Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640

✍ Scribed by Susan D. Amussen; David E. Underdown

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 243
• Series: Cultures of Early Modern Europe
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560-1640 integrates social history, politics and literary culture as part of a ground-breaking study that provides revealing insights into early modern English society.
Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown examine political scandals and familiar characters–including scolds, cuckolds and witches–to show how their behaviour turned the ordered world around them upside down in very specific, gendered ways. Using case studies from theatre, civic ritual and witchcraft, the book demonstrates how ideas of gendered inversion, failed patriarchs, and disorderly women permeate the mental world of early modern England. Amussen and Underdown show both how these ideas were central to understanding society and politics as well as the ways in which both women and men were disciplined formally and informally for inverting the gender order. In doing so, they give a glimpse of how we can connect different dimensions of early modern society.
This is a vital study for anyone interested in understanding the connections between social practice, culture, and politics in 16th- and 17th-century England.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Gender and inversion
Social order and social change
Inversion, or the upside down world
Looking forward
1 Unruly Women
The debate on women
Unruly women in local communities
Unruly women at court
Challenging patriarchal power
Reforming women
2 Failed Patriarchs
James I and the failure of patriarchy
Elite men as failed patriarchs
The Earl of Castlehaven: sexual disorder and household disorder
Failed marriages
Failed households
3 Performing Inversion: Theatre, Politics and Society
The Duchess of Malfi and court scandal
Revenge tragedy and the failures of patriarchy
Domestic tragedy and tragicomedy: gender and generic disruption
Comic reversal and the upside down world
4 Performing Inversion in Civic Pageantry and Charivari
Festivity and subversion
The scene: Wells, 1607
Dramatis personae: Wells’s fractured and fractious authorities
Act I: May Games
Act II: church ale
Act III: the libel
Act IV: revenge
Epilogue
5 Witches, Magicians and the Upside .Down World
Witchcraft suspicions and prosecutions
Witchcraft and social change
Playing witchcraft
Sorcery and aristocratic scandal
Conclusion
Notes
Introduction
1 Unruly Women
2 Failed Patriarchs
3 Performing Inversion: Theatre, Politics and Society
4 Performing Inversion in Civic Pageantry and Charivari
5 Witches, Magicians and the Upside Down World
Conclusion
Bibliography
Printed Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index