Description
Book SynopsisGender 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.
Trade Review“Gender Matters is a fascinating piece of reading, and, although the scope of scholarship presented seems too wide initially, the thematic chapters offer novel approaches to early modern studies. The main strength of the volume is its heterogeneity; it tackles interdisciplinary subjects and, more importantly, it introduces a broad perspective that points beyond the European framework in early modern studies and includes such rarely addressed issues in early modern art and culture in Japan. […] the volume fulfills its main goal and presents a holistic view of the early modern period that helps with the understanding of this era more fully, and similar endeavors would be greatly welcomed in future early modern studies.” - Zita Turi, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in: Sixteenth Century Journal 46.1 (2015), pp. 197-199 “A major strength of this collection is its transnational focus. Readers seeking a global perspective on early modern culture will find this text particularly fulfilling. […] Another strength of this collection is that the essays are widely interdisciplinary. Unlike many similar essay collections, the variety in this text demonstrates the pervasiveness of gendered violence — and it shows how easily scholars can arrive at similar conclusions about the systems of power in society while using different toolsets. […] Scholars specifically focused on violence or gender will easily find plenty to love here, of course, and the interdisciplinary focus might provide some necessary breadth to such research.” - Matt Carter, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in: Renaissance Quarterly 68.3, pp. 1105-1106
Table of ContentsMara R. Wade: Introduction Gender Matters: Discourses of Violence in Early Modern Literature and the Arts Women Warriors, Fact and Fiction Judith P. Aikin: The Militant Countesses of Rudolstadt: When an unruly army stops by on its way through, it’s time to call on a woman for help. Elizabeth Oyler: The Woman Warrior Tomoe in Medieval and Early Modern Japanese Nō Plays Violent Women, Violated Men Helmut Puff: Violence, Victimhood, Artistry: Albrecht Dürer’s The Death of Orpheus Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly: The Eroticization of Judith in Early Modern German Art Julie Singer: For Palle and Patrie: Re-gendering Violence from Benedetto Varchi to Marguerite de Navarre Marcus Keller: Framing Men: Violent Women in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron Violence and the Gendered Body Politic Catharine Gray: Tears of the Muses: 1649 and the Lost Political Bodies of Royalist War Elegy Brian Sandberg: Calm Possessor of his Wife, but Not of her Château: Gendered Religious Violence in the French Wars of Religion Lori Humphrey Newcomb: The Law Against Lovers: Dramatizing Civil Union in Restoration England Gender in Print Elizabeth Black: One Gender in the Legal System? An Examination of Gender in a Trio of Emblems from Pierre Coustau’s Pegme (1560) Tara L. Lyons: Prayer Books and Illicit Female Desires on the Early Modern English Stage Gerhild Scholz Williams: Romancing the News: History and Romance in Eberhard Happel’s Deß Teutschen Carls (1690) and Deß Engelländischen Eduards (1691) Gender and Violence on the Stage Susan Parisi: Transforming a Classical Myth in Seventeenth-Century Opera: the Story of Cybele and Atys in the Libretti of Francesco Rasi and Philippe Quinault Curtis Perry: Gismond of Salern and the Elizabethan Politics of Senecan Drama Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich: “Drabs of State vext”: Violent Female Masquers in Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women Virtue and Violence Carmen Ripollés: Death, Femininity, and the Art of Painting in Frans Francken’s The Painter’s Studio Lisa Rosenthal: Masculine Virtue in the Kunstkamer: Pictura, Lucre, and Luxury Anne J. Cruz: The Walled-In Woman in Medieval and Early Modern Spain Carl Niekerk: Violence, Gender, and the Construction of the Other in the Story of Inkle and Yarico Notes on Contributors
