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      Book

      Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation
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      Book

      Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation

      DOI link for Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation

      Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation book

      The Skull Beneath the Skin

      Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation

      DOI link for Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation

      Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation book

      The Skull Beneath the Skin
      BySasha Garwood
      Edition 1st Edition
      First Published 2019
      eBook Published 6 August 2019
      Pub. Location London
      Imprint Routledge
      DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429284465
      Pages 262
      eBook ISBN 9780429284465
      Subjects Humanities
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      Garwood, S. (2019). Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation: The Skull Beneath the Skin (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429284465

      ABSTRACT

      Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation: The Skull Beneath the Skin is a unique exploration of why early modern noblewomen starved themselves, how they understood their behaviour, and how it was interpreted and received by their contemporaries.

      The first study of its kind, the book adopts an interdisciplinary and highly detailed approach to examining women’s self-starvation between 1500 and 1640. It is also the first book to focus on this behaviour among noblewomen. Beginning with a contextual outline of gender, food and embodiment in early modern culture, the book then looks explicitly at the food behaviour of several well-known figures, including Elizabeth I, Catherine of Aragon, Mary I, Arbella Stuart, and Katherine Grey. Each case study engages with a variety of primary sources, such as letters and legal documents, as well as with literary texts, providing an in-depth exploration of the relationship between self-starvation and concepts of autonomy, sexuality, and literal and symbolic imprisonment, highlighting the body and specifically the act of eating as fundamental to identity in the early modern period and today.

      Employing both literary and historical methodologies, Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation is an important contribution to the study of the history of the body and is essential reading for students and academics of early modern women’s history, gender history, food history, and the history of the body.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      chapter |16 pages

      Introduction

      part I|2 pages

      Contexts

      chapter 1|16 pages

      Modern vs early modern bodies

      18Anorexia nervosa and other historically situated forms of self-starvation

      chapter 2|12 pages

      Fasting and food in early modern society

      ‘At dinner, supper, or in taverns’ 1

      chapter 3|11 pages

      Women, food, and early modern households

      ‘None other wyse than the capitaine of a garison’ 1

      chapter 4|21 pages

      The female body in early modern England

      ‘Oh, that we may call these delicate creatures ours/and not their appetites!’ 1

      chapter 5|22 pages

      Women and self‑starvation on the Renaissance stage

      ‘Dead’ ‘Dead!’ ‘Starved!’ 1

      part II|2 pages

      Case studies

      chapter 6|13 pages

      Catherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor

      102Eating and identity, royalty, and resistance

      chapter 7|28 pages

      ‘The body of a weak and feeble woman’

      Elizabeth I and eating, power, politics, and penetration 1

      chapter 8|22 pages

      ‘With my body, I thee worship’

      The tragedy of Lady Katherine Grey

      chapter 9|45 pages

      ‘So Wilfully Bent’

      Arbella Stuart, starvation, strategy, and survival

      chapter |11 pages

      Conclusion

      The skull beneath the skin: starvation and embodied selfhood then and now
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