The wives of rulers in early modern Europe did far more than provide heirs for their principalities and adornment for their courts. In this study, Judith Aikin examines the exceptionally well-documented actions of one such woman, Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1637-1706), in order to expand our understanding of the role of ruler’s consort in the small principalities characteristic of Germany during this period. Aikin explores a wide range of writings by her subject, including informal letters to another woman, hundreds of devotional song texts, manuscript books both devotional and practical, and published pamphlets and books. Also important for this study are the plays, paintings, and musical works that adorned the court under Aemilia Juliana’s patronage; the books, poems, and sermons published in her honor; and the massive memorial volume printed and distributed soon after her death. This material, when coupled with the more scanty record in official documents, reveals the nature and scope of Aemilia Juliana’s role as full partner in the ruling couple. Among the most important findings based on this evidence are those related to Aemilia Juliana’s advocacy for women of all social classes through her authorship and publications, her support for the education of girls, her efforts to ameliorate the fear and suffering of pregnant and birthing women, and her contributions to female support networks. In examining the career of a consort whose various activities are so well documented, this study helps to fill in the blanks in the documentary record of numerous consorts across early modern Europe, and serves as a model for future research on other consorts at other courts.

Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe investigates the gendered nature of political culture across early modern Europe by exploring the relationship between gender, power, and political authority and influence. This collection offers a rethinking of what constituted ‘politics’ and a reconsideration of how men and women operated as part of political culture. It demonstrates how underlying structures could enable or constrain political action, and how political power and influence could be exercised through social and cultural practices. The book is divided into four parts - diplomacy, gifts and the politics of exchange; socio-economic structures; gendered politics at court; and voting and political representations – each of which looks at a series of interrelated themes exploring the ways in which political culture is inflected by questions of gender. In addition to examples drawn from across Europe, including Austria, the Dutch Republic, the Italian States and Scandinavia, the volume also takes a transnational comparative approach, crossing national borders, while the concluding chapter, by Merry Wiesner-Hanks, offers a global perspective on the field and encourages comparative analysis both chronologically and geographically. As the first collection to draw together early modern gender and political culture, this book is the perfect starting point for students exploring this fascinating topic.

Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity? Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical "disciplined" subject of church-state power.

Today the friendships that grab people’s imaginations are those that reach across inequalities of class and race. The friendships that seem to have exerted an analogous level of fascination in early modern France were those that defied the assumption, inherited from Aristotle and patristic sources, that friendships between men and women were impossible. Together, the essays in Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. The revival of Plato’s friendship texts in the sixteenth century challenged Aristotle’s rigid ideal of perfect friendship between men. In the seventeenth century, a new imperative of heterosociality opened a space for the cultivation of cross-gender friendships, while the spiritual friendships of the Catholic Reformation modeled relationships that transcended the gendered dynamics of galanterie. Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France argues that the imaginative experimentation in friendships between men and women was a distinctive feature of early modern French culture. The ten essays in this volume address friend-making as a process that is creative of self and responsive to changing social and political circumstances. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices. By showing that the benefits and the risks of friendship are magnified when gender roles and relations are unsettled, the essays in this volume highlight the relevance of early modern friend-making to friendship in the contemporary world.

Women’s life writing in general has too often been ignored, dismissed, or relegated to a separate category in those few studies of the genre that include it. The present work addresses these issues and offers a countervailing argument that focuses on the contributions of women writers to the study of autobiography in Spanish during the early modern period. There are, indeed, examples of autobiographical writing by women in Spain and its New World empire, evident as early as the fourteenth-century Memorias penned by Doña Leonor López de Cordóba and continuing through the seventeenth-century Cartas of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. What sets these accounts apart, the author shows, are the variety of forms adopted by each woman to tell her life and the circumstances in which she adapts her narrative to satisfy the presence of male critics-whether ecclesiastic or political, actual or imagined-who would dismiss or even alter her life story. Analyzing how each of these women viewed her life and, conversely, how their contemporaries-both male and female-received and sometimes edited her account, Howe reveals the tension in the texts between telling a ’life’ and telling a ’lie’.

In nahezu allen Gesellschaften und Epochen ist das Heroische vielfach gegendert. Die soziale und kulturelle Produktion des Heroischen ist jedoch nicht ausschließlich mit dem Instrumentarium der Männlichkeitsforschung zu fassen, und ebenso wenig scheint es sinnvoll, Frauen bzw. Weiblichkeit in diesem Zusammenhang lediglich als Ausnahmen zu verstehen. Vielmehr gilt es, den relationalen Charakter ernst zu nehmen. Der vorliegende Band unternimmt erstmals den Versuch, Geschlecht als analytische Kategorie für die Heroismusforschung fruchtbar zu machen. Auf der Basis vielfältiger geisteswissenschaftlicher Ansätze dient diese Kategorie als 'Spurensucherin' (tracer) des Heroischen und als Instrument zur Untersuchung der historischen Bedingungen, medialen und performativen Erscheinungsformen sowie zeiträumlichen Konjunkturen und Transformationen. Diese gilt es, mit Hilfe der Kategorie Geschlecht und unter Nutzung der zugehörigen Eigenschaften neu auszumessen.

This book retraces the life and experience of Princess Louisa Ulrika of Prussia (1720-1782), who became queen of Sweden, with a particular emphasis on her political role and activities. As crown princess (1744-1751), queen (1751-1771) and then queen dowager (1771-1782) of Sweden, Louisa Ulrika took an active role in political matters. From the moment she arrived in Sweden, and throughout her life, Louisa Ulrika worked tirelessly towards increasing the power of the monarchy. Described variously as fierce, proud, haughty, intelligent, self-conscious of her due royal prerogatives, filled with political ambitions, and accused by many of her contemporaries of wanting to restore absolutism, she never diverted from her objective to make the Swedish monarchy stronger, despite obstacles and adversities. As such, she embodied the perfect example of a female consort who was in turn a political agent, instrument and catalyst. More than just a biography, this book places Louisa Ulrika within the wider European context, thus shedding light on gender and politics in the early modern period.