Overview

This collection of essays shows the remarkable strides the study of gender has made in the decades since Barbara Todd helped reshape the field through her publications and teaching. In Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, gender conventions are examined in regard to men as well as women. Shaping and constraining behaviour as well as ways of thinking and feeling, gender conventions are used and manipulated so that women and men can manage their lives, make do as best they can, or advance. If gender conventions are often accepted, they are also on occasion defied, challenged, or simply ignored. The articles here give vivid illustration to these different possibilities and their precise historical contexts.

491 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-7727-2079-5 softcover
Published: 2011

Reviews

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 43.1 (2012), pp. 88-90. Reviewed by Susan McDonough.
Reformation and Renaissance Review, 13.1 (2012), p. 137. Reviewed by Julie A. Chappell.
University of Toronto Quarterly, 82.3 (2013), pp. 544-545. Reviewed by Christine Neufeld.

Contents

Kim Kippen and Lori Woods, “Barbara Todd: Scholar, Teacher, Friend”

Natalie Zemon Davis, “Introduction”

Working the Margins
1. Nicholas Terpstra, “Working the Cocoon: Gendered Charitable Enclosures and the Silk Industry in Early Modern Europe”
2. Tim Hitchcock, “Locating Beggars on the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London”
3. Lori Woods, “Mainstream or Marginal Medicine? The Case of a Parish Healer Named Gueraula Codines”
4. Kevin Siena, “Searchers of the Dead in Long Eighteenth-Century London”
5. Frances Timbers, “Mary Squires: A Case Study in Constructing Gypsy Identity in Eighteenth-Century England”
6. Bert Roest, “‘Scollers Bredd Vp in the Monastery’: Educating English Catholic Girls on the Continent”

Using the Law
7. Dana Wessell Lightfoot, “Patrician Widows and Remarriage in Late Medieval Valencia”
8. Shannon McSheffrey, “A Remarrying Widow: Law and Legal Records in Late Medieval London”
9. Jamie Smith, “Legal Protection for Wives of Absent Husbands in Late Fourteenth-Century Genoa”
10. Hilda L. Smith, “‘Free and Willing to Remit’: Women’s Petitions to the Court of Aldermen, 1670–1750
11. Karen Pearlston, “What a Feme Sole Trader Could Not Do: Lord Mansfield on the Limits of a Married Woman’s Commercial Freedom”

Performing, Playing, and Pleasing
12. Tim Stretton, “Misogyny and Male Honour in the Life of George Puttenham, Elizabethan ‘Princepleaser'”
13. David R. Lawrence, “Great Yarmouth’s Exercise: Honour, Masculinity and Civic Military Performance in Early Stuart England”
14. Paul Cohen, “The Women in Father’s Locatelli’s Linguistic Life: An Italian Priest’s Travels and the Erotics of Linguistic Plurality in Early Modern Europe”
15. Konrad Eisenbichler, “Erotic Elements in the Religious Plays of Renaissance Florence”
16. Emily F. Winerock, “‘Performing’ Gender and Status on the Dance Floor in Early Modern England”