The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Routledge series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study.
By Ruben Espinosa
November 17, 2016
Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England offers a new approach to evaluating the psychological 'loss' of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England by illustrating how, in the wake of Mary's demotion, re-inscriptions of her roles and meanings only proliferated, seizing hold of ...
By Sally Anne Hickson
November 17, 2016
Analyzing the artistic patronage of famous and lesser known women of Renaissance Mantua, and introducing new patronage paradigms that existed among those women, this study sheds new light the social, cultural and religious impact of the cult of female mystics of that city in the late fifteenth and ...
By Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
November 10, 2016
Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, composed in the 1540s and first published posthumously in 1558 and 1559, has long been an interpretive puzzle. De Navarre (1492-1549), sister of King Francis I of France, was a controversial figure in her lifetime. Her evangelical activities and proximity to the ...
By Julie A. Eckerle
October 31, 2016
Juxtaposing life writing and romance, this study offers the first book-length exploration of the dynamic and complex relationship between the two genres. In so doing, it operates at the intersection of several recent trends: interest in women's contributions to autobiography; greater awareness of ...
By David P. LaGuardia
September 30, 2016
Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature is an in-depth analysis of normative masculinity in a specific corpus from pre-modern Europe: narrative literature devoted to the subject of adultery and cuckoldry. The text begins with a set of general questions that serve as a conceptual ...
Edited
By Ania Loomba, Melissa E Sanchez
July 11, 2016
Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s Collaborative Book Prize 2017 Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies is a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the history, present state, and future possibilities of feminist criticism and ...
Edited
By James Daybell, Andrew Gordon
June 24, 2016
Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690 is the first collection to examine the gendered nature of women’s letter-writing in England and Ireland from the late-fifteenth century through to the Restoration. The essays collected here represent an important body of new work by a ...
By Una McIlvenna
May 26, 2016
Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron', the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress's own ...
By Susan Broomhall, Jennifer Spinks
April 21, 2011
Combining historical, historiographical, museological, and touristic analysis, this study investigates how late medieval and early modern women of the Low Countries expressed themselves through texts, art, architecture and material objects, how they were represented by contemporaries, and how they ...
By Sarah D.P. Cockram
September 17, 2013
In the first book systematically to give evidence of conjugal co-rule at an Italian Renaissance court, and the first full length scholarly study of Isabella d'Este and Francesco Gonzaga, Sarah Cockram shows their relationship in an entirely new light. The book draws on (and presents) a large ...
Edited
By Anne J. Cruz, Maria Galli Stampino
December 16, 2013
As the first comprehensive volume devoted entirely to women of both the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg royal dynasties spanning the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, this interdisciplinary collection illuminates their complex and often contradictory political functions and their ...
Edited
By Karen Bamford, Naomi J. Miller
February 04, 2016
Though recent scholarship has focused both on motherhood and on romance literature in early modern England, until now, no full length volume has addressed the notable intersections between the two topics. This collection contributes to the scholarly investigation of maternity in early modern ...