The book contains perceptions of nature and ecology in writings by English women authors from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Includes discussion of works by the writers: Mary Wroth (ca. 1586-ca. 1640), Margaret Cavendish (1624?-1674), Mary Rich Warwick (1625-1678), Catherine Talbot (1721-1770), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).

In 16th and 17th century England conversation was an embodied act that held the capacity to negotiate, manipulate and transform social relationships. Early Modern Women in Conversation illuminates the extent to which gender shaped conversational interaction and demonstrates the significance of conversation as a rhetorical practice for women.

Through fifteen essays that work from a rich array of primary sources, this collection makes the novel claim that early modern European women, like men, had a youth. European culture recognised that, between childhood and full adulthood, early modern women experienced distinctive physiological, social, and psychological transformations. Drawing on two mutually shaped layers of inquiry -- cultural constructions of youth and lived experiences -- these essays exploit a wide variety of sources, including literary and autobiographical works, conduct literature, judicial and asylum records, drawings, and material culture. The geographical and temporal ranges traverse England, Ireland, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, and Mexico from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. This volume brings fresh attention to representations of female youth, their own life writings, young women's training for adulthood, courtship, and the emergent sexual lives of young unmarried women.

This book explores how women of the poorer and middling sorts in early modern England negotiated a patriarchal culture in which they were generally excluded, marginalized, or subordinated. It focuses on the networks of close friends ('gossips') which gave them a social identity beyond the narrowly domestic, providing both companionship and practical support in disputes with husbands and with neighbours of either sex. The book also examines the micropolitics of the household, with its internal alliances and feuds, and women's agency in neighbourhood politics, exercised by shaping local public opinion, exerting pressure on parish officials, and through the role of informal female juries. If women did not openly challenge male supremacy, they could often play a significant role in shaping their own lives and the life of the local community.

This volume continues and amplifies a series of conversations initiated in 1990 at the conference, "Attending to Women in Early Modern England," sponsored by the University of Maryland's Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies on the College Park campus. The volume celebrates the work of the almost 400 scholars who contributed - as plenary speakers, workshop leaders, and participants - to "Attending to Early Modern Women," held in April 1994, once again at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Early Modern Women and the Problem of Evil examines the concept of theodicy—the attempt to reconcile divine perfection with the existence of evil—through the lens of early modern female scholars. This timely volume knits together the perennial problem of defining evil with current scholarly interest in women’s roles in the evolution of religious philosophy. Accessible for those without a background in philosophy or theology, Jill Graper Hernandez’s text will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates as well as graduate students and researchers.

Nancy Gutierrez's exploration of female food refusal during the early modern period contributes to the ongoing conversation about female subjectivity and agency in a number of ways. Exploring the portrayals of the anorectic woman in the work of Ford, Shakespeare, Heywood and others and arguing that the survival of these women undermines regulatory policies exercised over them by those in authority, Gutierrez here demonstrates how female food refusal is a unique demonstration of individuality. The chapters of this book reveal how the common cultural association of women and food manifests itself in the early modern period as a trope in which the female body is a site of political apprehension and cultural change. This study is neither a history nor a survey of the anorectic female body in early modern England, but rather individual yet related discussions in which the starved female body is seen to signify certain (un)expressed tensions within the culture.