Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World

How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the `spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction. Part I Frameworks: History in the present tense: feminist theories, spatialized epistemologies, and early modern embodiment, Valerie Traub; Early modern gender and the global turn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks; Gender and representation in the early modern Hispanic world, Charlene Villaseñor Black. Part II Embodied Environments: Body language: keeping secrets in early modern narratives, Gerhild Scholz Williams; Bodies by the book: remapping reputation in the account of Anne Greene and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Tara Pedersen; Envisioning a global environment for blessed Teresa of Avila in 1614: the beatification decorations for S. Maria della Scala in Rome, Pamela M. Jones; Re-placing gender in Elizabethan gardens, Sara L. French; Attending to fishwives: views from 17th-century London and Amsterdam, Alena Buis, Christi Spain-Savage, and Myra E. Wright. Part III Communities and Networks: Baby Jesus in a box: commerce and enclosure in an early modern convent, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt; Within and without: women’s networks and the early modern Roman convent, Kimberlyn Montford; Women’s kinship networks: a meditation on creative genealogies and historical labor, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, Julie A. Eckerle, Michelle M. Dowd, and Megan Matchinske; Navigating Shakespearean representations of female collaboration, John Garrison, Kyle Pivetti, and Vanessa Rapatz. Part IV Exchanges: Guides to marriage and `needful travel’ in early modern England, Ann Christensen; The `presences of women’ from the Islamic world in 16th- to early 17th-century British literature and culture, Bernadette Andrea; Rival to the Virgin Queen: the enduring narrative of Amy Robsart, Sheila T. Cavanagh. Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, USA.