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Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern Englandexamines the competing narratives of property told by and about women in the early modern period. Through letters, legal treatises, case law, wills, and works of literature, the contributors explore women's complex roles as subjects and agents in commercial and domestic economies, and as objects shaped by a network of social and legal relationships. By constructing conversations across the disciplinary boundaries of legal and social history, sociology and literary criticism, the collection explores a diverse range of women's property relationships. Recent research has revealed fissures in our knowledge about women's property relationships within a regime characterized by competing jurisdictions, diverse systems of tenure, and multiple concepts of property.Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern Englandturns to these points of departure for the study of women's legal status and property relationships in the early modern period. This interdisciplinary analysis of women and property is written in an accessible manner and will become a valuable resource for scholars and students of Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, early modern social and legal history, and women's studies.

This book presents a fascinating examination of modern Indian philosophical thought from the margins. It considers the subject from two perspectives - how it has been understood beyond India and how Indian thinkers have treated Western ideas in the context of Indian society. The book discusses the concepts of the self, the other and the border that underline various debates on modernity. In this framework, it proposes the notion of the other as an enabler in taking cue from the lives of Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. It focuses on the nature and compulsions of the colonised self and its response to the body of unfamiliar and sometimes oppressive ideas. The study traces these themes with allusion to the works of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon and Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya and the Bhagavad Gita. The author exposes the limitations in existing theories of self, the incompatibility between the slavery of self and svaraj in ideas, how the pre-modern village intersects modern city and democracy, the radical challenges that confront society with its accumulated social evils, inequality, hierarchy, and the need for reform and non-violence. This engaging work will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Indian philosophy, social and political philosophy, Indian political theory, postcolonialism and South Asian studies.

This collection of essays looks at the various ways in which women have coped financially in a male-dominated world. Chapters focus on Europe and Latin America, and cover the whole of the modern period.

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. Contents: Introduction: Rethinking women and politics in early modern England, James Daybell; Sisterhood, friendship and the power of English aristocratic women, 1450-1550, Barbara J. Harris; A rhetoric of requests: genre and linguistic scripts in Elizabethan women's suitors' letters, Lynne Magnusson; Politics in the Elizabethan Privy Chamber: Lady Mary Sidney and Kat Ashley, Natalie Mears; Portingale women and politics in late Elizabethan London, Alan Stewart; Negotiating favour: the letters of Lady Ralegh, Karen Robertson; 'Suche newes as on the Quenes hye wayes we have mett': the news and intelligence networks of Elizabeth Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury (c.1527-1608), James Daybell; Esther Inglis and the English succession crisis of 1599, Tricia Bracher; The Cavendish-Talbot women: playing a high-stakes game, Sara Jayne Steen; Aristocratic women, power, patronage and family networks at the Jacobean Court, 1603-25, Helen Payne; Anne of Denmark and the historical contextualisation of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII, Susan Frye; Mothers, lovers and others: royalist women, Jerome de Groot; Beyond microhistory: the use of women's manuscripts in a widening political arena, Elizabeth Clarke; Loyal and dutiful subjects: English nuns and Stuart politics, Claire Walker; Assuming gentility: Thomas Middleton, Mary Carleton, Aphra Behn, Valerie Wayne; Index.

\"Most of the women who ever lived left no trace of their existence on the record of history. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women of the middling and lower levels of society left no letters or diaries in which they expressed what they felt or thought. Criminal courts and magistrates kept few records of their testimonies, and no ecclesiastical court records are known to survive for the French Roman Catholic Church between 1540 and 1667. For the most part, we cannot hear the voices of ordinary French women-- but this study allows us to do so. Based on the evidence of 1,200 cases brought before the consistories, or moral courts, of the Huguenot church of Languedoc between 1561 and 1615, The Voices of Nîmes allows us to access ordinary women's everyday lives: their speech, behavior, and attitudes relating to love, faith, and marriage, as well as friendship and sex. Women appeared frequently before the consistory because one of the chief functions of moral discipline was the regulation of sexuality, and women were thought to be primarily responsible for sexual sin. This means that the registers include over a thousand testimonies by and about women, most of whom left no other record to posterity\"-- Provided by publisher.

Exploring the ways in which women have formed and defined expressions of culture in a range of geographical, political, and historical settings, this collection of essays examines women's figurative and literal roles as \"sites\" of culture from the 16th century to the present day. The diversity of chronological, geographical and cultural subjects investigated by the contributors-from the 16th century to the 20th, from Renaissance Italy to Puritan Boston to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to post-war Japan, from parliamentary politics to the politics of representation-provides a range of historical outlooks. The collection brings an unusual variety of methodological approaches to the project of discovering intersections among women's studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history, and art history, and expands beyond the Anglo- and Eurocentric focus often found in other works in the field. The volume presents an in-depth, investigative study of a tightly-constructed set of crucial themes, including that of the female body as a governing trope in political and cultural discourses; the roles played by women and notions of womanhood in redefining traditions of ceremony, theatricality and spectacle; women's iconographies and personal spaces as resources that have shaped cultural transactions and evolutions; and finally, women's voices-speaking and writing, both-as authors of cultural record and destiny. Throughout the volume the themes are refracted chronologically, geographically, and disciplinarily as a means to deeper understanding of their content and contexts. Women as Sites of Culture represents a productive collaboration of historians from various disciplines in coherently addressing issues revolving around the roles of gender, text, and image in a range of cultures and periods. Contents:Introduction; The female body as the site of polemics: The rhetoric of corporeality and the political subject: containing the dissenting female body in civil war England, Christopher Orchard; 'As strong as any man': Sojourner Truth's tall tale embodiment, Alison Piepmeier; Flappers and shawls: the female embodiment of Irish national identity in the 1920s, Louise Ryan; 'We are going to carve revenge on your back': language, culture, and the female body in Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Lisa Plummer Crafton; 'If this is improper,...then I am all improper, and you must give me up': Daisy Miller and other uppity white women as resistant emblems of America, Lisa Johnson; Staging the sights of culture, staging women: theater, ritual, and ceremony: Bodies political and social: royal widows in renaissance ceremonial, Elizabeth McCartney; Eroticizing virtue: The role of Cleopatra in early modern drama, Reina Green; Applauding Shakespeare's Ophelia in the 18th century: sexual desire, politics. and the good woman; Susan Lamb; Mothers of invention: prostitute-actresses of the late 19th-century Bengali theatre, Sudipto Chatterjee; 'Art' for men, 'manners' for women: how women transformed the tea ceremony in modern Japan, Etsuko Kato; Si(gh)ting the woman as cultural resource: Portrait medals of Vittoria Colonna: representing the learned woman, Marjorie Och; Si(gh)ting the mistress of the house: Anne Clifford and architectural space, Elizabeth V. Chew; The 'wild woman' in the culture of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, Lynn Lubamersky; 'At the end of the walk by Madam Mazarines lodgings': si(gh)ting the transgressive woman in accounts of the restoration court, Susan Shifrin; The female voice as the site of cultural authority: 'Why do you call me to teach the court?': Anne Hutchinson and the making of cultural authority, Ross J. Pudaloff; A criticism of contradiction: Anna Leticia Barbauld and the 'problem' of 19th-century women's writing, Robin DeRosa; Silent at the wall: women in Israeli Remembrance Day ceremonies, Kristine Peleg; Revisiting a site of cultural bondage: JoAnn Gibson Robinson's Boycott Memoir, Ruth Ellen Kocher; Bibliography; Index.

\"In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World. The Dutch would not have been able to achieve military victories without the native alliances they carefully cultivated. Indeed, the Dutch Atlantic was quintessentially interimperial, multinational, and multiracial. At the same time, it was an empire entirely designed to benefit the United Provinces. The pivotal colony in the Dutch Atlantic was Brazil, half of which was conquered by the Dutch West India Company. Its brief lifespan notwithstanding, Dutch Brazil (1630-1654) had a lasting impact on the Atlantic world. The scope of Dutch warfare in Brazil is hard to overestimate--this was the largest interimperial conflict of the seventeenth-century Atlantic. Brazil launched the Dutch into the transatlantic slave trade, a business they soon dominated. At the same time, Dutch Brazil paved the way for a Jewish life in freedom in the Americas after the first American synagogues opened their doors in Recife. In the end, the entire colony eventually reverted to Portuguese rule, in part because Dutch soldiers, plagued by perennial poverty, famine, and misery, refused to take up arms. As they did elsewhere, the Dutch lost a crucial colony because of the empire's systematic neglect of the very soldiers on whom its defenses rested. After the loss of Brazil and, ten years later, New Netherland, the Dutch scaled back their political ambitions in the Atlantic world. Their American colonies barely survived wars with England and France. As the imperial dimension waned, the interimperial dimension gained strength. Dutch commerce with residents of foreign empires thrived in a process of constant adaptation to foreign settlers' needs and mercantilist obstacles.\"--Page 4 of cover.

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women's lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.