Month: March 2019

Title: Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe Volume Editors: Lisa Hopkins & Aidan Norrie Series: Gendering the Late Medieval & Early Modern World Publisher: Amsterdam University Press Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, with an emphasis on the conflict that occurred when they crossed the edges society placed on their gender. Many of the women featured in this collection have only been afforded cursory scholarly focus, or the focus has been isolated to a specific, (in)famous event. This collection…

Dancing Queen: Marie de Médicis' Ballets at the Court of Henri IV (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2019). Drawing on newly discovered primary sources as well as theories and methodologies derived from literary studies, political history, musicology, dance studies, and women’s and gender studies, Dancing Queen traces how Queen Marie de Médicis’ ballets authorized her incipient political authority through innovative verbal and visual imagery, avant-garde musical developments, and ceremonial arrangements of objects and bodies in space. Making use of women’s “semi-official” status as political agents, Marie’s ballets also manipulated the subtle social and cultural codes of international courtly…

Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque Architectural Space and Prostitution in the Early Modern Mediterranean by Emily Kuffner Publisher: Amsterdam University Press Series: Gendering the Late Medieval & Early Modern World This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish…