This book engages in an interdisciplinary study of the establishment and entrenchment of gender roles in early modern England. Drawing upon the methods and sources of literary criticism and social history, this edited volume shows how politics at both the elite and plebeian levels of society involved violence that either resulted from or expressed hostility toward the early modern gender system. Contributors take fresh approaches to prominent works by Shakespeare, Middleton, and Behn as well as discuss lesser known texts and events such as the execution of female heretics in Reformation Norwich and the punishment of prostitutes in seventeenth-century London to draw new conclusions about gender in early modern England.

An extended study of gender and crime in early modern England. It considers the ways in which criminal behaviour and perceptions of criminality were informed by ideas about gender and order, and explores their practical consequences for the men and women who were brought before the criminal courts. Dr Walker's innovative approach demonstrates that, contrary to received opinion, the law was often structured so as to make the treatment of women and men before the courts incommensurable. For the first time, early modern criminality is explored in terms of masculinity as well as femininity. Illuminating the interactions between gender and other categories such as class and civil war have implications not merely for the historiography of crime but for the social history of early modern England as a whole. This study therefore goes beyond conventional studies, and challenges hitherto accepted views of social interaction in the period.

Gender Matters opens the debate concerning violence in literature and the arts beyond a single national tradition and engages with multivalent aspects of both female and male gender constructs, mapping them onto depictions of violence. By defining a tight thematic focus and yet offering a broad disciplinary scope for inquiry, the present volume brings together a wide range of scholarly papers investigating a cohesive topic—gendered violence—from the perspectives of French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and Japanese literature, history, musicology, art history, and cultural studies. It interrogates the intersection of gender and violence in the early modern period, cutting across national traditions, genres, media, and disciplines. By engaging several levels of discourse, the volume advances a holistic approach to understanding gendered violence in the early modern world. The convergence of discourses concerning literature, the arts, emerging print technologies, social and legal norms, and textual and visual practices leverages a more complex understanding of gender in this period. Through the unifying lens of gender and violence the contributions to this volume comprehensively address a wide scope of diverse issues, approaches, and geographies from late medieval Japan to the European Enlightenment. While the majority of essays focus on early modern Europe, they are broadly contextualized and informed by integrated critical approaches pertaining to issues of violence and gender.

Why was it that whenever the Tudor-Stuart regime most loudly trumpeted its moderation, that regime was at its most vicious? This groundbreaking book argues that the ideal of moderation, so central to English history and identity, functioned as a tool of social, religious and political power. Thus The Rule of Moderation rewrites the history of early modern England, showing that many of its key developments – the via media of Anglicanism, political liberty, the development of empire and even religious toleration – were defined and defended as instances of coercive moderation, producing the 'middle way' through the forcible restraint of apparently dangerous excesses in Church, state and society. By showing that the quintessentially English quality of moderation was at heart an ideology of control, Ethan Shagan illuminates the subtle violence of English history and explains how, paradoxically, England came to represent reason, civility and moderation to a world it slowly conquered.

"Female protagonists are commonly overlooked in the history of crime; especially in early modern Italy, where women's scope of action is often portrayed as heavily restricted. This book redresses the notion of Italian women's passivity, arguing that women's crimes were far too common to be viewed as an anomaly. Based on over two thousand criminal complaints and investigation dossiers, Sanne Muurling charts the multifaceted impact of gender on patterns of recorded crime in early modern Bologna. While various socioeconomic and legal mechanisms withdrew women from the criminal justice process, the casebooks also reveal that women - as criminal offenders and savvy litigants - had an active hand in keeping the wheels of the court spinning"--

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of, as well as responses to, sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the functions and effects of wartime sexual violence as part of a global political economy of violence. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity in a tangled web of plunder and profit. Difficult questions of accountability are tacked; in particular, the caes of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities and other crimes.

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what—or who—must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan contends, that its logical consequence is conflict. Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime," and late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other. In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce conflict, both companionship and competition.