The early modern period was an age of anatomical exploration and revelation, with new discoveries capturing the imagination not only of scientists but also of playwrights and poets. Approximate Bodies examines, in fascinating detail, the changing representation of the body in early modern drama and in the period's anatomical and gynaecological treatises. Maurizio Calbi focuses on the unstable representation of both masculinity and femininity in Renaissance texts such as The Duchess of Malfi, The Changeling and a variety of Shakespeare plays. Drawing on theorists including Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, these close textual readings examine the effects of social, psychic and cultural influences on early modern images of the body. Calbi identifies the ways in which political, social, racial and sexual power structures effect the construction of the body in dramatic and anatomical texts. Calbi's analysis displays how images such as the deformed body of the outsider, the effeminate body of the desiring male and the disfigured body parts of the desiring female indicate an unstable, incomplete conception of the body in the Renaissance. Compelling and impeccably researched, this is a sophisticated account of the fantasies and anxieties that play a role in constructing the early modern body. Approximate Bodies makes a major contribution to the field of early modern studies and to debates around the body.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.

Justice, Women, and Power in English Reniassance Drama is a collection of essays that explores the relationship of gender and justice as represented in English Renaissance drama. Many of the essays are concerned with interrogating the ways that women relied upon and/or reacted to the legal (and overarching political) systems in early modern England. Other essays examine issues involving the role of narrative, evidence, and gendered expectations about justice in the plays of this time period. An implicit concern of these essays is whether women were empowered or dis-empowered in this interaction with the legal/political system.

"Dramatic Difference offers an important contribution to the study of early modern women writers, and at the same time invites scholars and critics of the theater to reassess the place of closet drama - and the presence of women dramatists - in the early modern dramatic tradition."--BOOK JACKET.

2018 Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women’s alliances in early modern Europe. The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women’s political alliances. Grouped into three sections—domestic, court, and kinship alliances—these essays investigate historical documents, drama, and poetry, insisting that female alliances, much like male friendship discourse, had political meaning in early modern England. Offering new perspectives on female authors such as the Cavendish sisters, Anne Clifford, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips, as well as on male-authored texts such as Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, and The Maid’s Tragedy, the essays bring both familiar and unfamiliar texts into conversation about the political potential of female alliances. Some contributors are skeptical about allied women’s political power, while others suggest that such female communities had considerable potential to contain, maintain, or subvert political hierarchies. A wide variety of approaches to the political are represented in the volume and the scope will make it appealing to a broad audience.

This book examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, especially when they were expected to occupy the spheres society believed their gender should.