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.
Please contact Dorothea Schaefter, Publisher at Routledge ([email protected]) to submit a proposal or to find out more about the series.
Women’s Equestrian Culture during the Reign of Louis XIV: The King’s Amazons
1st Edition
By Valerio Zanetti
November 02, 2026
This book examines the rise of the Amazon as a fashionable gender icon during the reign of Louis XIV of France (1643–1715). By encouraging female courtiers to pursue traditionally masculine pastimes such as horse riding and hunting, the Sun King challenged contemporary gender norms and provided ...
Margaret of Austria, 1480–1530: Regent and Governor of the Netherlands, Diplomat, and Patron of the Arts
1st Edition
By Judy Kem
October 13, 2026
Margaret of Austria (1480-1530) is the first female regent of the Netherlands. This book uncovers her remarkable political achievements, cultural patronage, and advocacy for women, offering a fresh perspective on her legacy through overlooked primary and new secondary sources. Readers will gain ...
Alice Thornton’s Books: Reassessing the Life Writings of a Seventeenth-Century Woman
1st Edition
Edited
By Cordelia Beattie, Suzanne Trill, Joanne Edge
September 23, 2026
This book is the first dedicated study of Alice Thornton (1626–1707) and her life writings, offering unprecedented insights into how one early modern woman revised and reshaped her life story over 40 years, using newly accessible manuscripts and archival sources. Readers will gain fresh ...
Gender and Family Networks in Early Modern Italy
1st Edition
By Megan Moran
June 10, 2026
Women from the Ricasoli and Spinelli families formed a wide variety of social networks within and beyond Florence through their letters as they negotiated interpersonal relationships and lineage concerns to actively contribute to their families in early modern Italy. Women were located at the ...
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 ...