ABSTRACT
All of the essays in this volume capture the body in a particular attitude: in distress, vulnerability, pain, pleasure, labor, health, reproduction, or preparation for death. They attend to how the body’s transformations affect the social and political arrangements that surround it. And they show how apprehension of the body – in social and political terms – gives it shape.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|45 pages
Debates and directions
chapter 3|12 pages
Regendering the sublime and the beautiful
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and feminist formalism
part II|77 pages
Authorship and patronage
chapter 7|16 pages
Picturing the agency of widows
Female patronage among the gentry and the middling sort of Elizabethan England
part III|67 pages
The matter of reform
chapter 9|15 pages
“A witch! Who is not?”
Demonic contagion, gender, and class in The Witch of Edmonton
part IV|81 pages
Bodies of knowledge
chapter 14|15 pages
“Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron”
Ingredients, instructions, and the early modern recipe book
chapter 15|15 pages
“From a drudge, to … a cook”
Hidden and ostentatious labor in the early modern household
chapter 16|16 pages
“[T]he monkey duchess all undressed”
Simians, satire, and women in seventeenth-century England
part V|35 pages
The place of production
chapter 18|15 pages
Counter-narratives of survival
Amerindian and African women in early Caribbean literatures
chapter 19|18 pages
Constructing white privilege
Transatlantic slavery, reproduction, and the segregation of the marriage plot in the late seventeenth century
