countries (China, India, Indonesia, ...Japan, all Southeast Asian countries and some in Europe and the Americas). Starting in the 16th century, slavery and opium became the two means with which the bodies and souls of men and women in the tropics were exploited in western imperialism and colonialism. The first waned with the abolition movement in the 19th century, but opium production and trade continued to spread, with the associated serious social and political effects. Around 1670 the Dutch introduced opium as a cash crop for mass production and distribution in India and Indonesia. China became the main target in the 19th century, and only succeeded in getting rid of the opium problem around 1950. Then it had already been transformed from an “Eastern” into a “Western” problem.
Simon Forman (1552-1611) is one of London's most infamous astrologers. Whilst he was consulted thousands of times a year for medical and other questions he stood apart from the medical elite as he ...boldly asserted medical ideas that were at odds with most learned physicians. In this fascinating book, Lauren Kassell vividly recovers the world of medicine and magic in Elizabethan London.
Making babies was a mysterious process in early modern England. Mary Fissell employs a wealth of popular sources - ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to ...produce the first account of women's reproductive bodies in early-modern cheap print. Since little was certain about the mysteries of reproduction, the topic lent itself to a rich array of theories. The insides of women's reproductive bodies provided a kind of open interpretive space, a place where many different models of reproductive processes might be plausible. These models were profoundly shaped by cultural concerns; they afforded many ways to discuss and make sense of social, political, and economic changes such as the Protestant Reformation and the Civil War. They gave ordinary people ways of thinking about the changing relations between men and women that characterized these larger social shifts. Fissell offers a new way to think about the history of the body by focusing on women's bodies, showing how ideas about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth were also ways of talking about gender relations and thus all relations of power. Where other histories of the body have focused on learned texts and male bodies, Vernacular Bodies looks at the small books and pamphlets that ordinary people read and listened to - and provides new ways to understand how such people experienced political conflicts and social change.
Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of ...the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City. The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca. This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.
The Ramayana, an ancient epic of India, with audiences across vast stretches of time and geography, continues to influence numberless readers socially and morally through its many re-tellings. Made ...available in English for the first time, the 16th century version presented here is by Candravati, a woman poet from Bengal. It is a highly individual rendition as a tale told from a woman's point of view which, instead of celebrating masculine heroism, laments the suffering of women caught in the play of male ego.
This book presents a translation and commentary on the text, with an extensive introduction that scrutinizes its social and cultural context and correlates its literary identity with its ideological implications. Taken together, the narrative and the critical study offered here expand the understanding both of the history of women's self-expression in India and the cultural potency of the epic tale. The book is of interest equally to students and researchers of South Asian narratives, Ramayana studies and gender issues.
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