This collection offers a variety of approaches to aspects of womens lives. It moves beyond mens prescriptive pronouncements about female nature to womens lived experiences, replacing the singular woman with plural women and illuminating female agency. The contributors show that womens lives changed over the life course and differed according to region and social class. They also demonstrate that in the early modern period the largely private spaces in womens lives were not enclosed worlds isolated from the public spaces in which men operated. Contributors to this important collection are leading international scholars and offer strong, substantial, and archival-based research.

Table of Contents:

Illustrations

Introduction

Thomas Kuehn and Anne Jacobson Schutte

Part 1

Women’s History and Social History: Are Structures Necessary? .....Merry Wiesner-Hanks

The Querelle des Femmes as a Cultural Studies Paradigm .....Margarete Zimmermann

Grammar in Arcadia .....Gabriele Beck-Busse

The Girl and the Hourglass: Periodization of Women’s Lives in Western Preindustrial Societies .....Silvana Seidel Menchi

Part 2

Getting Back the Dowry: Venice, c. 1360–1530 .....Stanley Chojnacki

Daughters, Mothers, Wives, and Widows: Women as Legal Persons .....Thomas Kuehn

Women Married Elsewhere: Gender and Citizenship in Italy .....Julius Kirshner

Part 3

“Saints” and “Witches”: in Early Modern Italy: Stepsisters or Strangers? .....Anne Jacobson Schutte

The Dimensions of the Cloister: Enclosure, Constraint, and Protection in Seventeenth-Century Italy .....Francesca Medioli

The Third Status .....Gabriella Zarri

Part 4

“Non lo volevo per marito: in modo alcuno”: Forced Marriages, Generational Conflicts, and the Limits of Patriarchal Power in Early Modern Venice, c. 1580–1680 .....Daniela Hacke

Becoming a Mother in the Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman .....Marina d’Amelia

Space, Time, and the Power of Aristocratic Wives in Yorkist and Early Tudor England, 1450–1550 .....Barbara J. Harris

Eighteenth-Century Marriage Contracts: Linking Legal and Gender History .....Gunda Barth-Scalmani

Part 5

En-Gendering Selfhood: Defining Differences and Forging Identities in Early Modern Europe .....Kristin Eldyss Sorensen Zapalac

Construction of Masculinity and Male Identity in Personal Testimonies: Hans Von Schweinichen (1552–1616) in His Memorial .....Heide Wunder

About the Contributors

Index