"Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1750 brings together research on women and gender across the Low Countries, a culturally contiguous region that was split by the Eighty Years War into the Protestant Dutch Republic in the north and the Spanish-controlled, Catholic Hapsburg Netherlands in the south. The authors of this interdisciplinary volume highlight women's experiences of social class, as family members, before the law, and as authors, artists, and patrons, as well as the workings of gender in art and literature. In studies ranging from microhistories to surveys, the book reveals the Low Countries as a remarkable historical laboratory for its topic and points to the opportunities the region holds for future scholarly investigations"--

Offering a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing, the essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures across Italy, France, England, and the Low Countries. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers. The collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and in exploring familial, political, and religious communities.

Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1750 brings together research on women and gender across the Low Countries, a culturally contiguous region that was split by the Eighty Years' War into the Protestant Dutch Republic in the North and the Spanish-controlled, Catholic Hapsburg Netherlands in the South. The authors of this interdisciplinary volume highlight women’s experiences of social class, as family members, before the law, and as authors, artists, and patrons, as well as the workings of gender in art and literature. In studies ranging from microhistories to surveys, the book reveals the Low Countries as a remarkable historical laboratory for its topic and points to the opportunities the region holds for future scholarly investigations. Contributors: Martine van Elk, Martha Howell, Martha Moffitt Peacock, Sarah Joan Moran, Amanda Pipkin, Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Margit Thøfner, and Diane Wolfthal.

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.

Surveying court life and urban life, warfare, religion, and peace, this book provides a comprehensive history of how gender was experienced in early modern Europe. Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe shows how definitions of sexuality and gender roles operated and more particularly, how such definitions--and the activities they generated and reflected--articulated concerns inside a given culture. This means that the volume embodies an interdisciplinary approach: literature as well as history, religious studies, economics, and gender studies form the basis of this cultural history of early modern Europe. There are new approaches to understanding famous figures, such as Elizabeth I, James VI and I and his wife Anna of Denmark; Francis I; St. Teresa of Avila. Other chapters investigate topics such as militarism and court culture, and wider groups, such as urban citizens and noble families. The collection also studies ways in which gender and sexual orientation were represented in literature, as well as examinations of the theoretical issues involved in studying history from the angle of gender.

Dissenting Daughters reveals that devout women made vital contributions to the spread and practice of the Reformed faith in the Dutch Republic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The six women at the heart of this study: Cornelia Teellinck, Susanna Teellinck, Anna Maria van Schurman, Sara Nevius, Cornelia Leydekker, and Henrica van Hoolwerff, were influential members of networks known for supporting a religious revival known as the Further Reformation. These women earned the support and appreciation of their religious leaders, friends, and relatives by seizing the tools offered by domestic religious study and worship and forming alliances with prominent ministers including Willem Teellinck, Gijsbertus Voetius, Wilhelmus à Brakel, and Melchior Leydekker as well as with other well-connected, well-educated women. They deployed their talents to bolster the Dutch Reformed Church from 1572, the first year its members could publicly organize, to the death of this book's last surviving subject Cornelia Leydekker in 1725. In return for their adoption of religious teachings that constricted them in many ways, they gained the authority to minister to their family members, their female friends, and a broader audience of men and women during domestic worship as well as through their written works. These "dissenting daughters" vehemently defended their faith - against Spanish and French Catholics, as well as their neighbors, politicians, and ministers within the Dutch Republic whom they judged to be lax and overly tolerant of sinful behavior, finding ways to flourish among the strictest orthodox believers within the Dutch Reformed Church.

Pathologies of Love examines the role of medicine in the debate on women, known as the querelle des femmes, in early modern France. Questions concerning women’s physical makeup and its psychological and moral consequences played an integral role in the querelle. This debate on the status of women and their role in society began in the fifteenth century and continued through the sixteenth and, as many critics would say, well beyond. In querelle works early modern medicine, women’s sexual difference, literary reception, and gendered language often merge. Literary authors perpetuated medical ideas such as the notion of allegedly fatal lovesickness, and physicians published works that included disquisitions on the moral nature of women. In Pathologies of Love, Judy Kem looks at the writings of Christine de Pizan, Jean Molinet, Symphorien Champier, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and Marguerite de Navarre, examining the role of received medical ideas in the querelle des femmes. She reconstructs how these authors interpreted the traditional courtly understanding of women’s pity or mercy on a dying lover, their understanding of contemporary debates about women’s supposed sexual insatiability and its biological effects on men’s lives and fertility, and how erotomania or erotic melancholy was understood as a fatal illness. While the two women who frame this study defended women and based much of what they wrote on personal experience, the three men appealed to male authority and tradition in their writings.

This volume of twelve interdisciplinary essays addresses the multifaceted nature of female religious identity in early modern Europe. By dismantling the boundaries between the academic disciplines of history, art history, musicology and literary studies it offers new cross-cultural readings essential to a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of female spirituality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Consisting of four sections each dealing with different parts of Europe, and discussing issues of social and spiritual identity, such as the formation of community and memory, spiritual direction and secular patronage, this compelling collection offers a significant addition to a thriving field of study.

Dynastic Colonialism analyses how women and men employed objects in particular places across the world during the early modern period in order to achieve the remarkable expansion of the House of Orange-Nassau. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent explore how the House emerged as a leading force during a period in which the Dutch accrued one of the greatest seaborne empires. Using the concept of dynastic colonialism, they explore strategic behaviours undertaken on behalf of the House of Orange-Nassau, through material culture in a variety of sites of interpretation from palaces and gardens to prints and teapots, in Europe and beyond. Using over 140 carefully selected images, the authors consider a wide range of visual, material and textual sources including portraits, glassware, tiles, letters, architecture and global spaces in order to rethink dynastic power and identity in gendered terms. Through the House of Orange-Nassau, Broomhall and Van Gent demonstrate how dynasties could assert status and power by enacting a range of colonising strategies. Dynastic Colonialism offers an exciting new interpretation of the complex story of the House of Orange-Nassau‘s rise to power in the early modern period through material means that will make fascinating reading for students and scholars of early modern European history, material culture, and gender. This book is highly illustrated throughout. The print edition features the images in black and white, whereas the eBook edition contains the illustrations in colour.

Aristocratic dynasties have long been regarded as fundamental to the development of early modern society and government. Yet recent work by political historians has increasingly questioned the dominant role of ruling families in state formation, underlining instead the continued importance and independence of individuals. In order to take a fresh look at the subject, this volume provides a broad discussion on the formation of dynastic identities in relationship to the lineage’s own history, other families within the social elite, and the ruling dynasty.