1st Edition
Embodiment, Identity, and Gender in the Early Modern Age
Embracing a multiconfessional and transnational approach that stretches from central Europe, to Scotland and England, from Iberia to Africa and Asia, this volume explores the lives, work, and experiences of women and men during the tumultuous fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.
The authors, all leading experts in their fields, utilize a broad range of methodologies from cultural history to women’s history, from masculinity studies to digital mapping, to explore the dynamics and power of constructed gender roles. Ranging from intellectual representations of virginity to the plight of refugees, from the sea journeys of Jesuit missionaries to the impact of Transatlantic economies on women’s work, from nuns discovering new ways to tolerate different religious expressions to bleeding corpses used in criminal trials, these essays address the wide diversity and historical complexity of identity, gender, and the body in the early modern age.
With its diversity of topics, fields, and interests of its authors, this volume is a valuable source for students and scholars of the history of women, gender, and sexuality as well as social and cultural history in the early modern world.
Foreword
Natalie Zemon Davis
Introduction
The body and manifestations of gender
1. The strange survivial of the bleeding corpse
Joel F. Harrington
2. Martin Luther and the Reformation of virginity
Amy E. Leonard
3. Martin Luther’s gendered reflections on Eve
David M. Whitford
4. A "Prodigal son" remembers John of the cross
Jodi Bilinkoff
5. Women, conflict, and peacemaking in German villages
Marc R. Forster
6. James I and unruly women
Carole Levin
Women between reform, subversion, and self-determination
7. Protestant and Catholic nuns confronting the Reformation
Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer
8. Female religious communities during the Thirty Years’ War
Sigrun Haude
9. Conflicts between male reformers and female monastics
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt
10. Anna Maria van Schurman: poetry as exegesis
John L. Thompson
11. Sacral systems: the challenge of change
Raymond A. Mentzer
12. Catholic women in the Dutch Golden Age
Christine Kooi
13. Women and religious expression in Calvin’s Geneva
Jeffrey R. Watt
Gendered dynamics of displacement, migration, and conflict
14. Women, gender, and religious refugees
Nicholas Terpstra
15. Refugee wives, widows, and mothers
Timothy Fehler
16. Did the Jesuits introduce "Global Studies"?
Kathleen M. Comerford
17. Devotion at sea: ship voyages and Jesuit masculinity
Ulrike Strasser
18. Spanish women, work, and the early modern Atlantic economy
Allyson M. Poska
Afterword
Susan Karant-Nunn
Biography
Amy E. Leonard (Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University) focuses on women, gender, and sexuality in Reformation Germany. She is the author of Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany. She is currently working on a book that compares and contrasts changing views of female sexuality during the Reformations.
David M. Whitford (Professor of Reformation Studies at Baylor University) is a senior editor of The Sixteenth Century Journal. He is the author of A Reformation Life and The Curse of Ham in Early Modern Europe. He is currently working on the construction of masculinity during the Reformations.
