This collection of essays examines women's involvement in politics in early modern England, as writers, as members of kinship and patronage networks, and as petitioners, intermediaries and patrons. It challenges conventional conceptualizations of female power and influence, defining 'politics' broadly in order to incorporate women excluded from formal, male-dominated state institutions. The chapters embrace a range of interdisciplinary approaches: historical, literary, palaeographic, linguistic and gender based. They deal with a variety of issues related to female intervention within political spheres, including women's rhetorical, persuasive and communicative skills; the production by women of a range of texts that can be termed 'political'; the politicization of marital, family and kinship networks; and female involvement in patronage and court politics. Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450-700 also looks at ways in which images of female power and authority were represented within canonical texts, such as Shakespeare's plays and Milton's epic poetry. The volume extends the range of areas and texts for the study of women, gender and politics, and locates women's political, social and cultural activities within the contexts of the family, locality and wider national stage. It argues for a blurring of the boundaries between the traditional categories of the 'public' and the 'private,' the 'domestic' and the 'political'; and enhances our understanding of the ways in which women exerted political force through informal, intimate and personal, as well as more official, and formal channels of power. As a whole the book makes an important contribution to the reassessment of early modern politics from the perspective of women.

This book considers the ways that family relationships (parental, marital, sibling or other) mimic, and stand in for, political ones in the Early Modern period, and vice versa. Bringing together leading international scholars in literary-historical fields to produce scholarship informed by the perspective of contemporary politics, the volume examines the ways in which the family defines itself in transformative moments of potential crisis – birth and death, maturation, marriage – moments when the family is negotiating its position within and through broader cultural frameworks, and when, as a result, family ‘politics’ become most apparent.

This interdisciplinary volume of essays brings together a team of leading early modern historians and literary scholars in order to examine the changing conceptions, character, and condemnation of 'heresy' in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Definitions of 'heresy' and 'heretics' were the subject of heated controversies in England from the English Reformation to the end of the seventeenth century. These essays illuminate the significant literary issues involved in both defending and demonising heretical beliefs, including the contested hermeneutic strategies applied to the interpretation of the Bible, and they examine how debates over heresy stimulated the increasing articulation of arguments for religious toleration in England. Offering fresh perspectives on John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and others, this volume should be of interest to all literary, religious and political historians working on early modern English culture.

Ideas about marriage, gender and the family were central to political debate in late Stuart England. Newly available in paperback, this book shows how political argument became an arena in which the proper relations between men and women, parents and children, public and private were defined and contested. Using sources that range from high political theory to scurrilous lampoons, she considers public debates about succession, resistance and divorce. Weil examines the allegedly fraudulent birth of the Prince of Wales in 1688, the uses to which Williamite propagandists put the image of the paradoxically sovereign but obedient Mary II, anxieties about the influence of bedchamber women on Queen Anne, the political self-image of the notorious Duchess of Marlborough, the relationship of feminism and Tory ideology in the polemical writings of Mary Astell and the scandal novels of Delariviere Manley. Solidly grounded in current historical scholarship, but written in an engaging manner accessible to non-specialists, this book will interest students of literature, gender studies, political culture and political theory as well as historians.

In this book, McMahon considers Early Modern revenge plays from a political science perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of family and state institutions. Plays set for close study are The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Malcontent and The Duchess of Malfi. The plays are read as unique events occupying positions in historical process concerning the privatisation of the family (by means of symbolism and concrete household strategies such as budgeting and surveillance) and the subsequent appropriation of the family and its methods by the state. The effect is that family becomes an unofficial organ of the state. This process, however, also involves the reform of the state along lines demanded by the private family. McMahon’s critical method, derived from the theory of Bourdieu, Bataille, and Girard, maps capital transactions to reveal emotionally charged, often idiosyncratic responses to issues of shared concern. Such issues include state corruption, the management of women, the performance of roles according to gender, the uses of surveillance, and the ethics of sacrifice.

The Politics of Female Households is the first collection that seeks to integrate ladies-in-waiting into the master narrative of early modern court studies. Presenting evidence and analysis of the multifarious ways in which ‘women above stairs’ shaped the European courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it argues for a re-assessment of their political influence. The cultural agency of ladies-in-waiting is viewed in the reflection of portraiture, pamphlets and masques: their political dealings and patronage are revealed through analysis of letters, family networks, career patterns, gift exchange and household structures, as well as their activities in the fields of intelligence-gathering and espionage. By concentrating on a previously neglected area of female agency, this collection demonstrates clearly that the political climate of Europe was often shaped outside the male-dominated institutions of government and administration. Contributors include: Helen Graham-Matheson, Hannah Leah Crummé, Katrin Keller, Vanessa de Cruz, Birgit Houben, Dries Raeymaekers, Janet Ravenscroft, Una McIlvenna, Rosalind K. Marshall, Oliver Mallick, Cynthia Fry, Nadine Akkerman, Sara J. Wolfson, Fabian Persson, and Jeroen Duindam.

A common literary language linked royal absolutism to radical religion and republicanism in seventeenth-century England. Authors from both sides of the Civil Wars, including Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and the Quakers, adapted the analogy between family and state to support radically different visions of political community. They used family metaphors to debate the limits of political authority, rethink gender roles, and imagine community in a period of social and political upheaval. While critical attention has focused on how the common analogy linking father and king, family and state, bolstered royal and paternal claims to authority and obedience, its meaning was in fact intensely contested. In this wide-ranging study, Su Fang Ng analyses the language and metaphors used to describe the relationship between politics and the family in both literary and political writings and offers a fresh perspective on how seventeenth-century literature reflected as well as influenced political thought.