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Recent Posts
- Patriotic women: Shakespearean heroines of the 1720s
- Sir Francis Kynaston: The importance of the ‘Nation’ for a 17th-century English royalist
- Anciennete among the Non-Jurors: a study of Henry Dodwell
- Wet-nurses in early modern England: some evidence from the Townshend archive
- Masters and servants: the Hudson’s Bay Company and its personnel, 1668-1782
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Women’s Studies Archive
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Patriotic women: Shakespearean heroines of the 1720s
Posted on May 19, 2012 | No CommentsEarly 18th-century adaptations of Shakespeare can arguably be regarded as reconstructions of the plays for the ‘modern’ stage. Commentators such as Jean Marsden have convincingly suggested that post-1660 drama turns its attention to love, family and marriage, all subjects befitting the presence of women... -
“Unspottyd Lambs Of the Lord”: Presbyterianism and the People in Elizabethan London
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsAs a result of this popular appeal, the presbyterian movement was able to endure the systematic attempts to eliminate it carried out by the Queen and the church hierarchy, to continue to help shape the nation's religious climate under the Stuarts, and to leave a lasting mark on English culture. -
All the World’s a Stage: Pageantry as Propaganda at the Court of Elizabeth I, 1558-1569
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsIn order to strengthen her position and unite the country during her first decade as queen, Elizabeth and her council launched an organized and effective propaganda campaign and cultivated an image that focused her subjects’ loyalty on her. She accomplished this through the use of spectacle, drama, and pageantry, specifically in her coronation procession, the performance of plays and masques at court, and annual progresses. -
Victorian Governesses: A Look at Education and Professionalization
Posted on April 4, 2012 | No CommentsVictorian governesses found themselves central to the debate of ideal womanhood because of their roles as educators and workers. Governesses and others concerned with the conditions of governesses endeavored to professionalize that career by embracing and taking part in the movement for higher female education and the advancement of women in other fields of work. -
Illustrated Soap Advertisements in Myra’s Journal 1875-1912: Hygiene, Beauty and Class in Victorian England
Posted on April 3, 2012 | No CommentsIdeas about cleanliness were also changing in the time leading up to the Victorian era; the observance of being clean developed from an activity largely practised by monks and those of the religious community into an exercise that almost anyone could and should adopt, though cleanliness came to be defined as denoting both physical and moral purity. The development of a cult of cleanliness occurred during this time, where this society detested dirtiness to such an extent that in advertisements, cleanliness received praise but dirtiness was ridiculed. -
Ballads, Culture and Performance in England 1640-1660
Posted on March 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis study argues that ballads were a uniquely potent cultural medium. Because ballads were used for popular entertainment, the discourses about contemporary political and religious controversies contained in them pervaded culture more so than messages contained in other kinds of print. -
Haunting the House, Haunting the Page: The Spectral Governess in Victorian Fiction
Posted on March 27, 2012 | No CommentsFor James’s novella participates in a period-spanning discourse that associated governesses with ghosts both real and imaginary. Throughout the Victorian period, governesses found themselves implicitly allied with the legions of the unquiet dead. -
Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth-century childbirth: travail and deliverance in the making of an early modern world
Posted on March 26, 2012 | No CommentsAlice Thornton’s accounts of the pains and perils of childbirth, including this passage on the birth of her fifth child, have attracted the attention of a number of recent historians as particularly detailed and evocative examples of personal testimony to the experience of giving birth in the early modern period. -
To “Bring Down the Flowers”: The Cultural Context of Abortion Law in Early Modern England
Posted on March 25, 2012 | No Comments...their concerns with abortion were based on its providing a means to enable or conceal extra-marital sex, not on any condemnation of abortion per se. -
Childbirth Prayers in Medieval and Early Modern England: “For drede of perle that may be-falle”
Posted on March 25, 2012 | No CommentsChildbirth prayers and rituals from the medieval period and early modern era shall be analyzed and compared with childbirth prayers and rituals in post-Reformation England. -
Conflict, consensus and charity: politics and the provincial voluntary hospitals in the eighteenth century
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsJust as each individual infirmary linked county and town, so collectively the provincial voluntary hospitals displayed both national and local features. On the one hand, they were linked in a national movement. -
The Wife’s Administration of the Earnings’? Working-Class Women and Savings in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a range of proposals for ways to improve the condition of the poor by stimulating savings. Institutions that encouraged and rewarded thrift would, it was argued, reduce dependence in old age on the Poor Law: the industrious would be rewarded for their good habits and the idle and vicious would suffer if required to rely on their own exertions rather than on public assistance. -
Women Thieves in Early Modern England: What Can We Learn from Narrative Sources?
Posted on February 28, 2012 | No CommentsAccording to the Assize records for Sussex which cover the entire reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), 12 women were tried in that county and over that period of time for witchcraft, 24 for infanticides and 127 for all kinds of theft. -
Servants in Preindustrial Europe: Gender Differences
Posted on February 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe specific mobility and type of work of servants of both sexes were indeed a major feature in the delineation of building up European societies. Domestic service was the main way to elect for young rurals wanting to migrate towards small and big towns, since they could consider service as a transitory phase, giving them an opportunity to adapt themselves to a new way of life before marriage. -
‘Boasting of silence’: women readers in a patriarchal state
Posted on February 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis essay considers three prescribed forms of female readerly silence - restraint from public reading, limitations on linguistic proficiency and abstention from vocal criticism - as the context for women's habitual silence in the margins of their books. -
Writing the Self? Love and the Letter in England, c. 1660–c. 1760
Posted on February 15, 2012 | No CommentsBefore we examine the socio-cultural meanings of Ursula’s letters, and what they tell us about emotional experience and expression in long eighteenth-century England, we need to consider their circumstances of production. -
The protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsThe English conduct book writers, themselves from the first generation of married pastors, saw it as their task to model the patriarchal family afresh for this new world. -
From Maiden to Matron: Victorian Heroines and the Creation of Domestic Identity
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsFor the Victorian heroine, no goal is as important to her happiness, social position and financial security as a successful courtship that leads to a successful marriage with a suitable man. -
Below stairs at Arbury Hall: Sir Richard Newdigate and his household staff, c.1670–1710
Posted on February 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn all these spheres of activity, Newdigate had a preference for micro-management which sat very uneasily with his irascible, volatile personality. He was, therefore, the worst type of control-freak: that is,none with time on his hands -
“The wife of Lucifer” : women and evil in Charles Dickens
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsThe central thesis behind this is that no human being commits evil “knowingly” – an evil action must therefore be the result of mistakenly believing that the action is good; or it must be done unintentionally, through accident, coercion, or incapacity. -
The anatomy of Charles Dickens: a study of bodily vulnerability in his novels
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation concludes that the body’s vulnerability is not only a continual presence in Dickens’s novels but is an under-examined yet fundamental element in what makes his writing style distinctive and what makes his work continually popular. -
The importance of Charles Dickens in Victorian social reform
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No Comments...While the likes of Victorian thinkers such as Marx, Mill, Carlyle, and Ruskin to name but a few,formulated the ideas of and laid the groundwork for social reform in the 19th c., it was in reality men like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy who pointed out through their various novels, the abuses of the Industrial Age in Victorian England. -
Seeking the Supernatural: The Exorcisms of John Darrell and the Formation of an Orthodox Identity in Early Modern England
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis examines the questions raised by Darrell‘s exorcisms and the ways in which they were shaped by relations of power. I hope that it will shed new light on the ways in which people formed their religious and ideological identities in this pivotal period in English history. -
Warning, Familiarity and Ridicule: Tracing the Theatrical Representation of the Witch in Early Modern England
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsThe image of the witch and the vehicle of the theatre seem to be a natural fit. The spectacle inherent in the supernatural aspects of the witch provided a wealth of vivid opportunities for the employing the latest in scenic and technical advances and for experimenting with the possibilities for new special effects. -
Constructions of Infanticide in Early Modern England: Female Deviance During Demographic Crisis
Posted on January 31, 2012 | No CommentsNewborn child murder may have been rare in early modern England, but there is little doubt that it happened. Evidence of it exists in the judicial records, as it was criminalized by the legal code. -
Victorian Governesses : A Look at Education and Professionalization
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsHistories and fictions explore the lives of Victorian governesses. The governess appeared lonely, depressed, and unwanted, yet thousands of women entered the profession. Victorian governesses experienced changing social and economic conditions. -
A Crisis in Regal Identity: The Dichotomy Between Levinia Teerlinc’s (1520-1576) Private and Public Images of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsTeerlinc’s career began with an invitation to serve as official court painter to Henry VIII (1491-1547). After his death in 1554, she worked for Edward VI (1547-1553), Mary I (1516-1558), and finally Elizabeth I (1533-1603). -
Courtship and Marriage Rituals in Seventeenth Century England
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will examine the more personal side of courtship and marriage, through the use of seventeenth century diaries and letters. -
Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth-century childbirth: travail and deliverance in the making of an early modern world
Posted on January 23, 2012 | No CommentsAlice Thornton’s accounts of the pains and perils of childbirth, including this passage on the birth of her fifth child, have attracted the attention of a number of recent historians as particularly detailed and evocative examples of personal testimony to the experience of giving birth in the early modern period. -
The Last Nun
Posted on January 17, 2012 | No CommentsOne spring day in 1539, twenty-six women were forced to leave their home— the only home most had known for their entire adult lives. The women were nuns of the Dominican Order of Dartford Priory, in Kent. -
Working with the body : subjectivity, gender, commodification and the labouring body in Victorian England
Posted on December 20, 2011 | No CommentsThe dissertation’s contrapuntal structure places middle-class texts against working-class texts. -
“Like Spiders’ Webs for Flies”: False Confinement in Nineteenth-Century English Asylums
Posted on December 20, 2011 | No CommentsIn the eighteenth century, many people feared being taken by some unscrupulous person, be he family member, friend, or stranger, to a madhouse to be locked away forever to the detriment of their health, wealth, and sanity. ..By the early nineteenth century, enough legislation had been passed and enough investigations were being carried out that this fear should perhaps not have been so pressing. -
Victoria’s feminist Legacy: how nineteenth-century women imagined the queen
Posted on December 14, 2011 | No CommentsI am interested in women who inspire their fellow women to challenge gender roles without explicitly being feminists themselves. Examples—real and fictional—as varied as Joan of Arc, Jane Eyre, and Janis Joplin have had a powerful emotional resonance with women, and the fact that they avoid articulating political positions about gender makes them available to a wider audience. -
An ideal woman : literary, parliamentary, and sexual representations of model femininity in mid-Victorian England
Posted on November 18, 2011 | No CommentsMiddle-class women of the Victorian era experienced isolation from various aspects of society, in favor of removal to the “woman‟s sphere” of hearth and home. -
Ophelia’s Mistreatment and Ignored Monastic Opportunities
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsAn examination of her relationship with Polonius and Laertes will culminate with an inspection of the relationship between Ophelia and Laertes, using the feminist theory employed by Virginia Wolf -
Margaret Cavendish’s Imaginary Friends
Posted on October 15, 2011 | No CommentsMargaret Cavendish’s Imaginary Friends Rachel Warburton – Lakehead University Session: “English Epistolary Friendships” Paper given at the conference: Friendship In Pre-Modern Europe (1300-1700) This paper analysed Margaret Cavendish’s sociable letters. They... -
Promoting ‘English Civility’ in Tudor Times
Posted on October 14, 2011 | No CommentsPromoting ‘English Civility’ in Tudor Times Ellis, Steven G. (National University of Ireland, Galway) Tolerance and Intolerance in Historical Perspective, (University of Pisa, 2003) Like states everywhere, the 16th-century English monarchy regulated... -
The Life Of Jane Dormer Duchess of Feria
Posted on October 10, 2011 | No CommentsThe Life Of Jane Dormer Duchess of Feria Departamento de la Lengua Inglesa Intramuros – Studia: Commemrorative Booklet (1995) Abstract Acera del estilo de vida de una viuda de la... -
Ophelia, the Singing Corpse: Pleasure and the Gaze in Where the Wild Roses Grow
Posted on October 9, 2011 | No CommentsOphelia, the Singing Corpse: Pleasure and the Gaze in Where the Wild Roses Grow Zeleny, Rachael Baitch (University of Delaware, USA) Neo-Victorian Studies 3:2 (2010) Abstract This essay deconstructs a very... -
Inventing the Wicked Women of Tudor England: Alice More, Anne Boleyn, and Anne Stanhope
Posted on October 9, 2011 | No CommentsInventing the Wicked Women of Tudor England: Alice More, Anne Boleyn, and Anne Stanhope Warnicke, Retha M. (Arizona State University) Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association,... -
The Education of Princess Mary Tudor
Posted on October 6, 2011 | No CommentsThe Education of Princess Mary Tudor Pierret Perkins, Katherine Lee M.A. Thesis, History, Louisiana State University, December(2007) Abstract Mary Tudor, the first officially crowned queen regnant of England, received a... -
The case of Aaron Kosminski: was he Jack the Ripper?
Posted on October 4, 2011 | No CommentsThe case of Aaron Kosminski: was he Jack the Ripper? S. K. Lekh, A. Langa, P. Begg and B. K. Puri Psychiatric Bulletin (1992), 16:786-788 Abstract The Whitechapel murders of... -
The Madonna and the Whore: The Victorian Wife and the Victorian Prostitute, a Collision of Virtue and Vice
Posted on October 4, 2011 | No CommentsThe Madonna and the Whore: The Victorian Wife and the Victorian Prostitute, a Collision of Virtue and Vice Coressel, Patti Lourdes College Online Narrative History Journal, Volume 9 (2011) Abstract... -
Bearded Women in Early Modern England
Posted on June 16, 2010 | No CommentsBearded Women in Early Modern England By Mark Albert Johnston Studies in English Literature, Vol.47:1 (2007) Introduction: “An old man, whose beard was all ouer-growne with gray haires, ask’d a... -
Women, performance, and the household in early modern England, 1580-1660
Posted on May 21, 2010 | No CommentsWomen, performance, and the household in early modern England, 1580-1660 By Sara Mueller PhD Dissertation, Queen’s University, 2007 Abstract: The texts and records of the household performances of early modern... -
‘The Good and Bad of that Sexe’: Monstrosity and Womanhood in Early Modern England
Posted on April 12, 2010 | No Comments‘The Good and Bad of that Sexe’: Monstrosity and Womanhood in Early Modern England By Alletta Brenner Online work (2004) – Winner of the Undergraduate Library Research Award scholarship competition... -
Love, Death and Resurrection in Tragicomedies by Seventeenth-Century English Women Dramatists
Posted on March 16, 2010 | No CommentsLove, Death and Resurrection in Tragicomedies by Seventeenth-Century English Women Dramatists Corporaal, Marguérite Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) Abstract In tragicomedies by seventeenth-century English women, such as Lady... -
Female Spectacle as Liberation in Margaret Cavendish’s Plays
Posted on March 15, 2010 | No CommentsFemale Spectacle as Liberation in Margaret Cavendish’s Plays Devlin Mosher, Joyce Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (May, 2005) Abstract In Cavendish’s life and in her plays, lavish confections and transsexual... -
Women, Children, and the Rhetoric of Milton’s Divorce Tracts
Posted on March 9, 2010 | No CommentsWomen, Children, and the Rhetoric of Milton’s Divorce Tracts van den Berg, Sara Early Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (May, 2004) Abstract In his divorce tracts, Milton uses vignette, metaphor, and... -
Does Beatrice Joanna Have a Subtext?: The Changeling on the London Stage
Posted on March 9, 2010 | No CommentsDoes Beatrice Joanna Have a Subtext?: The Changeling on the London Stage Nicol, Dave & Barker, Roberta Early Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (May, 2004) Abstract Middleton and Rowley’s tragedy The...