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Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs
Posted on May 22, 2013 | No CommentsThe word 'mistress' has a multi-layered history. Today, it generally refers either to a woman an illicit sexual relationship, or, more rarely, to someone who is in perfect control of her art. Both the sexual connotation and the inference of complete competencei date back to at least the later middle ages. -
Women, ale and company in early modern London
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsWomen, ale and company in early modern London Tim Reinke-Williams Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract This article explores attitudes to female ale- and beer-drinkers and the... -
Representations of Elizabeth I
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis looks at three themes in representations of the Queen in Elizabethan literature. They are: the problem of representing a female ruler; the relation between the cult of Elizabeth and the cult of the Virgin Mary; and representations of Elizabeth as Cynthia, the moon-goddess. These topics are seen as focal points for problematic issues in panegyric. -
Marriage and the position of women, as presented by some of the early Victorian novelists
Posted on April 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe subject of this thesis is the unusual nature, in the presentation of courtship and marriage, of Trollope's depiction of women as compared with that of other novelists of the first part of the Victorian age. -
Victoria’s Sovereign Obedience Portraits of the Queen as Wife and Mother
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsIn this essay I explore some specific ways in which Victoria's gender and marital status enabled such representations during the early part of her reign, simultaneously creating the appearance of limited female and monarchic power and expanding the monarchy's symbolic power and ideological influence. -
Servants and hands: Representing the working classes in Victorian factory novels
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsMany of the middle-class readers who would have read Trollope’s novel probably shared the servants’ discomfort at the prospect of a “factory boy” in the midst of a middle-class home. Servants, of course, were an integral part of the familiar world these readers lived in; employing servants, in fact, has often been used by historians as the standard of middle-class status in Victorian England -
“Tell me a story, dear, that is not true”: Love, Historicity, and Transience in A. Mary F. Robinson’s An Italian Garden
Posted on March 8, 2013 | No CommentsThrough a poetic voice compelled to recognize that individual desire is often not reciprocated and that love entails great risk that is itself ennobling, Robinson explores the nature of love that is selfless in that one gives oneself to another, yet selfish in that one comes to need a totality of love not possible in a finite context. Paradoxically, then, love evokes both pleasure and pain. -
“Be unto me as a precious ointment”: Lady Grace Mildmay, Sixteenth-Century Female Practitioner
Posted on March 7, 2013 | No CommentsLady Grace Mildmay's manuscripts represent an unusual presentation of three interrelated areas of family, devotion, and medicine -
Reassessing Gilbert and Gubar: Women, Creativity, and Hopkins
Posted on March 5, 2013 | No CommentsGilbert and Gubar’s identification of Hopkins with Victorian sexism has undoubtedly influenced Hopkins studies. Since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic, several Hopkins critics have speculated that the poet’s wish for ‘masterly execution’ appears to betray his own fear of becoming unmanly or effeminate in his art and life. -
Re-familiarizing Victorian Marriage
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsThis article will define the familiar marriage model, discuss its historical evolution, and explore its presence in Victorian fiction. What I want to suggest here is that the central plot of the Victorian novel, the marriage plot, is about love only inasmuch as love is a problem. As Victorian novels obsessively rehearse the clash between romantic and familiar marriage, we see a culture struggling to come to terms with the event that defined its subjects’ – above all, its female subjects’ – lives. -
Emotional Intertexts: Female Romantic Friendship and the Anguish of Marriage
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsIn the decades after the path-breaking work of Lillian Faderman and Caroll Smith- Rosenberg, critical energy was largely directed to questions of the compatibility of female romantic friendship with marriage and the contested erotic content of inter- female intimacy. -
Hysteria and Femininity: A Tentative Investigation into a Victorian and Edwardian Myth
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsBased on the medical narratives of various hysterical women shown in fictional and operatic texts, it meticulously discusses Anglo-American feminist scholars and their French counterparts’ different responses to and interpretative strategies for the same texts, calling for the integration of these two perspectives——a meaningful fusion of humanity and philosophy, essentialisation and romanticisation in ultimately deconstructing the patriarchal myth. -
![Four small fragments of clay pipe stem were found in context [5]. Despite attempts to date pipes by their stem bore, this remains an inadequate system at best, and fragments of this kind are almost impossible to date at all closely. Given the associated finds, it is highly likely that they are contemporaneous, unless residual or intrusive.](http://earlymodernengland.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Victorian-London-115x115.jpg "Living in Victorian London: The Clay Pipe Evidence")
Living in Victorian London: The Clay Pipe Evidence
Posted on February 2, 2013 | No CommentsFour small fragments of clay pipe stem were found in context [5]. Despite attempts to date pipes by their stem bore, this remains an inadequate system at best, and fragments of this kind are almost impossible to date at all closely. Given the associated finds, it is highly likely that they are contemporaneous, unless residual or intrusive. -
With This Ring, I Surrender: Politics, Religion, and Marriage in Shakespeare and Tudor England
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ideas I wish to explore are the overarching themes of politics, religion, and marriage in the Turor period under the rule of King Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. The popular opinion of the period on Henry VIII's behavior can be seen in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. -
Actresses As Working Women In the Victorian Theatre
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsVictorian performers were an unusual socioeconomic group. Unlike other professionals they were recruited from all classes of society. While some performers demonstrated that hard work and sheer talent could overcomeany class disadvantages, there were others who spent their entire careers in poverty... -
The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsThese revisionist accounts provide a much needed corrective in our view of Victorian sexuality. Unfortunately, corrective exercises all too often produce their own simplifications. These revisionist accounts have, I believe, replaced the popular stereotype of the repressed Victorian with an overly sanguine, modem image. -
Gender and the Culture of the English Alehouse in Late Stuart England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay explores the place of women within the public house, in serving, buying and consuming alcohol, and the unwritten conventions that underpinned social practice. -
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Ermine: Elizabeth I’s Coronation Robes and Mothers’ Legacies in Early Modern England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe first part of this essay explores how many links between mothers and children were therefore conceived through—even created by—mate- rial goods. -
“Thy Righteousness is but a menstrual clout”: Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsAs well as the physical threat that menstrual blood could pose, it might also pose a psychological one: according to an extreme example, a man’s seeing of a woman’s menstrual blood could be enough to cure him of love sickness or infatuation. -
The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th-Century in England: An Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe epistemology behind this research follows from my understanding of a novel not as a literary genre, but rather as a ‘cultural form’ in Raymond Williams’ cul- tural-materialist sense (Williams, 1997), according to which cultural production (in order to be properly understood) can be studied only in relation to its specific societal and historical frameworks. -
Common Woman to Commodity: Changing Perceptions of Prostitution in Early Modern England, C. 1450-1750
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsI began this project under the assumption that the modern definition and conception of the term “prostitute” had materialized by the eighteenth century. This is not a difficult conclusion to draw when examining the existing historiography of illicit sexuality in early modern England. -
A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital
Posted on December 22, 2012 | No CommentsWhat would a post-Victorian Christmas look like after capitalism? Is it even possible, or desirable, to exorcise our Victorian Christmas ghosts? -
‘Man is a dining animal’: the archaeology of the English at table, c.1750-1900
Posted on December 20, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis covers the material culture of food and dining c.1750-1900. At first view this is a long period to attempt to cover within the remit of a doctoral thesis, which might reasonably be expected to concentrate on one specific aspect of the dining experience or a single case study within the period, or to consider a few decades only. The length of the period to be considered has been dictated by the wish to study and explain large-scale changes in dining in England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. -
Household Politics: The View From Early Modern England
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsThat’s a glimpse of the sort of evidence I’ll canvass in this book. I hope to conjure up a social world full of ornery, funny, sickening, and lethal controversies about gender, patriarchy, misogyny, public and private, and more. -
Historical Perspectives on Violence Against Women
Posted on December 3, 2012 | No CommentsThree great bodies of thought have influenced western society’s views and treatment of women: Judeo-Christian cultural beliefs, Greek philosophy and the western legal code. -
‘High Housewifery’: the Duties and Letters of Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester
Posted on November 29, 2012 | No CommentsBarbara Sidney makes a particularly rewarding study because of the rich archival sources preserved by the Sidney family over many generations—account books, estate papers, genealogical records, and a wealth of correspondence. -
A Fortunate Dialect: Class, Language, and Survival in Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsMoll expresses her own sense of gentility to the reader by using the language of the upper class, but then, in the same breath, translates the implications and semantics to those of the lower class. She uses this adaptability as a survival tool. -
Hot Holiday Reads!
Posted on November 23, 2012 | No CommentsGreat reads & holiday ideas! -
Some Bloody good reads for Halloween!
Posted on October 30, 2012 | No CommentsSome Bloody good reads for Halloween! -
Cunning Folk and Wizards in Early Modern England
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsI aim to offer an original perspective on white witchcraft in this period; revealing its relevance to the historical study of witchcraft in which it is often overshadowed. -
Women in The Book Of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England
Posted on October 24, 2012 | No CommentsFoxe had made the decison to publish his work on the martyrs and the history of the Christian church in English, thus providing him with a much larger audience. As a good humanist, he had first considered Latin (his earliest work on the martyrs, written during his exile, was in Latin) but he felt the English people had the best claim on this information, and it could only reach them in the vernacular. -
Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII
Posted on October 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe aim of this bachelor thesis is a detailed analysis of Anne Boleyn`s life. The thesis is divided into five main chapters. -
Witchcraft and Family: What Can Witchcraft Documents Tell Us About Early Modern Scottish Family Life?
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsA wide range of document-types survive for the early modern period. But random survival rates of potentially detailed docu- ments coupled with their often significant lack of detail about women and the lower orders means that at this stage we do not know even the very basics about family life, let alone people’s subjective thoughts and experiences of family. -
To Converse with the Devil? Speech, Sexuality, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn both of the above cases, the women involved were accused of witchcraft as a consequence of their wilful and disorderly speech; yet, in the course of the witch trial, they were also accused and convicted of participating in an unnatural sexual relationship with the devil. -
The anatomy of beauty in nineteenth-century England
Posted on October 11, 2012 | No CommentsHow then did some nineteenth-century European anatomists come to see human beauty as a branch of science for which they might construct universal laws? -
Deeds Against Nature: women and Crime in Street Literature of Early Modern England
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn early modern England, when news in printed form designed for a large- scale readership was only beginning to develop, accounts of murders committed by women assumed an importance entirely disproportionate in relation to their actual occurrence. -
LANT STREET, SOUTHWARK, IN THE MID NINETEENTH CENTURY
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn the nineteenth century, the main industries of the Borough included “leather working, printing and bookbinding, hat making, wharves, warehousing, food processing and engineering”.3 Many of the heads of household of Lant Street in 1851 were employed in these industries. -
A Woman’s World: How Afternoon Tea Defined and Hindered Victorian Middle Class Women
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsAs England developed in the Industrial Revolution, fear grew that the rapidly changing society would threaten the patriarchal system. Technological advances allowed women to participate in manual labor alongside men, which was quite an attack on traditional gender roles. With the public sphere changing, home life was viewed as the means to stabilize society. Tea, long the dominion of women, was a method used for such a cause. -
The True Executor of the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper examines the culpability of Elizabeth and her Councillors in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the woman who threatened to take Elizabeth's throne and life away from her. -
George and Maria: A Reinterpretation of King George IV and the Queen Caroline Affair
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsHowever, the majority of recent non-biographical scholarship relating to the reign of George IV focuses primarily on the Queen Caroline Affair, which painted an unflattering picture of George as a weak, corrupt, immoral cuckold. Thus, it is only through this narrow focus that George has been judged as a husband and man. Somewhere between the lovelorn and the heartless depictions lies reality. During my quest to reconcile these two vastly different perceptions, I discovered that, despite negative modern portrayals ofthe Queen Caroline Affair by feminist scholars, my initial romantic conception of George was not false. -
A Scottish Threat: Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsOne must ask, after nineteen years of confinement, was Mary, Queen of Scots really such a threat to Queen Elizabeth that her death would be necessary? -
Victorian Values
Posted on October 6, 2012 | No Comments‘ “Victorian” is an academic epithet with which I feel profoundly uneasy for a number of reasons’, Kate Flint remarked in 2005, arguing that it has led to an unwholesome ‘period fetishism’, together with a limited view of transnational cultures, and an unreflective inclination to pack too many disparate intellectual and social movements into one simple grouping. -
Eat, drink, man, woman: Food, eating, and social formations in Renaissance culture and drama
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation explores the ways in which representations of food and eating in the drama and culture of Early Modern England contribute to its social formation. -
After marriage: The literature and culture of divorce in England, 1515-1650
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe following pages will argue that in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the idea of divorce, of marriage's breakdown and dissolution, was as important a concept as that of the marital union itself. -
Promises broken: Breach of promise of marriage in England and Wales, 1753-1970
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe primary basis for this study was are 875 breach of promise cases between 1750 and 1970. -
MOVIE REVIEW: BYZANTIUM
Posted on September 11, 2012 | No CommentsThis a review of Neil Jordan's new movie, 'Byzantium', released at the Toronto International Film Festival. -
Charlotte Brontë’s Villette: The Challenge of autobiography for Victorian Women
Posted on September 7, 2012 | No CommentsVillette, by Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), tells the story of a young woman, Lucy Snowe, who experiences a personal tragedy that leaves her alone and entirely dependent upon her own resources. -
The Medical Diagnosis of Demonic Possession in an Early Modern English
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn the families of the English gentry where the majority of the documented cases of demonic possession occurred, doctors played a significant role in interpreting strange and unusual illnesses. It was considered important to first rule out the possibility of natural causation when a supernatural affliction was suspected, and physicians were regarded as crucial in making the distinction. -
Jane Austen and the History of England
Posted on September 4, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough it is suggested frequently that Jane Austen embraced a particular understanding of English history, historians have only just begun analyzing exactly what this understanding of history might have been, or how her particular understanding of English history shaped her oeuvre. -
‘Queen Lilies’? The Interpenetration of Scientific, Religious and Gender Discourses in Victorian Representations of Plants
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsTo establish the continuity of the ideas involved, the first half of this article outlines modes of thinking that Victorian women inherited from Linnean botany, and from Romantic responses to it, across a broad range of social practices: in systematics, field study, flower painting and illustration, and popular botanical writing.