The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe

The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe address questions of gender and the historical significance of women living in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of dramatic scientific and intellectual change and religious warfare.

This exciting new thematic survey is divided into three parts; part one, Affective Worlds, looks at the experiences of women, their family life and experiences of fertility and maternity. Part two, Spatial and Material Worlds explores education, crime and punishment, material culture and war. Lastly part three, Intellectual, Religious and Political Worlds, focuses more closely on individuals and groups of women in the political, learned and cultural spheres of early-modern Europe. Parts one and two reveal the embodied, sensate, emotive, lived experience of early-modern European women, including their dynamic interaction with institutions, such as the law courts, and exogenous forces that sometimes imposed upon and altered their lives, for example, slavery and bonded labour and war. The final part focuses on faith, ideas, beliefs and intellectual life; the world of the mind and emotions. It uses new historiographical approaches to link up mind and body by echoing some of the themes of affectivity found in the first two parts of the book.

Essential reading for students and researchers of early modern history and women’s and gender studies.