How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism.

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 theory. It responds to current anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline by attending to debates and differences that have emerged in light of ongoing scholarly discussions of race, affect, sexuality, and transnationalism-work that compels us continually to reassess our definitions of ’women’ and gender. Rethinking Feminism demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a reimagination of feminist aims, methods, and objects of study at this historical juncture. While the scholars contributing to Rethinking Feminism have very different interests and methods, they are united in their conviction that early modern studies must be in dialogue with, and indeed contribute to, larger theoretical and political debates about gender, race, and sexuality, and to the relationship between these areas. To this end, the essays not only analyze literary texts and cultural practices to shed light on early modern ideology and politics, but also address metacritical questions of methodology and theory. Taken together, they show how a consciousness of the complexity of the past allows us to rethink the genealogies and historical stakes of current scholarly norms and debates.

The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is the eagerly-awaited study by the feminist scholar who was among the first to address the issue of early modern female homoeroticism. Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography and medicine. Contrary to the silence and invisibility typically ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. By means of sophisticated interpretations of a comprehensive set of texts, the book not only charts a crucial shift in representations of female homoeroticism over the course of the seventeenth century, but also offers a provocative genealogy of contemporary lesbianism. A contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.

'Distracted Subjects' offers a feminist analysis of early modern madness. Carol Neely reveals the mobility & heterogeneity of discourses of 'distraction', the most common term for the condition in late 16th & early 17th century England.

Analyses the construction of gender through bodily elements and clothing in early modern England.

Patricia Phillippy's analysis of the representation of women in literature and visual arts revolves around multiple early modern senses of 'painting'. She focuses on women who paint themselves with cosmetics, women who paint on canvas and women and men who paint women, either with pigment or with words.

This work examines the lowest levels of early modern popular street literature (ballads, broadsides, song pamphlets, and chapbooks) to shed light on differences between German and English attitudes toward women and on the ways in which those attitudes intertwined with wider social and cultural conceptions.