ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the ways in which attention to gender allows, or better said, requires one to examine politics and culture together. It surveys recent scholarship on three topics on which significant studies of gendered cultural power have emerged: female rulers, female religious leaders and intermarriage. In West Africa, the highest female leadership title is generally translated as queen mother. In Western Europe, the Reformation brought the possibility of border-crossing marriages in which spouses differed in their confessional allegiance. This global perspective seems especially appropriate for the early modern period, that era shaped by long-distance voyages and dramatic increases in large-scale cultural encounters. Historians of women and gender have tended to be suspicious of generalizations, and after an initial flurry of sisterhood is global, they have instead emphasized multiple categories of identity and difference race, sexuality, class, religion, age, ability.
