Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World
About the Book Series
This series provides a forum for studies that investigate the themes of women and gender in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays. Chronologically, we welcome studies that look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on Britain, Europe and Global transnational histories. We invite proposals including, but not limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power; construction of femininity and masculinities; gift-giving, diplomacy and the politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives and architectural spaces (court, salons, household); consumption and material culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.
English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450-1550
1st Edition
By Barbara J. Harris
January 10, 2026
The role played by women in the evolution of religious art and architecture has been largely neglected. This study of upper-class women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries corrects that oversight, uncovering the active role they undertook in choosing designs, materials, and locations for ...
The Youth of Early Modern Women
1st Edition
Edited
By Elizabeth Storr Cohen, Margaret Louise Reeves
January 10, 2026
Through fifteen essays that work from a rich array of primary sources, this collection makes the novel claim that early modern European women, like men, had a youth. European culture recognised that, between childhood and full adulthood, early modern women experienced distinctive physiological, ...
Abduction, Marriage, and Consent in the Late Medieval Low Countries
1st Edition
By Chanelle Delameillieure
January 09, 2026
The Middle Dutch term schaec referred to abduction with marital intent. This book explores this phenomenon to understand wider attitudes towards marriage-making in the fifteenth-century Low Countries. Whilst exchanging words of consent was all that was required legally, making marriage was a social...
Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction
1st Edition
Edited
By James Fitzmaurice, Naomi Miller, Sara Jayne Steen
January 09, 2026
The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or ...
Challenging Women's Agency and Activism in Early Modernity
1st Edition
Edited
By Merry Wiesner-Hanks
January 09, 2026
Examining women’s agency in the past has taken on new urgency in the current moment of resurgent patriarchy, Women’s Marches, and the global #MeToo movement. The essays in this collection consider women’s agency in the Renaissance and early modern period, an era that also saw both increasing ...
Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain: From Amadís de Gaula to Don Quixote
1st Edition
By Stacey Triplette
January 09, 2026
The Iberian chivalric romance has long been thought of as an archaic, masculine genre and its popularity as an aberration in European literary history. Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain contests this view, arguing that the surprisingly egalitarian gender politics of ...
Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World
1st Edition
Edited
By Merry Wiesner-Hanks
January 09, 2026
Is time gendered? This international, interdisciplinary anthology studies the early modern era to analyse how material objects express, shape, complicate, and extend human concepts of time and how people commemorate time differently. It examines conceptual aspects of time, such as the categories ...
Missionary Men in the Early Modern World: German Jesuits and Pacific Journeys
1st Edition
By Ulrike Strasser
January 09, 2026
How did gender shape the expanding Jesuit enterprise in the early modern world? What did it take to become a missionary man? And how did missionary masculinity align itself with the European colonial project? This book highlights the central importance of male affective ties and masculine mimesis ...
Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563
1st Edition
Edited
By Susan Broomhall
January 09, 2026
Women and Power at the French Court, 1483—1563 explores the ways in which a range of women as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early ...
Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence
1st Edition
By Susan M. Cogan
December 01, 2025
Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence explores the lived experience of Catholic women and men in the post-Reformation century. Set against the background of the gendered dynamics of English society, this book demonstrates that English Catholics were ...
Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic
1st Edition
Edited
By Emily Colbert Cairns, Nieves Romero-Diaz
December 01, 2025
Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic is the first volume to emphasize women’s personal experiences and their life trajectories as mothers within the Peninsula and across the Atlantic. Although an official discourse that defined the conditions of motherhood emerged in the eighteenth ...
Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque: Architectural Space and Prostitution in the Early Modern Mediterranean
1st Edition
By Emily Kuffner
December 01, 2025
This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established...