Embodiment, Identity, and Gender in the Early Modern Age

Embracing a multiconfessional and transnational approach that stretches from central Europe, to Scotland and England, from Iberia to Africa and Asia, this volume explores the lives, work, and experiences of women and men during the tumultuous fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The authors, all leading experts in their fields, utilize a broad range of methodologies from cultural history to women’s history, from masculinity studies to digital mapping, to explore the dynamics and power of constructed gender roles. Ranging from intellectual representations of virginity to the plight of refugees, from the sea journeys of Jesuit missionaries to the impact of Transatlantic economies on women’s work, from nuns discovering new ways to tolerate different religious expressions to bleeding corpses used in criminal trials, these essays address the wide diversity and historical complexity of identity, gender, and the body in the early modern age. With its diversity of topics, fields, and interests of its authors, this volume is a valuable source for students and scholars of the history of women, gender, and sexuality as well as social and cultural history in the early modern world.

Table of Contents:
Introduction The body and manifestations of gender 1. The strange survival of the bleeding corpse 2. Martin Luther and the Reformation of virginity 3. Martin Luther’s gendered reflections on Eve 4. A "Prodigal son" remembers John of the cross 5. Women, conflict, and peacemaking in German villages 6. James I and unruly women Women between reform, subversion, and self-determination 7. Protestant and Catholic nuns confronting the Reformation 8. Female religious communities during the Thirty Years’ War 9. Conflicts between male reformers and female monastics 10. Anna Maria van Schurman: poetry as exegesis 11. Sacral systems: the challenge of change 12. Catholic women in the Dutch Golden Age 13. Women and religious expression in Calvin’s Geneva Gendered dynamics of displacement, migration, and conflict 14. Women, gender, and religious refugees 15. Refugee wives, widows, and mothers 16. Did the Jesuits introduce "Global Studies"? 17. Devotion at sea: ship voyages and Jesuit masculinity 18. Spanish women, work, and the early modern Atlantic economy

About the Author :
Amy E. Leonard (Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University) focuses on women, gender, and sexuality in Reformation Germany. She is the author of Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany. She is currently working on a book that compares and contrasts changing views of female sexuality during the Reformations. David M. Whitford (Professor of Reformation Studies at Baylor University) is a senior editor of The Sixteenth Century Journal. He is the author of A Reformation Life and The Curse of Ham in Early Modern Europe. He is currently working on the construction of masculinity during the Reformations.