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As the notion of government by consent took hold in early modern England, many authors used childhood and maturity to address contentious questions of political representation - about who has a voice and who can speak on his or her own behalf. For John Milton, Ben Jonson, William Prynne, Thomas Hobbes and others, the period between infancy and adulthood became a site of intense scrutiny, especially as they examined the role of a literary education in turning children into political actors. Drawing on new archival evidence, Blaine Greteman argues that coming of age in the seventeenth century was a uniquely political act. His study makes a compelling case for understanding childhood as a decisive factor in debates over consent, autonomy and political voice, and will offer graduate students and scholars a new perspective on the emergence of apolitical children's literature in the eighteenth century.

Making babies was a mysterious process in early modern England. Mary Fissell employs a wealth of popular sources - ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to produce the first account of women's reproductive bodies in early-modern cheap print. Since little was certain about the mysteries of reproduction, the topic lent itself to a rich array of theories. The insides of women's reproductive bodies provided a kind of open interpretive space, a place where many different models of reproductive processes might be plausible. These models were profoundly shaped by cultural concerns; they afforded many ways to discuss and make sense of social, political, and economic changes such as the Protestant Reformation and the Civil War. They gave ordinary people ways of thinking about the changing relations between men and women that characterized these larger social shifts. Fissell offers a new way to think about the history of the body by focusing on women's bodies, showing how ideas about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth were also ways of talking about gender relations and thus all relations of power. Where other histories of the body have focused on learned texts and male bodies, Vernacular Bodies looks at the small books and pamphlets that ordinary people read and listened to - and provides new ways to understand how such people experienced political conflicts and social change.

G.F. Still’s History of Paediatrics restricted the philosopher John Locke’s (1632–1704) influence in paediatrics to pedagology and specifically his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693).1 This significantly limits Locke’s immense ongoing influence on child health care and human rights. Locke was a physician and had a lifelong interest in medicine. His case records and journals relate some of his paediatric cases. His correspondence includes letters from Thomas Sydenham, the “English Hippocrates” (1624–89) when Locke has sought advice on a paediatric case as well as other correspondence from parents regarding child health care and management of learning disability. Locke assisted and influenced Thomas Sydenham with his writing, and Locke’s own work, Two Treatises on Government, clearly stated the rights of children and limitation of parental authority. Furthermore, Locke’s thoughts on Poor Law, making an economic case for a workhouse in every parish, were implemented from 1834.

The essay examines Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, which portrays the love of honor animating political life in early Rome. Demonstrating the relation of the soul and the city, the poem depicts the psychology of honor, envy, and shame; the near identity of moral worth and public reputation; the close connection between deeds and truth, action and speech; the insufficiency of moral intention; the city as an association of fathers; the relation between the inner and the outer man, soul and body; manly courage as proof of feminine chastity; the private effects of a fully public life; and, generally, the simultaneously self-denying, self-affirming core of Rome's political life. The essay concludes by considering why Shakespeare, in presenting a historically accurate portrait of early Rome, puts it in the mouth not of a Roman, but of a medieval or Renaissance narrator.

The child murder in George Eliot's \"Adam Bede\" has shaped a relationship between this work and its historical context that has dominated its literary-critical and historical treatment. McDonagh argues that such endeavors nevertheless fail to take account of the particular nature of child murder in \"Adam Bede,\" its operation as a nodal point or repository of associations with ideas and social formations from diverse historical and political contexts.

John Dunton's 1696 parable about the dangers of middle-class women dressing like \"persons of quality\" has its roots in the more or less endemic anxiety that prostitutes' \"excellent Art . . . can easily turn a Sempstress into a waiting Gentlewoman.\" Recent scholarship on early modern prostitution and pornography interprets the time-honored conflation of women's bodies and the clothes they wear largely in economic terms, emphasizing English culture's treatment of prostitution as a degraded expression of capitalist production and consumption. But Dunton's allegory eludes this economic account of clothing's relationship to prostitution and pornography as he insists that clothing causes middle-class women's social and sexual degradation, rather than masking it. This insistence situates Dunton's warning within a half-century-long tradition of antidemocratic political pornographic satire that used clothing as a political rather than a social or economic signifier.