Title: A very social time: crafting community in antebellum New England 
Author: Hansen, Karen V
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | United States History | Gender Studies | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Karen Hansen's richly anecdotal narrative explores the textured community lives of New England's working women and men - both white and black - n the half century before the Civil War. Her use of diaries, letters, and autobiographies brings their voices to life, making this study an extraordinary combination of historical research and sociological interpretation.Hansen challenges conventional notions that women were largely relegated to a private realm and men to a public one. A third dimension - the social sphere - also existed and was a critical meeting ground for both genders. In the social worlds of love, livelihood, gossip, friendship, and mutual assistance, working people crossed ideological gender boundaries.The book's rare collection of original writings reinforces Hansen's arguments and also provides an intimate glimpse into antebellum New England life.   [brief]
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Title: An empire nowhere: England, America, and literature from Utopia to The tempest 
Author: Knapp, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | United States History | Renaissance Literature | European History
Publisher's Description: What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, grow spiritually divided from the Continent as well, but every one of their attempts to colonize the New World actually failed.Jeffrey Knapp accounts for this strange combination of literary expansion and national isolation by showing how the English made a virtue of their increasing insularity. Ranging across a wide array of literary and extraliterary sources, Knapp argues that English poets rejected the worldly acquisitiveness of an empire like Spain's and took pride in England's material limitations as a sign of its spiritual strength. In the imaginary worlds of such fictions as Utopia , The Faerie Queene , and The Tempest , they sought a grander empire, founded on the "otherworldly" virtues of both England and poetry itself.   [brief]
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Title: The making of the English middle class: business, society, and family life in London, 1660-1730 
Author: Earle, Peter 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History
Publisher's Description: This is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources - including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys - Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe.He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life - from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial.Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.   [brief]
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Title: Women preachers and prophets through two millennia of Christianity
Author: Kienzle, Beverly Mayne
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Women's Studies | Christianity | Classical Religions | History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: For nearly two millennia, despite repeated prohibitions, Christian women have preached. Some have preached in official settings; others have found alternative routes for expression. Prophecy, teaching, writing, and song have all filled a broad definition of preaching. This anthology, with essays by an international group of scholars from several disciplines, investigates the diverse voices of Christian women who claimed the authority to preach and prophesy. The contributors examine the centuries of arguments, grounded in Pauline injunctions, against women's public speech and the different ways women from the early years of the church through the twentieth century have nonetheless exercised religious leadership in their communities. Some of them based their authority solely on divine inspiration; others were authorized by independent-minded communities; a few were even recognized by the church hierarchy. With its lively accounts of women preachers and prophets in the Christian tradition, this exceptionally well-documented collection will interest scholars and general readers alike.   [brief]
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Title: The tragedy of Mariam, the fair queen of Jewry
Author: Cary, Elizabeth, Lady 1585 or 6-1639
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is the first original play by a woman to be published in England, and its author is the first English woman writer to be memorialized in a biography, which is included with this edition of the play. Mariam is a distinctive example of Renaissance drama that serves the desire of today's readers and scholars to know not merely how women were represented in the early modern period but also how they themselves perceived their own condition.With this textually emended and fully annotated edition, the play will now be accessible to all readers. The accompanying biography of Cary further enriches our knowledge of both domestic and religious conflicts in the seventeenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Best friends and marriage: exchange among women 
Author: Oliker, Stacey J
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Gender Studies | Popular Culture | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this fascinating book, Stacey Oliker delves into the intimate realm of women's friendships and explores the complex relation between friendship and family life. Based on a series of interviews with women from the middle and working classes, this work reveals the distinctive values of best friendship and marriage, how husbands and their wives' friends feel about each other, and how women friends talk about marriage problems. Best Friends and Marriage suggests that close friendships provide women with unique sources of intimacy, affection, identity, and community. Contradicting a widespread view of families as isolated and self-contained private worlds, Oliker suggests that "companionate marriage" did not replace the friendship and intimacy that pervaded communities of past times, but rather, that intimate friendship and companionate marriage evolved intertwined. Examining the cultures and dynamics of friendship, Oliker shows how women's position in society constrains the choices they make at home and in friendship, and shapes how best friends perceive each other's best interests. Best Friends and Marriage breaks ground in linking together the institutions of family and friendship, and in explaining intimacy in sociological and historical as well as psychological terms. In this way, a richly descriptive book also extends theory in the areas of family, community, and gender inequality.   [brief]
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Title: The middling sort: commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680-1780
Author: Hunt, Margaret R 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | Social Science
Publisher's Description: To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines narrative and alternately poignant and hilarious anecdotes with convincing analysis, Margaret R. Hunt offers a view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of many family papers and court records, Hunt is able to examine what people thought, felt, and valued. She finds that early capitalism and early modern family life were far more insecure than their "classical" models supposed.Commercial needs and social needs coincided to a large extent. The family is central to Hunt's story, and she shows how financial struggles brought conflict, ambiguity, and tension to the home. She investigates the way gender intertwined with class and family hierarchy and the way many businesses survived as precarious successes, secured through the sacrifices made by female as well as male family members. The Middling Sort offers a dynamic portrait of a society struggling to minimize the considerable social and psychic dislocation that accompanied England's launch of a full-scale market economy.   [brief]
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Title: Writing and rebellion: England in 1381
Author: Justice, Steven 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | Medieval History | European History
Publisher's Description: In this compelling account of the "peasants' revolt" of 1381, in which rebels burned hundreds of official archives and attacked other symbols of authority, Steven Justice demonstrates that the rebellion was not an uncontrolled, inarticulate explosion of peasant resentment but an informed and tactical claim to literacy and rule.Focusing on six brief, enigmatic texts written by the rebels themselves, Justice places the English peasantry within a public discourse from which historians, both medieval and modern, have thus far excluded them. He recreates the imaginative world of medieval villagers - how they worked and governed themselves, how they used official communications in unofficial ways, and how they produced a disciplined insurgent ideology.   [brief]
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Title: Emblems of eloquence: opera and women's voices in seventeenth-century Venice
Author: Heller, Wendy Beth
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Music | European Studies | Opera | Classical Music | Women's Studies | Classical Literature and Language | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: Opera developed during a time when the position of women - their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality - was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts - by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus - form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).   [brief]
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Title: The three-piece suit and modern masculinity: England, 1550-1850
Author: Kuchta, David 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | European History | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: In 1666, King Charles II felt it necessary to reform Englishmen's dress by introducing a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. We learn what inspired this royal revolution in masculine attire--and the reasons for its remarkable longevity--in David Kuchta's engaging and handsomely illustrated account. Between 1550 and 1850, Kuchta says, English upper- and middle-class men understood their authority to be based in part upon the display of masculine character: how they presented themselves in public and demonstrated their masculinity helped define their political legitimacy, moral authority, and economic utility. Much has been written about the ways political culture, religion, and economic theory helped shape ideals and practices of masculinity. Kuchta allows us to see the process working in reverse, in that masculine manners and habits of consumption in a patriarchal society contributed actively to people's understanding of what held England together. Kuchta shows not only how the ideology of modern English masculinity was a self-consciously political and public creation but also how such explicitly political decisions and values became internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits.   [brief]
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Title: Between Sundays: Black women and everyday struggles of faith
Author: Frederick, Marla Faye 1972-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | African American Studies | Women's Studies | Politics | Anthropology | Christianity
Publisher's Description: To be a black woman of faith in the American South is to understand and experience spirituality in a particular way. How this understanding expresses itself in everyday practices of faith is the subject of Between Sundays, an innovative work that takes readers beyond common misconceptions and narrow assumptions about black religion and into the actual complexities of African American women's spiritual lives. Gracefully combining narrative, interviews, and analysis, this book explores the personal, political, and spiritual commitments of a group of Baptist women whose experiences have been informed by the realities of life in a rural, southern community. In these lives, "spirituality" emerges as a space for creative agency, of vital importance to the ways in which these women interpret, inform, and reshape their social conditions--conditions often characterized by limited access to job opportunities, health care, and equitable schooling. In the words of these women, and in Marla F. Frederick's deft analysis, we see how spirituality - expressed as gratitude, empathy, or righteous discontent - operates as a transformative power in women's interactions with others, and in their own more intimate renegotiations of self.   [brief]
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Title: God's daughters: evangelical women and the power of submission
Author: Griffith, R. Marie (Ruth Marie) 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Religion | Gender Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In recent decades, religious conservatives and secular liberals have battled over the "appropriate" role of women in society. In this absorbing exploration of Women's Aglow Fellowship, the largest women's evangelical organization in the world, R. Marie Griffith challenges the simple generalizations often made about charismatic or "spirit-filled" Christian women and uncovers important connections between Aglow members and the feminists to whom they so often seem opposed. Women's Aglow is an international, interdenominational group of "spirit-filled" women who meet outside the formal church structure for healing prayer, worship, and testimony. Aglow represents a wider evangelical culture that has gained recent media attention as women inspired by the Christian men's group, Promise Keepers, have initiated parallel groups such as Praise Keepers and Promise Reapers. These groups are generally newcomers to an institutional landscape that Aglow has occupied for thirty years, but their beliefs and commitments are very similar to Aglow's. While historians have examined earlier women's prayer groups, they've tended to ignore these modern-day evangelical groups because of their assumed connection to the "religious right." God's Daughters reveals a devotional world in which oral and written testimonies recount the afflictions of human life and the means for seeking relief and divine assistance. A relationship with God, envisioned as father, husband or lover, and friend, is a way to come to terms with pain, dysfunctional family relationships, and a desire for intimacy. Griffith's book is also valuable in showing the complex role that women play within Pentecostalism, a movement that has become one of the most important in twentieth-century world religions.   [brief]
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Title: Wordsworth and the cultivation of women 
Author: Page, Judith W 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | English Literature | Poetry | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the poems of Wordsworth's "Great Decade," feminist critics have tended to see Wordsworth as an exploiter of women and "feminine" perspectives. In this original and provocative book, Judith Page examines works from throughout Wordsworth's long career to offer a more nuanced feminist account of the poet's values. She asks questions about Wordsworth and women from the point of view of the women themselves and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. Making extensive use of family letters, journals, and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet's daughter Dora Wordsworth, Page presents Wordsworth as a poet not defined primarily by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and conflicted endorsement of domesticity and familial life.   [brief]
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Title: Inscribing the time: Shakespeare and the end of Elizabethan England 
Author: Mallin, Eric Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Combining the resources of new historicism, feminism, and postmodern textual analysis, Eric Mallin reveals how contemporary pressures left their marks on three Shakespeare plays written at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Close attention to the language of Troilus and Cressida , Hamlet , and Twelfth Night reveals the ways the plays echo the events and anxieties that accompanied the beginning of the seventeenth century. Troilus reflects the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and the failure of the courtly, chivalric style. Hamlet resonates with the danger of the bubonic plague and the difficult succession history of James I. Twelfth Night is imbued with nostalgia for an earlier period of Elizabeth's rule, when her control over religious and erotic affairs seemed more secure.   [brief]
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Title: Nobody's story: the vanishing acts of women writers in the marketplace, 1670-1820 
Author: Gallagher, Catherine
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher reveals the connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, the economy of credit and debt, and the rise of the novel. The "nobodies" of her title are not ignored, silenced, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, intellectual property rights, literary reputations, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers through the eighteenth century. Women writers, Gallagher discovers, invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. The terms "woman," "author," "marketplace," and "fiction" come to define each other reciprocally.Gallagher analyzes the provocative plays of Aphra Behn, the scandalous court chronicles of Delarivier Manley, the properly fictional nobodies of Charlotte Lennox and Frances Burney, and finally Maria Edgeworth's attempts in the late eighteenth century to reform the unruly genre of the novel.   [brief]
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Title: Lucrecia's dreams: politics and prophecy in sixteenth-century Spain
Author: Kagan, Richard L 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | Women's Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Branded by the Spanish Inquisition as an "evil dreamer," a "notorious mother of prophets," the teenager Lucrecia de León had hundreds of bleak but richly imaginative dreams of Spain's future that became the stuff of political controversy and scandal. Based upon surviving transcripts of her dreams and on the voluminous records of her trial before the Inquisition, Lucrecia's Dreams traces the complex personal and political ramifications of Lucrecia's prophetic career. This hitherto unexamined episode in Spanish history sheds new light on the history of women as well as on the history of dream interpretation.Charlatan or clairvoyant, sinner or saint, Lucrecia was transformed by her dreams into a cause celébre , the rebellious counterpart to that other extraordinary woman of Golden Age Spain, St. Theresa of Jesus. Her supporters viewed her as a divinely inspired seer who exposed the personal and political shortcomings of Philip II of Spain. In examining the relation of dreams and prophecy to politics, Richard Kagan pays particular attention to the activities of the streetcorner prophets and female seers who formed the political underworld of sixteenth-century Spain.   [brief]
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Title: Printed poison: pamphlet propaganda, faction politics, and the public sphere in early Seventeenth-century France 
Author: Sawyer, Jeffrey K
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Print Media | Politics | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Combining a broad analysis of political culture with a particular focus on rhetoric and strategy, Jeffrey Sawyer analyzes the role of pamphlets in the political arena in seventeenth-century France. During the years 1614-1617 a series of conflicts occurred in France, resulting from the struggle for domination of Louis XIII's government. In response more than 1200 pamphlets - some printed in as many as eighteen editions - were produced and distributed. These pamphlets constituted the political press of the period, offering the only significant published source of news and commentary.Sawyer examines key aspects of the impact of pamphleteering: the composition of the targeted public and the ways in which pamphlets were designed to affect its various segments, the interaction of pamphlet printing and political action at the court and provincial levels, and the strong connection between pamphlet content and assumptions on the one hand and the evolution of the French state on the other. His analysis provides new and valuable insights into the rhetoric and practice of politics.Sawyer concludes that French political culture was shaped by the efforts of royal ministers to control political communication. The resulting distortions of public discourse facilitated a spectacular growth of royal power and monarchist ideology and influenced the subsequent history of French politics well into the Revolutionary era.   [brief]
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Title: Christianity and the rhetoric of empire: the development of Christian discourse
Author: Cameron, Averil
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Classical Religions | Classical History | History | Christianity | Ancient History | Rhetoric
Publisher's Description: Many reasons can be given for the rise of Christianity in late antiquity and its flourishing in the medieval world. In asking how Christianity succeeded in becoming the dominant ideology in the unpromising circumstances of the Roman Empire, Averil Cameron turns to the development of Christian discourse over the first to sixth centuries A.D., investigating the discourse's essential characteristics, its effects on existing forms of communication, and its eventual preeminence. Scholars of late antiquity and general readers interested in this crucial historical period will be intrigued by her exploration of these influential changes in modes of communication.The emphasis that Christians placed on language - writing, talking, and preaching - made possible the formation of a powerful and indeed a totalizing discourse, argues the author. Christian discourse was sufficiently flexible to be used as a public and political instrument, yet at the same time to be used to express private feelings and emotion. Embracing the two opposing poles of logic and mystery, it contributed powerfully to the gradual acceptance of Christianity and the faith's transformation from the enthusiasm of a small sect to an institutionalized world religion.   [brief]
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Title: Standing ground: Yurok Indian spirituality, 1850-1990
Author: Buckley, Thomas C. T
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Native American Ethnicity
Publisher's Description: This colorful, richly textured account of spiritual training and practice within an American Indian social network emphasizes narrative over analysis. Thomas Buckley's foregrounding of Yurok narratives creates one major level of dialogue in an innovative ethnography that features dialogue as its central theoretical trope. Buckley places himself in conversation with contemporary Yurok friends and elders, with written texts, and with twentieth-century anthropology as well. He describes Yurok Indian spirituality as "a significant field in which individual and society meet in dialogue - cooperating, resisting, negotiating, changing each other in manifold ways. 'Culture,' here, is not a thing but a process, an emergence through time."   [brief]
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Title: Religion and society in a Cotswold vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865 
Author: Urdank, Albion M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History
Publisher's Description: During the English Industrial Revolution, the Vale of Nailsworth was a rural-industrial settlement and a center of evangelical Nonconformity. Why did the transition to the factory system bring deindustrialization and social decline rather than long-term advancement? Albion Urdank investigates the modernization of Nailsworth from many perspectives, revealing the experience and the mentalité of ordinary people in their ecological, economic, and social environments. His innovative approach, in the tradition of the Leicester and Annales schools, contributes to the historical literature on popular religion, secularization, local history, and European industrialization, and will appeal to a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary interests.   [brief]
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