"Katherine Willoughby, duchess of Suffolk, was one of the highest-ranking noblewomen in sixteenth-century England. She wielded considerable political power in her local community and at court, and her social status and her commitment to religious reform placed her at the centre of the political and religious developments that shaped the English Reformation." "By focusing on her kinship and patronage network, this book offers an examination of the development of Protestantism in the governing classes during the period. The importance of gender in the process of spiritual transformation emerges clearly from this study, showing how the changing religious climate provided new opportunities for women to exert greater influence in their society."--BOOK JACKET.

Catholic or Protestant, recusant or godly rebel, early modern women reinvented their spiritual and gendered spaces during the reformations in religion in England during the sixteenth century and beyond. These essays explore the ways in which some Englishwomen struggled to erase, rewrite, or reimagine their religious and gender identities.

Now in its third edition, Reformation England 1480-1642 provides a clear and accessible narrative account of the English Reformation, explaining how historical interpretations of its major themes have changed and developed over the past few decades, where they currently stand, and where they seem likely to go. This new edition brings the text fully up-to-date with description and analysis of recent scholarship on the pre-Reformation Church, the religious policies of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I, the impact of Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism, the character of English Catholicism, the pitfalls of studying popular religion, and the relationship between the Reformation and the outbreak of civil war in the seventeenth century. With a significant amount of fresh material, including maps, illustrations and a substantial new Afterword on the Reformation's legacies in English (and British) history, Reformation England 1480-1642 will continue to be an indispensable guide for students approaching the complexities and controversies of the English Reformation for the first time, as well as for anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of this fascinating and formative chapter in the history of England.

This book explores the collaborative practices – both literary and material – that women undertook in the production of early modern texts. It confronts two ongoing methodological dilemmas. How does conceiving women’s texts as collaborations between authors, readers, annotators, editors, printers, and patrons uphold or disrupt current understandings of authorship? And how does reconceiving such texts as collaborative illuminate some of the unresolved discontinuities and competing agendas in early modern women’s studies? From one perspective, viewing early modern women’s writing as collaborative seems to threaten the hard-won legitimacy of the authors we have already recovered; from another, developing our understanding of literary agency beyond capital “A” authorship opens the field to the surprising range of roles that women played in the history of early modern books. Instead of trying to simply shift, disaggregate or adjudicate between competing claims for male or female priority in the production of early modern texts, Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration investigates the role that gender has played – and might continue to play – in understanding early modern collaboration and its consequences for women’s literary history.

A compelling, authoritative account of the brilliant, conflicted, visionary world of Tudor England When Henry VII landed in a secluded bay in a far corner of Wales, it seemed inconceivable that this outsider could ever be king of England. Yet he and his descendants became some of England’s most unforgettable rulers, and gave their name to an age. The story of the Tudor monarchs is as astounding as it was unexpected, but it was not the only one unfolding between 1485 and 1603. In cities, towns, and villages, families and communities lived their lives through times of great upheaval. In this comprehensive new history, Lucy Wooding lets their voices speak, exploring not just how monarchs ruled but also how men and women thought, wrote, lived, and died. We see a monarchy under strain, religion in crisis, a population contending with war, rebellion, plague, and poverty. Remarkable in its range and depth, Tudor England explores the many tensions of these turbulent years and presents a markedly different picture from the one we thought we knew.

This study considers sixteenth century evangelicals' vision of a ›godly‹ commonwealth within the broader context of political, religious, social, and intellectual changes in Tudor England. Using the clergyman and bestselling author, Thomas Becon (1512–1567), as a case study, Brian L. Hanson argues that evangelical views of the commonwealth were situation-dependent rather than uniform, fluctuating from individual to individual. His study examines the ways commonwealth rhetoric was used by evangelicals and how that rhetoric developed and changed. While this study draws from English Reformation historiography by acknowledging the chronology of reform, it engages with interdisciplinary texts on poverty, gender, and the economy in order to demonstrate the intersection of commonwealth rhetoric with Renaissance humanism. Furthermore, the experience of exile and the languages of prophecy and companionship directly influenced commonwealth rhetoric and dictated the priorities, vocabulary, and political expression of the evangelicals. As sixteenth-century England vacillated in its religious direction and priorities, the evangelicals were faced with a political conundrum and the tension between obedience and ›lawful‹ disobedience. There was ultimately a fundamental disagreement on the nature and criteria of obedience. Hanson's study makes a further contribution to the emerging conversation about English commonwealth politics by examining the important issues of obedience and disobedience within the evangelical community. A correct assessment of the issues surrounding the relationship between evangelicals and the commonwealth government will lead to a rediscovery of both the complexities of evangelical commonwealth rhetoric and the tension between the biblical command to submit to civil authorities and the injunction to ›obey God rather than man‹.

Women’s Lives presents essays on the ways in which the lives and voices of women permeated medieval literature and culture. The ubiquity of women amongst the medieval canon provides an opportunity for considering a different sphere of medieval culture and power that is frequently not given the attention it requires. The reception and use of female figures from this period has proven influential as subjects in literary, political, and social writings; the lives of medieval women may be read as models of positive transgression, and their representation and reception make powerful arguments for equality, agency and authority on behalf of the writers who employed them. The volume includes essays on well-known medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Cartagena, as well as women less-known to scholars of the European Middle Ages, such as Al-Kāhina and Liang Hongyu. Each essay is directly related to the work of Elizabeth Petroff, a scholar of Medieval Women Mystics who helped recover texts written by medieval women.

Long considered marginal in early modern culture, women writers were actually central to the development of a Protestant literary tradition in England. Kimberly Anne Coles explores their contribution to this tradition through thorough archival research in publication history and book circulation; the interaction of women's texts with those written by men; and the traceable influence of women's writing upon other contemporary literary works. Focusing primarily upon Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Anne Vaughan Lok, Coles argues that the writings of these women were among the most popular and influential works of sixteenth-century England. This book is full of prevalent material and fresh analysis for scholars of early modern literature, culture and religious history.

This collection examines early modern women’s contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode’s first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women’s participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts. This volume interrogates new texts (closet drama, song, manuscript-based religious and political lyrics), new authors (Dorothy Shirley, Scots satirical writers, Hester Pulter, Mary Rowlandson), and new versions of complaint (biblical, satirical, legal, and vernacular). Its essays pay specific attention to politics, form, and transmission from complaint’s first circulation up to recent digital representations of its texts. Bringing together an international group of experts in early modern women’s writing and in complaint literature more broadly, this collection explores women’s role in the formation of the mode and in doing so reconfigures our understanding of complaint in Renaissance culture and thought.

2018 Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women’s alliances in early modern Europe. The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women’s political alliances. Grouped into three sections—domestic, court, and kinship alliances—these essays investigate historical documents, drama, and poetry, insisting that female alliances, much like male friendship discourse, had political meaning in early modern England. Offering new perspectives on female authors such as the Cavendish sisters, Anne Clifford, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips, as well as on male-authored texts such as Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, and The Maid’s Tragedy, the essays bring both familiar and unfamiliar texts into conversation about the political potential of female alliances. Some contributors are skeptical about allied women’s political power, while others suggest that such female communities had considerable potential to contain, maintain, or subvert political hierarchies. A wide variety of approaches to the political are represented in the volume and the scope will make it appealing to a broad audience.