ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on texts that both assess and help to shape and stabilize the maternal body, the foreign body, and the body politic, in conditions of rapid social change and cultural chaos and fragmentation. It analyses how the German witch figures negativize maternal nurture, representing the other to the Mother. The book examines some of the ways in which written texts–and in particular, alphabets, initials, and calligraphy–permeated women’s domestic lives and helped to make those domestic lives fertile ground for later published writing by women. It outlines the spectrum, and spectacle, of maternity in and of female caregivers at large in the early modern period. Not surprisingly, early modern women were often identified and represented, both by themselves and by men, in terms of their caregiving functions.
