1st Edition
Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation The Skull Beneath the Skin
Introduction; Contexts: 1. Modern vs early modern bodies: anorexia nervosa and other historically situated forms of self-starvation; 2. Fasting and food in early modern society: ‘At dinner, supper or in taverns’; 3. Women, food and early modern households, ‘None other wyse than the capitaine of a garison’; 4. The female body in early modern England - ‘Oh, that we may call these delicate creatures ours/and not their appetites!’; 5. Women and self-starvation on the Renaissance stage - ‘Dead’ ‘Dead!’ ‘Starved!’; Case Studies: 6. Catherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor: eating and identity, royalty and resistance; 7. ‘The body of a weak and feeble woman’: Elizabeth and eating, power, politics and penetration; 8. ‘With my body, I thee worship’: The tragedy of Lady Katherine Grey; 9. 'So Wilfully Bent': Arbella Stuart, starvation, strategy and survival; Conclusion: The skull beneath the skin: starvation and embodied selfhood then and now; Bibliography; Appendix: supporting studies on modern eating disorders, a selection
Biography
Sasha Garwood is an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on gender, sex and food as a nexus of cultural anxieties from the early modern period to the present. She studied at UCL and Keble College Oxford, is currently a Fellow of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, and teaches History at Sheffield and English Literature at the University of Nottingham.
