Stephen Orgel, Impersonations; The performance of gender in Shakespeare's England

Stephen Orgel, Impersonations; The performance of gender in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996

For two of my four years at the Horace Mann School for Boys in New York in the late 1940s, transvestite theatre was an unproblematic reality. Like several other members of the Drama Club, I regularly played both male and female roles, with no sense that any stigma was attached to performing as a woman. This is how the Drama Club had always operated; but in my junior year, in 1948, the policy suddenly changed: for Our Town and The Man Who Came to Dinner we brought in actresses from a nearby girls’ school,… (Preface, xiii)

Had boys started to refuse to dress as women? Not at all, he assured me; nothing had happened: “I just didn’t think it was a good idea.” But why not? His first answer was clearly an evasion: the boys simply couldn’t do it convincingly. … the explanation I had, I suppose, been waiting to hear: “It was turning the boys into pansies.” … Five years earlier what the school would have considered dangerous to the morals of American adolescent boys was precisely the presence of women at close quarters, … (xiv)

Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women? … The matter has generally been disposed of by observing that the English were used to an all-male stage from generations of university productions and mystery plays, the latter performed by the all-male craft guilds, and that the appearance of women on stage was forbidden because it was felt in the Renaissance to compromise their modesty. …French, Spanish and Italian society was just as familiar with academic and guild performances, and quite as deeply concerned with female virtue as England was, and none banned actresses form the public stage. … The English equation of actresses with whores was also common in France and Italy, but this was not seen as an impediment to their performing in plays. Spain provides an even more striking parallel. Spanish morality was far more restrictive of [1] women’s behavior than English morality was; nevertheless, actresses appeared on Spanish stages with the explicit approval of both civil and ecclesiastical authorities—as did, moreover, transvestite boys. The problem of female chastity was sufficiently resolved, officially at least, in French and Spanish theatres merely by requiring that the actresses be married. (1-2)

There were, to be sure, countries besides England that proscribed women from the public stage—for example the Netherlands, and certain areas of Protestant Germany. But here it was theatre itself that was felt to be morally dangerous, … In these societies, the solution was to dispense with the public stage entirely—actors were no more tolerable than actresses. (2)

But to set the matter up as a question—why did the English stage take boys for women?—is in a sense to misrepresent it. The question conceals (and may, indeed, be a way of concealing) important prior and more basic issues. What is the relation between the construction of gender on the stage—any stage—and in society at large; why has the uniqueness of gender construction on the English stage never seemed problematic until now; and—perhaps even more substantive—what would qualify for us as an adequate explanation? (2)

Indeed, to set the matter up as a question at all presupposes that there is an answer; but to answer a question so narrowly conceived is to close it off, and thereby to trivialize it. (2)

There are many possible kinds of answers, but they all lead to more questions; and ultimately it is the openness of the question, and the ambiguities and ambivalences of the two cultural situations—Renaissance and [2] contemporary—generating it, that we must address. I am, then, not undertaking to answer a question but to raise one; to address an exfoliating cultural issue of which we can give many kinds of accounts, but none sufficient to settle the matter, for the matter is a process that is still going on. (2-3)

There were many polemical debates in England about the dangers to public morality of transvestite boy actors; but none that argued in favor of the introduction of women as an alternative. That part of the issue was not in question. (3)

…is it true that women never appeared on the English stages? The claim, to begin with, can relate only to the public theatre; women commonly appeared as dancers in court masques throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, … it is that the performer’s [3] amateur status made the whole differences: … there was no stigma whatever attached to women performing in plays, so long as they did not do it as a profession. (3-4)

Glynne Wickham cites the records of the London Lord Mayor’s Shows in which payments to several women who took roles in the entertainments of 1523 and 1534 are recorded—there were in London in the early sixteenth century professional women performers who were hired to appear in public entertainments. Wickham goes on to deduce what should be an important inference from these data: that “in the Middle Ages and in Tudor times women could and did perform both as amateurs and professionals… (4)

So until the 1530s, at least, women seem to have performed unproblematically in guild and civic theatrical productions. The evidence for actresses on the English stage is not, however, limited to pre-Elizabethan times. I myself found two women apparently routinely performing professionally as theatrical singers in 1632. [5] … are they basically anomalies or the tip of an iceberg? (5-6)

Sophie Tomlinson points out that the word “actress” as a term for a stage player was first used of Queen Henrietta Maria in her court plays; Tomlinson persuasively argues that it was through the continuing acrimonious debate over women on the Whitehall stage that the naturalization of the actress took place. When the theatres reopened in 1660, the introduction of women on the public stage was accomplished without objection. (6)

We know, for example, that Italian companies performed in Elizabethan England from time to time, and Italian companies always included women; (7)

…we are not justified in assuming, therefore, either that because Coryat did not see women on stage in England, he could not have done so, or that because Coryat did not see them, nobody did. (7)

It is clear, then, that foreign actresses were acceptable on the [7] English public stage, at least from time to time. (7-8)

…Moll Frith, the model for Middleton’s and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, gave a solo performance at the Fortune in 1611. I shall return to this; here, it is sufficient to point out that she did so at a major London theatre before an audience that bought tickets to see her, and without interference from the authorities. Nor was this a unique insistence: Richard Madox recorded that in 1583 he “went to the theatre to see a scurvie play set out al by one virgin”—the actress pleased him no better than the play, and he left before the end. How special are these cases? (8)

…Richard Vennar’s phantom England’s Joy. Vennar was a theatrical entrepreneur, clearly of considerable ingenuity. In 1602 he advertised a pageant play to be performed at the Swan celebrating English history and culminating in the reign of Queen Elizabeth… the major attraction of the production was that the roles to be “acte only by certain gentlemen and gentlewomen of account.” The promise of seeing both women and gentry on stage sold a large number of tickets; but when the time came, Vennar was found to have decamped with the receipts, and there was no play—and doubleness had been one. / If advertising women performers was an effective way of selling tickets, public opinion was obviously not averse to such a spectacle. (8)

Obviously our evidence does not support any blanket claim that women were [8] excluded from the stages of Renaissance England, but it may certainly indicate that the culture, and the history that descends from it, had an interest in rendering them unnoticeable. (9)

…the male public theatre represents a uniquely English solution to the universal European disapproval of actresses. (10)

The theatre was a place of unusual freedom for women in the period; foreign visitors comment on the fact that English women go to theatre unescorted and unmasked, and a large proportion of the audience consisted of women. The puzzle here would be why a culture that so severely regulated the lives of women in every other sphere suspended its restrictions in the case of theatre. (10)

…theatrical representations—whether of women or men or anything else—also depended for their success to a significant degree on the receptiveness of women. … we see dramatic depictions of women in Elizabethan drama that we consider degrading, … The depictions must at the very least represent cultural fantasies, and women are implicated in them as well as men. (11)

…Italian troupes, which were family affairs and always included women, visited England from time to time and performed not only at court but throughout the country. When such performances took place in conjunction with royal progresses, and therefore under the queen’s patronage, theatre became an extension of the court; … What they apparently did not see was English women on the professional stage: the distinction they maintained was not between men and women but between “us” and “them”—what was appropriate for foreigners was not appropriate for the English, and women on display became increasingly associated with Roman Catholicism. (11)

…there are lots of Others, and Others of many kinds, in this theatre; in fact, Elizabethan drama is often dependent on otherness. Comedies are Italian, French or provincial, tragedies Spanish or Scandinavian or ancient; pastorals programmatically take place Somewhere Else. Dekker, Jonson and Middleton, placing comedies in contemporary London, are recognized as doing something new. The Other, for this theatre, is as much foreign as female… (12)

…wooing scene in George Wilkins’ play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607). … Scar: Prithee tell me: are you not a woman? / Clare: I know not that neither, till I am better acquainted with a man. / Scar: And how would you be acquainted with a man? Clare: To distinguish betwixt himself and myself. / Scar: Why, I am a man. / Clare: That’s more than I know, sir. / Scar: To approve that I am no less, thus I kiss thee. / Clare: And by that proof I am a man too, for I have kissed you. ….women are defined in this culture by their relation to men, yet the distinctions of gender are fluid and unclear. (13)

Elizabethan children of both sexes were dressed in skirts until the age of seven or so; the “breeching: of boys was the formal move out of the common gender of childhood, which was both female in appearance and largely controlled by women, … This event was traditionally the occasion for a significant family ceremony. (15)

…the translation of the inseparable friend into the dangerous rival, and of the chaste wife into a whore, is implicit in the fantasy, its worst-case scenario, so to speak, replicating the situation Shakespeare had imagined with such detailed intensity in the Dark Lady sonnets. This is the consequence of women entering the world of male friendship. And when Leontes retreats from it he is retreating not only from women and sex… (17)

Marriage is a dangerous condition in Shakespeare. We are always told that comedies end in marriages, and that this is normative. A few of Shakespeare’s do, but the much more characteristic Shakespearean conclusion comes just before the marriage, and sometimes, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night, with an entirely unexpected delay or postponement. Plays that continue beyond the point where comedy ends, with the old fogies defeated and a happy marriage successfully concluded, depict the condition as utterly disastrous: Romeo and Juliet, Othello. Perhaps this is really the Shakespearean norm. Most Shakespearean marriages of longer duration are equally disheartening, with shrewishness, jealousy and manipulativeness the norm in comedy, and real destructiveness in tragedy: [17] … This is the dark side of the culture’s institutionalization of marriage and patriarchy—what is striking is how little of the bright side Shakespeare includes. All the fun is in the wooing; what happens after marriage, between husbands and wives, parents and children, is a subject for tragedy. (17-18)
…a significant group of plays require the woman to become a man for the wooing to be effected. The dangers of women in erotic situations, whatever they may be, can be disarmed by having the women play men, just as in the theatre the dangers of women on the stage (whatever they may be) can be disarmed by having men play the women. The interchangeability of the sexes is, on both the fictive and the material level, an assumption of this theatre. (18)

…difference between the sexes? On Shakespeare’s stage it is a difference we would regard as utterly superficial, a matter of costumes and mannerisms; nevertheless, the superficies produce a difference that is absolute—gender disguises in this theatre are represented as all but impenetrable. (18)

Some Like It Hot… Ours is a theatre of named, known, and (most important for the purposes of this argument) gendered actors; to be seriously deceived by cross-gendered disguising is for us deeply disturbing, … The Crying Game… (19)

Sex for us the bottom line, the ultimate truth of gender. / Or so we claim. Nevertheless, a modern father who urges his timid son to “be a man” is perfectly comprehensible, despite the fact that this commonplace exhortation assumes that masculinity is achieved not through biology but through an effort of will. We are fully the heirs of the Renaissance in this: Early Modern moralists continually reminded their charges that manhood was not a natural condition but a quality to be striven for and maintained only through constant vigilance, and even them with the utmost difficulty. There has always been a crucial behavioral element to gender that has nothing to do with the organs of generation. (19)

Gynecological treatises offered widely variant accounts of etiology of gender, often concurrently and without any determination as to their [19] relative likelihood, but the most persistent line of medical and anatomical thought from the time of Galen had cited homologies in the genital structure of the sexes to show that male and female were versions of the same unitary species. In this view of sexuality, the female genitals were simply the male genitals inverted, and carried internally rather than externally. Sexual experience was conceived orgasm but ejaculate, … (20)

In this version of anatomical history, we all begin as female, and masculinity is a development out of and away from femininity. Logically, therefore, the medical literature from Roman times onward confirms the theory by recording numerous cases of women completing the physiological process and turning into men under the pressure of some great exertion or excitement. (20)

Helkiah Crooke, whose Mikrokosmographia (1615) was the most compendious English synthesis of Renaissance anatomical knowledge, provides a striking testimony to the ambiguities of the science of gender in the period. Writing for an audience of physicians, Crooke presents a detailed discussion of the homological sex thesis, which he accepts with minor reservations, and then follows it with an entirely contradictory thesis in which women are not inverted versions of men at all, but are genuinely different and have their own kind of perfection, providing the human animal with substance and nurture, as the male provides it with form. Both theories have a long history of authority behind them; both derive ultimately from Aristotle, though the homological argument was associated principally with Galen. Thus, in a chapter on the male genitals, Crooke explains women as in complete men: … ‘a woman is so much less perfect then a man by how much her heat is less and weaker then his; yet…is this imperfection turned unto perfection, because without the woman, mankind could not have been perfected by the perfecter sex.’ / But fifty pages farther on Crooke is flatly denying the homology of male and female organs. (21)

The ambiguity is in no way unusual in the period, nor is the fact that Crooke sees no need to reconcile the conflicting scientific arguments. He has, in effect, one theory when his attention is focused on men, another when it is focused on women; … the relevance of evidence is a function of the thesis being argued, not the other way round. … But Renaissance arguments rarely work in a way that seems to us neat and logical. Both theories are authoritative, each has its utility in explicating some part of the subject; each is produced not in the abstract, as part of a synthesis of gender theory, but at the appropriate moment in a discussion of physiology and behavior. (22)

In the same way Sir Thomas Browne, like Crooke a practicing physician, was on the one hand empirically persuaded of the absolute distinction between the sexes. …and this leads him to a plea to maintain the separation of the genders in [22] society: “transplace not their Proprieties and confound not their Distinctions. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica he asserts that his empirical knowledge of anatomy has convinced him that Galen was wrong about the male and female organs being inverted versions of each others, … Against this utter conviction of the integrity and immutability of the genders, however, we find the equally complete assurance of this passage from the same chapter of Pseudodoxia Epidemica: / ‘As for the mutation of sexes, or transition into one another, we cannot deny it in Hares, it being observable in Man. For hereof beside Empedocles or Tiresias, there are not a few examples: and through very few, or rather none which have emasculated or turned into women, yet very many who from an esteem or reality of being women have infallibly proved Men…’ Women are totally different from the men from before the moment of birth, even in the womb, and their genital organs “admit not of protrusion,” yet the possibility of their transformation into men goes without saying. The only sticking point is the question of whether the process can be reversed, and men turn into women; it is this that is judiciously declared to be, if not impossible, at least so rare as to be negligible (they are “very few, or rather none”). Those transformations that are attested to as scientific fact only work in one direction, from female to male, which is conceived to be upward, … (23)

As for the other part of Helkia Crooke’s convictions about gender, in which women are not versions of men develop in [23] their own way and are equally complete beings, it sounds like a blow for freedom, but for all its air of empiricism and modern good sense, it is no more advanced scientifically than the homological theory: both ultimately derive their authority from Aristotle, … In any case, the denial of female imperfection implied little that was beneficial to women within the structures of Renaissance authority; women were still, by nature, firmly ensconced below men in the hierarchy. Throughout the age, and despite the increasing evidence provided by the study of anatomy, outside the professional scientific community homology remained the predominant theory—as, for example, in The Roaring Girl the transvestite Moll Cutpurse is accounted for by explaining that “her birth began / Ere she was all made” : both her femininity and her desire to be male are functions of her incompleteness. (23-24)

Renaissance ideology had a vested interested in defining women in terms of men; the aim is thereby to establish the parameters of maleness, not of womanhood. This is why Crooke abandons the homological thesis when he turns to the specific of the female anatomy; to define the nature of women, it is not useful. (24)

Most of the scholastic opinion codified by Ian Maclean in The Renaissance Notion of Women assumes the correctness of the homological thesis, but nevertheless stresses the differences between men and women, not their similarities, and these are invariably prejudicial. (25)

The frightening part of the teleology for the Renaissance mind, however, is precisely the fantasy of its reversal, the “very few, or rather none” of Sir Thomas Browne: the conviction that men can turn into—or be turned into—women; (25)

…we all start as women, and the culture confirmed this by dressing all children in skirts until the age of seven or so, when the boy, as Leontes recalls, was “breeched,” … From this point on, for a man to associate with women was felt to be increasingly dangerous—not only for the woman, but even more for the man: lust effeminates, makes men incapable of manly pursuits; hence the pervasive antithesis of love and war. (25)

Robert Burton elucidates the matter with uncharacteristic directness: love is “full of fear, anxiety, doubt, care, peevishness, suspicion, it turns a man into a woman.” The fear of effeminization is a central element in all discussions of what constitutes a “real man” in the period, and the fantasy of the reversal of the natural transition from woman to man underlies it. It also, in a much more clearly pathological way, underlies the standard arguments against the stage in antitheatrical tracts from the time of the Church Fathers on. In this context, the very institution of theatre is a threat to manhood and the stability of the social hierarchy, as unescorted women and men without their wives social freely, and (it follows) flirt with each other and take each other off to bed: (26)

But in England, the sexuality feared is more subversive than even this suggests, precisely because of the transvestism of the stage. It is argued first that the boys who perform the roles of women will be transformed into their roles and play the part in reality. This claim has its basis in a Platonic argument, but in the Puritan tracts it merges with a general fear of blurred social and sexual boundaries, of roles and costumes adulterating the essences that God has given us. Jonas Barish, in his exhaustive and indispensable study of the antitheatrical material, relates the hostility to transvestite actors to the synchronous revival of medieval sumptuary laws, the attempts to [26] prevent members of one social class from appearing to be members of another … “Distinctions of dress,” Barish comments, “however external and theatrical they may seem to us, for Perkins virtually belong to our essence, and may no more be tampered with than that essence itself.” (26-27)

It is the fragility, the radical instability of our essence, that is assumed here, and the metaphoric quality of our sinful nature. The enormous popularity of Ovid in the age reflects both its desires and its deepest fears. (27)

Male spectators, it is argued, will be seduced by the impersonation, and losing their reason will become effeminate, which in this case means not only that they will lust after the woman in the drama, which is bad enough, but also after the youth beneath the woman’s costume, thereby playing the woman’s role themselves. This fear, which has been brilliantly anatomized by Laura Levine, is so pervasive in the tracts, and so unlike modern kinds of sexuality anxiety, that it is worth pausing over. / John Rainoldes says the adoption by men of women’s clothing incites a lust that is specifically homoerotic: [27] ... Scripture, he continues, condemns prostitution of both women and men, “detesting specially the male by terming him a dog,” and concludes by urging that we “control likewise the means and occasions whereby men are transformed into dogs, … The slippage here from effeminacy to bestiality is notable, and should remind us that in this culture femininity is not equated with docility—on the contrary, what is feared in women is their violent and uncontrollable appetites. (28)

Subsequently, citing the authority of Socrates, Rainoldes compares the homoerotic response engendered by transvestite boys to the sting of poisonous spiders: “if they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting and pour secretly in a kind of poison.” Here the attraction of men to beautiful boys is treated as axiomatic. (28)

… ‘can wise men be persuaded that there is no wantonness in the players’ parts when experience showeth (as wise men have observed) that men are made adulterers and enemies of all chastity by coming to such plays? that senses are moved, affections are delighted, hearts though strong and constant are vanquished by such players? … (28)

William Prynne… in Histriomastix the transvestism of the stage is especially dangerous because female dress is an important stimulant specifically to homoeroticism: … Heterosexuality here only provides the fetish that enables the true homosexual response to emerge. It is significant that the transvestite is not the passive one in this relationship. (29)

Rainolds, Prynes and any number of other antitheatrical writers offer observations such as these as models for the theatrical experience. For such writers, the very fact that women are prohibited from the stage reveals the true etiology of theatre: what the spectator is “really” attracted to in plays is an undifferentiated sexuality, a sexuality that does not distinguish men from women and reduces men to women—the deepest fear in antitheatrical tracts, far deeper than the fear that women in the audience will becomes whores, is the fear of a universal effeminization. In this anxiety, the fact of transvestite boys is really only incidental; it is the whole concept of the mimetic art that is at issue, the art itself that effeminates. (29)

Prynne… ‘Yea, witness… M. Stubbes, his Anatomy of Abuses… where he affirms that players and play-houses in their secret conclaves play the sodomites; together with some modern examples of such, who have been desperately enamored with players’ boys thus clad in women’s apparel, so far as to solicit them by words, by letters, even actually to abuse them… This I have heard credibly reported of a scholar of Baillol College, and I doubt not but it may be verified of divers others.’ / The assumption here is first that the basic form of response to theatre is erotic, second that erotically, theatre is uncontrollably exciting, and third, that the basic, essential form of erotic excitement is men is homosexual—that indeed, women are only a cover for men. And though the assumption as Prynne articulates it is clearly pathological, a reducto ad absurdum of antitheatrical commonplaces, it is also clearly related both to all the generalized anxieties attendant upon the institutionalization of masculinity within the culture, and to the sanctioned homoeroticism that played so large a role in relationship between men. (30)

Peter Stallybrass… the transvestite stage,… “less a matter of indeterminacy than of the production of contrary fixations: the imagined body of a women, the staged body of a boy actor, the material presence of clothes.” Testimony from the period, sparse as it is, is contradictory in just the ways that Stallybrass suggests. … Wroth’s assumption (to which I shall return) is precisely the opposite of Rainoldes’ and Prynne’s: that the stage’s transvestitism works to insulate it from lustful feelings, not to arouse them. Thomas Heywood, in one of the very few English defenses of the stage, agrees that audiences are always aware they are not watching women: [31] … but the two past participles (“occisa,” “interfecta”) agree with a female Desdemona, not with the male actor. The boy here has disappeared; Desdemona as both actor and character is gendered female. [32] … when Pepys went to see Edward Kynaston, the last of the great male heroines, the gender rules were still in force” “one Kynaston, a boy, acted the Duke’s sister but made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life—only her voice not very good.” (33)

Perhaps the most striking example of the dependence of gender on costume, and not on sexuality, is found in the romance that lies behind the cross-dressing of Twelfth Night, Barnabe Riche’s tale of Apolonius and Silla. Silla, the Viola character, in her male disguise under the name of her twin brother Silvio, is accused of impregnating Julina, the Olivia figure, and is ordered by the duke to marry her or face death. The real culprit, of course, is her twin, who passing through the town on his travels was entertained by Julina, spend the night with her, and in conventional masculine fashion decamped the next day. Silla/Silvio, put to the final test of her gender, considers her (or in the circumstances, his) plight: / ‘hearing an othe sworne so divinely that he had gotten a women with childe, was like to believe it had bin true in very deede; but remembryng his owne impediment, thought it impossible that he should committe suche an acte.’ / The degree of consideration Silla gives to Julina’s accusation here is notable. She determines that a revelation of the truth is her only recourse: / ‘And here with all loosing his garments doune to his stomacke, and shewed Julina his breasts and pretie teates, surmounting farre the whiteness of snow itself.’ / [33] Silla’s gender is determined by Silla’s garments, even in removing them. (33-34)

The notion that the transvestite stage is an enabling mechanism for homosexual activity is central to the extended confrontation between Rainoldes and William Gager over the performance of plays by Oxford undergraduates, arguably the most searching discussion of the subject in the age. Most of this has to do with interpretations of the relevant passage from Deuteronomy proscribing cross-dressing. (34)

Why, after all, should women’s garments and men be considered a temptation to homosexuality? Dresses are concealing; … Rainoldes … a womens garment being put on a man doeth vehemently touch and move him with the remembrance and imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable [34] doth stir up the desire.” There is no desire for men imagined here; what is elicited by travesty, the great danger, is heterosexual desire. (34-35)

Ironically, Rainoldes’ and Prynne’s fears point ahead to the time when actresses finally become normative on the English stage, and transvestite plots burgeoned, as they had done in Spain and France for sixty years. Cross-dressing provided much of the substance of drama for those society that did not have transvestite theatres—men paid to see women in breeches and hose. (35)

Why, then, if boys in women’s dress are so threatening, did the English maintain a transvestite theatre? It is necessary to remember that antitheatrical tracts are pathological. They share assumptions with the culture, as a whole, but their conclusions are eccentric. (35)

Stephen Greenblatt, in a brilliant essay, relates the development of the transvestite stage precisely to the cultural tropes of the boy as they are anatomized in the medical and gynecological theories of the age, and he concludes that “a conception of gender that is teleologically male and insists upon a verifiable sign to confirm nature’s final cuase finds its supreme literary expression in a transvestite theatre.” This is an exciting and attractive thesis, but the problem with it is that the medical theorists are for the most part French and Italian, and France and Italy did not develop transvestite theatres. (35)
Why did only the English public theatre resist the introduction of women on the stage? As I have indicated, any attempt to answer this question by simply producing an explanation, whether social, religious or political, will only close off the ramifications of the question. (35)

Despite the anxiety expressed in the antitheatrical literature, despite the institutionalization of marriage and patriarchy, English Renaissance culture, to judge from the surviving evidence, did not display a morbid fear of homoeroticism as such; … As Alan Bray demonstrates, … the line between the homosocial and the sodomitical was a firm but exceedingly fine one, and lay in the most profound sense in the eye of the beholder. Anxiety about the fidelity of women, on the other hand, does seem to have been strikingly prevalent; … The fear of losing control of women’s chastity, a very valuable possession that guaranteed the legitimacy of one’s heirs, and especially valuable for fathers as a piece of disposable property, is a logical consequence of a patriarchal structure… theatre served as a means of managing specifically sexual anxieties: Maus notes that the incidence of cuckoldry plots seems to be much higher in the drama than in the other imaginative genres of the period. (36)

…until 1604 the legal age of consent was twelve for women (fourteen for men), which meant that daughters over the age of twelve were also legally entitled to arrange their own marriages. They might make themselves paupers by doing so, but they could not be stopped. The horror stories of enforced marriages—there are many in the period—relate primarily to upper-class matches, where political alliances and large sums of money were at stake. In such cases what the age of consent meant in practice was merely that a woman could not be forced to consent to a marriage arranged for her before she reached the age of twelve. (37)

Middle- and lower-class arrangement, however, would have been much less constrained, as there was much less at stake. Indeed, middle-class London was a place of unusual liberty for women, and this certainly bears on both the population of the London theatre with women, and their relative freedom to enjoy it: (37)

Public theatre is regularly associated, moreover, not only with loose women but with homosexual prostitution; the latter charge is found not only in Puritan polemicists but in the playwrights themselves. Yet the attitude implied in the charge tends to be, surprisingly, liberal and permissive. [37] … The crime of sodomy is inveighed against repeatedly and energetically in legal and theological contexts; but, as Bray and Bruce Smith demonstrate, it was scarcely ever prosecuted. When cases of homosexual behavior reach the courts, they are dealt with on the whole with surprising moderation—admonitions, exhortations to abstain. (38)

In one extraordinary case discussed by Bray, a laborer named Meredith Davy was brought before the magistrate on what certainly could have been a charge of sodomy. Davy slept in the same bed with a twelve-year-old apprentice, and a third man slept in the same room. On a number of occasions the third man heard activity in the other bed, and heard the boy protest and cry out in pain. It took about a month for the witness to realize what was happening, and he finally reported it to the mistress of the house, who referred the case to the magistrate. The defendant appeared baffled by the charge, and clearly had no conception that what he was doing was related to the abominable crime of sodomy. This, surprisingly, seemed sufficient mitigation to the magistrate, and the household as a whole; Davy was sent home with an admonishment to leave the boy alone, “since which time,” the court report concludes, “he hath lain quietly with him.” The two, that is, were allowed to continue to sleep together; and of course it is conceivable that things quieted down not because Davy stopped [38] making advances but because the boy stopped objecting—it was not, after all, the boy who made the complaint. / Bray argues that such a story does not testify to any remarkable tolerance on the part of the English, but rather to a selective blindness: sodomy was something that, despite a number of explicit charges and well-known prosecution—the cases of Nicholas Udall, Francis Bacon, the Castlehaven scandal—the English associate on the whole only with foreigners, not with themselves. Travelers observing it in the relatively tolerant climates of Italy, Turkey, North Africa and Russia use it as an index to the viciousness of Roman Catholic, Muslim or barbaric societies. And yet when, at the opening of Epicoene, Clerimont is shown with a page boy who is described as “his ingle,” the fact serves as nothing more than one of a number of indications of the easy and pleasant life of a London playboy. (39)

Charges of sodomy always occur in relation to other kinds of subversion; the activity has little independent existence in the Renaissance mind, just as there is not yet a separate category of the homosexual. It becomes visible in Elizabethan society only when it intersects with some other behavior that is recognized as dangerous and anti-social; it is invariably an aspect of atheism, Papistry, sedition, witchcraft, malfeasance… [40] In the same way, the Puritan charge that theatre promotes homosexuality appears because to the Puritan mind theatre is felt to be dangerous, not the other way round; sodomy becomes the visible sign of its subversiveness. (40-41)

…I have already cited Alan Bray’s observation that the rhetoric of patronage, gratitude and male friendship in the period is precisely the language of love, render all such relationships literally ambiguous. He goes on to argue that the relationships implied are therefore not to be read as homosexual in the modern sense, that is, that they do not imply a sexual relationship; but… Jonathan Goldberg points out… The love between man was open and public, … How far beyond beneficence and gratitude that love went is imponderable, and there is nothing in the language of love that will reveal it to us—it is a language that implies everything and nothing. (42)

…it is also a commonplace to find generalized misogyny in the work of the period, especially in its idealization of chaste and beautiful women who are also cold and untouchable. What is less often observed is that… erotic homosexual relationships also figure in the literature of the period, in a context that is often, if not invariably, positive, and registers again, even when the underlying attitude is disapproving, surprisingly little anxiety about the matter. (42)

Consider the fact that Rosalind disguised as a boy can play a wooing scene with another man under the name Ganymede. …there is no indication whatever that Shakespeare is doing something sexually daring there, skating on thin ice. Counterexamples in which homoerotic behavior leads to disaster are exceedingly rare. The only clear-cut theatrical one is in Marlowe’s Edward II… (43)

The young shepherd Colin in The Shepherd’s Calendar rejects the advances of the older shepherd Hobbinol, … Colin is identified in the book as Spenser, and Hobbinol as Gabriel Harvey, … Spenser clearly does not consider this libelous, and judging from their continued association, neither did Harvey; but it makes the volume’s editor E. K. nervous, and in glossing the passage he duly cites the relevant classical precedents of Socrates and Alcibiades. These lead him to the conclusion that “paederistike [is] much to be preferred before generastike, that is the love which enflameth men with lust toward womankind.” He adds only at this point that he is not thereby condoning… the “execrable and horrible sins of forbidden and unlawful fleshiness” celebrated by Lucian and Peitro Aretino. [43] … E. K. wants to insist on the privileged status of homosexuality, not as an aspect of poetry, but of the highest moral philosophy—Socrates authorized it. To do this it is only necessary to deflect the prohibited aspects of homosexual behavior onto women on the other hand, and Italian on the other. It is important to observe that despite Colin’s interest in Rosalind, there is no argument here in favor of the love of women, and that homosexual love is defined in opposition to heterosexuality, which is equated with lust. (43-44)

Leander, …attracts the attentions of Neptune, who mistakes him for Ganymede, and is described in an extraordinarily explicit passage making passes [44] as Leander as he swims naked to Sestos. The episode is notable for the total lack of anxiety is projects. It is passionate, comic, and enthusiastic. (44-45)

To my knowledge the only dramatic instance of a homoerotic relationship being presented in the terms in which the culture formally conceived it—as antisocial, seditious, ultimately disastrous—is in Marlowe’s Edward II. It would certainly be possible to account for its perspective, if not for its uniqueness, by viewing it in the context of Eve Sedgwick’s thesis about Renaissance homosexuality: that it was not viewed as threatening because it was not defined in opposition to, or as an impediment to, heterosexuality and marriage. Edward’s love for Gaveston therefore is destrutive because it is presented as anitheterosexual; it renders him an unfit husband, as his passion render him an unfit king. I am unhappy with this explanation not because there is anything wrong with it, but because it is too straightforward to account for what seem to me a very devious and genuinely subversive play. Both politically and morally, the power-hungry nobles and the queen’s adultery with Mortimer are as destabilizing as anything in Edward’s relationship with his favorite. … Marlowe makes Gaveston an upstart, raised to the nobility by the king’s infatuation with him, and the social inappropriateness of the love is a central element in the presentation of Edward as a sodomite. (46)

And in important respects ours: modern performances always, and critics nearly always, construe the murder scene as an anal rape with a hot spit or poker. Bu this is “correcting” Marlowe by reference to Holinshed: [47] … Gregory Bredbeck’s excellent chapter on the play unintentionally provides an epitome of modern revisionism: “The murder of Edward by raping him with a red-hot poker—quite literally branding him with sodomy—can be seen as an attempt to ‘write’ onto him the homoeroticism constantly ascribed to him.” It can indeed: we want the murder to be precisely what Marlowe refuses to make it, a condign punishments, the mirror of Edward’s unspeakable vice. (47-48)

..it was probably safer to represent the power structure in that way than it would have been to play it, so to speak, straight. Had Richard II been presented as a sodomite, would the authorities have found it necessary to censor the deposition scene? Maybe Edward’s sexuality is a way of protecting the play, a way of keeping what it says about power intact. [48] … Had it been possible for a Jacobean audience to acknowledge sodomy as an English vice, the play, and the allusion, would certainly have been treasonable. (48-49)

In the examples we have considered, the love of men for men in this culture appears less threatening than the love of men for women: it had fewer consequences, it was easier to de-sexualize, it figured and reinforced the patronage system. But beneath these practical considerations was a deep layer of anxiety. (49)

…women, on whom the culture projects a natural tendency towards promiscuity of all kinds, and for which theatre is being seen as a release mechanism. Behind the outrage of public modesty is a real fear of women’s sexuality, and more specifically, of its power to evoke men’s sexuality; … It is a fear that denies the claim s of the gynecology of inverted, incomplete masculinity, a fear grounded in a recognition not of sameness but of difference, … (49)

Stephen Greenblatt has related… Portia, Rosalind and Viola, … Such figures, in this reading, “pass through the state of being men in order to become women. Shakespearean women are in this sense the projected mirror images of masculine self-differentiation.” But even this clearly has its anxieties: Shakespeare shows on occasion an unwillingness to allow them to return to being women. In an ending that has been almost totally ignored, if not positively misrepresented by the critical tradition, Viola announced in the final moments of Twelfth Night that she cannot become a woman and the wife of Orsino until her woman’s clothes have been recovered… (50)

…Twelfth Night includes the only overtly homosexual couple in Shakespeare except for Achilles and Patroclus. (51)

Handsome boys were praised in Renaissance England by saying that they looked like women—“a woman’s face, by Nature’s own hand painted/ Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.” (51)

We ought therefore to confront the implications of Viola’s conceiving herself as not simply a youth in disguise, but as surgically neutered in addition. She seems to be proposing a sexlessness that is an aspect of her mourning, that will effectively remove her, as Olivia has removed herself, from the world of love and wooing. [54] … Viola has with a single word created for herself a character in whom frustrated sexual desire is of the essence … peculiar overtone as well: being a eunuch, a sexually incapacitated male, is conceived as an equivalent, or an alternative, to being a [54] woman. This fantasy is a very old one: Chaucer, expressing his doubts about the Pardoner’s sexuality, describes him as “a geldying or a mare.” …classic Freudian fantasy, whereby gender difference is a function of castration. Twelfth Night makes the fantasy all but explicit in its puns on “cut” and “cunt.” If a eunuch is an alternative to a woman, and either is the opposite of a man, then the assumptions behind Viola’s disguise desexualize women too. / Or do they? A brief look at the history of castrati complicates the question. [55] … The Vatican castrati quickly started playing secular roles as well as religious ones: like the boys on the [55] English stage, they played the romantic women’s parts in entertainments for the exclusively male society of the Catholic hierarchy. In this respect the boys were not at all desexualized; on the contrary, they enabled the introduction of overt sexuality, simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual, into the world of ecclesiastical celibacy. / Viola as eunuch, then, both closes down options for herself and implies a world of possibilities for others—possibilities that were, to a post-Reformation Protestant society, particularly (perhaps temptingly) illicit. (55-56)

If we look at Twelfth Night in this context, Orsino and Olivia have fallen in love with the same young man, Cesario; only the costume, the chosen role, distinguishes Cesario from Viola and Viola from the Sebastian who is effortlessly substituted for her in Olivia’s affections. The gender of these figures is mutable, constructed, a matter of choice. (57)

If Viola the eunuch equivocates her sexuality, Rosalind as Ganymede in As You Like It makes the equation between women and boys not only explicit, but explicitly sexual. And here the idea of the boy displacing the woman appears in its most potentially threatening form, the catamite for whom Jove himself abandons his marriage bed. (57)

…(homosexuality is generally, though not exclusively, conceived to be pederastic in the period)… (58)

The abominable crime of sodomy was fervently condemned throughout the age, but the legal definition of sodomy was in fact exceedingly narrow. According to the Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, the sex had to be nonconsensual… the prosecution had to be able to prove that there had been both anal penetration and an ejaculation… the courts required a witness—and there were strict rules about who could serve as a witness in such cases. … The legal situation does not at all coincide with popular attitudes, of course, in which the term sodomy covered a multitude of horrendous sins, not all of them by any means involving homosexuality; but precisely for this reason it is to the point that sodomy was legally construed in such a way that it could hardly ever be prosecuted. Coke’s definition was developed in Jacobean times (and the third part of the Institutes, in which the definition finally [58] appears, was not published until 1644), … Bruce Smith’s study of the Assize courts in the Home Countries reveals a total of only six sodomy trials in the entire reign of Elizabeth; all involved the rape of a minor, and five of the six resulted in acquittals. (59)

Sodomy, then, does not mean what we mean by homosexuality. As proliferating studies in the history of sexuality have show, the binary division of sexual appetites into the normative heterosexual and the deviant homosexual is a very recent invention; neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality existed as categories for the Renaissance mind. Indeed, the very idea that sexual preferences constitutes categories—that people can be identified according to what kinds of sex they enjoy—and moreover that such categories are exclusive ones—that an interest in men necessarily precludes or conflicts with an interest in women—is largely a piece of post-Enlightenment taxonomy. (59)

Indeed, overt imputations of sodomy in the drama rarely treat it as an exclusive taste, and are, as I have suggested, more often a subject [59] for comedy than for moral outrage. … The displacement of the desire onto the French and Italians is sufficient to render it comic. (59-60)

English satire had identified foreign Papist priests as sodomites since the Reformation, … (61)

In Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1697), we can see that the paradigm has at last changed: homoeroticism is both unqualified and domesticated in the person of the lecherous Coupler—this is the first character I know of who would be recognizable as gay in the modern sense. [61] … unabashed overtness and singlemindedness of Coupler’s sexual appetite, unmitigated by foreignness or Roman Catholicism, … [but] To use the terms of homosexual and heterosexual to describe the pre-Enlightenment situation, therefore, is anachronistic [62] and misleading. (61-62)

In a society that has an investment in seeming women as imperfect men, the ganger points will be those at which women reveal that they have an independent essence, .. In romance plots, this point is reached when the wooing starts, when the woman’s separateness becomes essential, and her sexual nature has to be taken into account. This is the moment in Twelfth Night and As You Like It when Viola and Rosalind start to feel trapped by their disguises rather than protected by them. … Even after the wooing has been successfully accomplished, the play insists that the wife is really a boy—and this too, of course, may be a way of [63] offering Orlando (or any number of spectators of either sex) what he “really” wants. (63-64)

All historical claims, even the most tactful and unpoliticized, are ultimately concerned to make the past comprehensible, usable and relevant to our own interests—to make it, that is, present. (64)

Standard theatrical history holds that the boys of the company were its apprentices, that they got their training playing woman’s roles and, when their voices changed, they progressed to playing adult males. …boys were apprenticed, but not to the actors… only members of guilds could have apprentices, and there was no actor’s guild. [64] … The boys of the troupe were thus technically not apprenticed actors but apprentice grocers, goldsmiths, drapers, shoemakers, joiners, and so forth, and when they completed their apprenticeships they were (or were entitled to be) full members of whatever guild they had been apprenticed in. …Jonson, despite his notorious distaste for the craft, renewed his membership in the bricklayers’ guild in 1599, long after he became an actor… female roles could thenceforth be played by an apprentice bricklayers. (64-65)

There is one exception to the generalization that boys could not be apprentice actors, and it is an instructive one. Under a royal patent, the children’s companies were granted the right to impress boys into service—the logic of this was that the boys were to be trained as choristers, providing music for the royal chapel; … the patent actually authorized the choirs to practice what amounted to legalized kidnapping, and in a remarkable suit in 1601, a gentlemen named Henry Clifton brought an action in the Star Chamber against the director of the Blackfriars, Henry Evans, charging that Evans had removed his son and seven other boys from their grammar school to be forcibly apprenticed as actors. [66] … The rules finally changed in 1606, when a new royal patent was issued specifically prohibiting the Blackfriars from using any impressed boys in plays. (66-67)

The persistent complaint of London commercial interests, that theatres are subversive, that the existence of theatres interferes with business, particularly that theatre seduces apprentices away from their craft, must have included a sense that the theatrical companies were in effect operating as unlicensed guilds, … Belonging to a London guild conferred both privilege and protection. It meant that one had the freedom of the city—that one was a citizen with full rights to engage in business, trade or craft (in London, it conferred the right to engage in any trade, not simply the one in which one had been apprenticed). [67] … I think it is most likely that the initial impulse of acting troupes toward the guild system came from this, its promise of respectability within the city structure, rather than from its utility as an enabling mechanism for theatrical apprentices. (67-68)

Apprenticeship … benefited both the boys and their masters. The apprentice lived in his master’s household, and was fed and clothed by him; in return, all wages due for the boy’s services, with the exception of a small stipulated percentage, belonged to the master. (68)

Sue-Ellen Case, … notes that there are significant ways in which the relation of master and apprentice parallels that of husband and wife in a patriarchal society: the analogy between boy sand women… (68)

It is always assumed that this was the model for the theatre as well, that the boys got their training playing women, but graduated to adult male roles. This sounds logical and may well be correct, but it is worth remarking how few documented instances there are of adult actors in the period who began by playing women: …we should at least consider the possibility that what we are dealing with is not simply a company organized according to categories of age, adults and adolescents, but two different classes of actors as well. Did boys who played women go on to play men? Some did, certainly, but what about the rest? Viewed in this light, it is less significant that the acting companies were all male than that they consisted of men and boys, masters and indentured servants, two asymmetrical classes of performers. … though it is almost invariably assumed to be: boys do not look any more like women than men do. It is important to bear in mind how time-bound the notion of what “women” look like is: boys have no facial hair, like women, but they are also slim-hipped and without breasts. There are also, needless to say, women with facial hair, or small breasts or slim hips, or with all of these (just as there are buxom men [69] with large hips); but to judge from the evidence of portraits, the Elizabethan ideal, at least of aristocratic womanhood, was what we would call boyish and they called womanly: slim-hipped and flat-chested. Whether boys are thought to look like women or not it is in our interests to view boys as versions of men, but the Renaissance equally clearly sought the similitude in boys and women. (69-70)

…after the Restoration, when Edward Kynaston was playing female roles, he was declared by John Downes to be more convincingly female than any of this female colleagues. For both these observers, realism was clearly not the major factor; the assumption is that the best actor makes the best woman. … Why then did only boys play women? (70)

The boy player was apparently as much an object of erotic attraction for women as for men: (71)

Standard history hold that the guilds were all-male preserve, and that women could not be apprentices or guild members. This would be an especially useful fact if it were true, … although female apprenticeship is documented from the fifteenth century onward, and was relatively commonplace in the early seventeenth century, most historians absolutely deny its existence… (72)

…records survive of women in fifteenth-century London as full apprentices [72] and guild members in the silk trade; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the statues of the masons’ and carpenters’ guilds are addressed to “systeren and bretheren”; until late in the seventeenth century women, in one place or another, were admitted into practically every English trade or guild. Women did not, moreover, limit their efforts to ladylike pursuits: in Chester, in 1575, there was five women blacksmiths. … a common modern way of ignoring the presence of women in the Renaissance workforce is to claim that they were there only as emanations of absent or dead husbands: this is not the case. … In Southampton, for example, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, 48 percent—almost half—the apprentices were women. (The fact that the presence of women in the guild system declined markedly (it dropped, in Southampton, during the course of the seventeenth century to 9 percent) was, like the fact that there were no English actresses on the Elizabethan and early Stuart stage, a matter of social convention, not statute. [73] … But the situation in both the guilds and there theatre confirms Joan Kelly’s thesis that medieval women enjoyed more rights and had considerably more mobility than their Renaissance descendents—rights that, in the guilds, persisted much longer than they did in other areas of English society. (72-74)

…Patricia Crawford stunned the members of a recent conference of Early Modern history by pointing out that a study of the voting registers shows that in certain parts of the country, women had been regularly voting in parliamentary elections during the seventeenth century into the 1650s at least, despite the fact that, according to Lord Chief Justice Coke, women were not legally entitled to vote. This being the case, it becomes especially important not simply to assume that women were excluded from all areas of public life, and to look closely at those endeavors in which they did in fact participate, whether we believe they were legally empowered to do so or not. (74)

What did women enjoy about a theatre we find misogynistic? I have already suggested certain kinds of answers: plays about love matches are especially powerful fantasies of freedom in a patriarchal society, and for women even more than for men; and the positive side of [74] cuckoldry plots from the woman’s perspective is the conviction that her sexuality is powerful and attractive, threatening to husbands, and under her own control: … (74-75)

Merchant of Venice, … the women feign outrage, accuse the men of faithlessness… (75)

If we resist the impulse simply to dismiss this as a pointless joke the women play on the men, with no larger implications, but focus instead on the anxieties it expresses, as criticism has begun to do, it is part of a fantasy of female sexual power that is difficult to read as humane or benevolent. It sets the demands of marriage not only [76] against those of friendship, but, more dangerously, against those of gratitude, and in a culture of clientage, as this is, ingratitude is the primal sin—as it sill is in Milton’s version of the Fall, … (76-77)

But we need to look further than interpretation, beyond the plots: asking what Renaissance women would have like about such a play is certainly to ask the wrong question. There are many reasons for going to theatre, and very few of them have anything to do with the texts of the plays. (77)

A better starting point seems to me Lisa Jardine’s contention that “playing the woman’s part—male effeminacy—is an act for a male audience’s appreciation.” There is ample evidence, from the Jonson of Epicoene to Dame Edna Everedge that this is true; but is there anything in the act for a female audience as well? Renaissance literature is in fact rich in plots involving male transvestism in which women are deeply implicated, not only as the cause, but sometimes directly as the instigators. Cleopatra, for example, amuses herself by dressing the drunken Antony in her garments: (78)

Sidney’s Arcadia … [78] Pyrocles, in order to gain access to Philocleia, disguises hisemlf as an Amazon warrior. Musidorus comes upon him in the forest, and is appalled at the transformation he sees. He urges Pyrocles to give up the disguise, effeminate and unworthy of a soldier. But Pryocels defends himself with some surprisingly forceful Platonic logic. He says that it is in the nature of love to imitate the beloved; that since women are virtuous, imitating them cannot be vicious; and that no human being’s virtue is complete unless it encompasses the virtue of women as well as men. Pyrocles is, in short, realizing Aristophanes’ fable in Plato’s Symposium in which humankind as originally created was a double creature, subsequently separated by the gods in envy of its perfect happiness. (78-79)

…the readership of romances was overwhelmingly female—Sidney’s title, after all, is The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia… (80)

Peter Stallybrass remarks that here “the threat to replace women with boy actors is not imagined as a general loss but as a loss to the male spectator alone. The female spectator, on the contrary, is imagined as running wild after the ‘Youth in Petticoats.’ The boy actor is thus depicted as particularly alluring to women.” (81)

For a female audience, in a culture as patriarchally stratified as that of Renaissance England, to see the youth in skirts might be to disarm and socialize him in ways that were specifically female, to see him as a possessor or master, but as companionable and pliable and one of them—as everything, in fact, that the socialized Renaissance woman herself is supposed to be. It strikes me that Twelfth Night provides just such a model in Olivia, in love with the boy/girl/eunuch Cesario/Sebastian, … (81)

One thing such moments certainly suggest, even for us, is the degree to which both gender and sexual desire, in any era, are socially and culturally constructed. This is true for both sexes; and women profit from these representations and are empowered by them precisely thought that recognition. It is, after all, Omphale who dresses Hercules in her garments, Cleopatra who puts Antony into her tires and mantles. These are represented not as male stratagems, but as transformations that give women power and pleasure. (82)

The other side of male effeminacy was female masculinity, and the identification of socially offensive behavior in women as “masculine” constitutes one of the most commonplace pf Renaissance slippages… In social contexts, the complaints focused particularly on fashions in clothing, which were construed as instances of cross-dressing. The locus classicus here is King James’s well-known admonition to the London clergy, requiring them “to inveigh vehemently and bitterly in their sermons against the insolency of our women, and their wearing of broad-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn, and some of them stilettos or poniards…adding withal that if pulpit admonitions will not reform them he would proceed by another course.” [83] … Is the real object of King James’s outburst, then, his wife’s taste in fashion? The possibility is not inconceivable; husband and wife had few tastes in common, and by 1617 were maintaining both different households and different religions—indeed, Queen Anne’s conversion to Roman Catholicism had been a problem for the king for two decades, even threatening to compromise his accession to the English throne. Man-like and unseemly clothes in this case would be an index to a much more dangerous kind of independence. And if every Englishman was a king in his own household, was every Englishwoman by the same token a version of the unmanageable queen? (83-84)

Here is the same issue in reverse. Barnabe Riche, in his Farewell to the Military Profession, indicates as one of the major changes driving him from his calling the effeminization of the military: [84] … I net one who came riding towards me…appareled in a French ruff, a French cloak, Frence hose, and in his hand a great fan of feathers, bearing them up very womanly against the side of his face. [85] … Riche’s diagnosis of the new social disease places its etiology securely in heterosexuality, observing that the fashion is adopted “to please gentlewomen.” … Riche’s version of heterosexuality is literally homoerotic. (84-87)

…the most widely circulated portrait of King Jame’s elder son Prince Henry, who saw himself as a military hero. He is presented as manly and athletic, practicing at the lance. Plate 8, on the other hand, is his investiture portrait as Prince of Wales, painted only a year earlier—the lace collar, the luxuriantly feathered hat… [87] It is clear that these two representations of the heir to the throne do not contradict each other. (87-94)

Both Francois I and his son Henri II made exemplary use of the virtues of double gender by having themselves depicted in dresses (plates 11 and 12). Francois’ image is accompanied by an explanatory motto: the king is a Mars in war, a Minerva or Diana in peace. (94)

For all the pulpit rhetoric about the evils of cross-dressing, sumptuary legislation said nothing about the [page 96] wearing of sexually inappropriate garments. It was concerned with violations of the sartorial badges of class, not those of gender. … Insofar as sumptuary legislation in the period generalizes about [98] women, it insists on just the distinctions the king refuses to make: it declares that all women are not the same; what is proper dress for ladies is not proper for women of the middle class—indeed, it says the same of men, and thereby declines to distinguish the sexes. King James did not have much use for women, but perhaps the point of his reproach in really the same as the point of van Somer’s painting: that the queen sets her own style; and that what is appropriate for the [99] queen is not appropriate for other women. The royal outrage would be, in this reading, against presuming to imitate the style of royalty, and thereby encroaching on the prerogatives of the crown—a danger the king throughout his reign saw as ubiquitous. / This may well be giving the king too much credit. (96-100)

Theatre was under aristocratic and ultimately royal patronage, but it constituted both an obvious violation of the sumptuary laws—it presented middle-class actors and working-class apprentices dressed as aristocrats… (100)

If costume was essential to theatre, the wrong costume was quintessential. (102)

In the England of Elizabeth , the most highly charged misrepresentation were those of class, hence the legislation against wearing clothes that admitted one to an undeserved place in the hierarchy, and hence also the endemic flouting of the legislation. On the stage, however, the egregious misrepresentations are those of gender, … Bu this practice too was, as we have seen, just as thoroughly naturalized in Renaissance England as the violation of [102] the semiotics of class: the only people who found it reprehensible were those for whom theatre itself was reprehensible. (102-103)

That the analogy between boys and women was naturalized does not imply that boys are substitutes for women; it implies just the opposite: both are treated as a medium of exchange within the patriarchal structure, and both are (perhaps in consequence) constructed as objects of erotic attraction for adult men. Boys and women are not in competition in this system; … (103)

The flummery at the conclusion of Twelfth Night about the impossibility of proceeding with the marriage of Orsino and Viola (and therefore the impossibility of concluding the plot) until Viola’s clothes have been found declares in the clearest possible way that, whatever Viola says about the erotic realities of her inner life, she is not a woman unless she is dressed as one. Even here, it is a particular costume that matters, her own dress that was left with the sea captain: this is the dress that is Viola. (104)

…one way of viewing the transvestite actor of Shakespeare’s stage is as a response to a large cultural anxiety, a manifestation of the audience’s, and ultimately of the culture’s, desire for a disarmed woman. Alternatively, we have seen it as just the opposite, a performative construction that both reveals the malleability of the masculine and empowers the feminine, enabling the potential masculinity of women to be realized and acknowledged, if safely contained within the theatre’s walls. …this account… does not, for example, explain why English theatres differed from those on the Continent in this respect; but perhaps it does not need to: it might be sufficient to observe that different societies have different ways of responding to common cultural anxieties. Italy executed sodomites while England on the whole ignored them. (106)

…women in drag. The most famous instance in the period is Mary Frith (the model for [106] Middleton’s and Dekker’s Roaring Girl), a woman who presented herself, defined her identity, as a transvestite, and was accepted as such—accepted, that is, as a transvestite, not as a man. The disguise here is no disguise, but at most an open secret. (106-107)

Why then do women want to present themselves as mannish in a culture that seems to reprehend such behavior, and why, if the behavior is really seen as reprehensible, does it remain legal, and thereby, in some significant sense—the literal sense must be significant—legitimate? (107)

The fears of a patriarchal society about the power of women, localized in sexual power, … (107)

Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531… ‘A man in his natural perfection is fierce, hardy, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable [i.e. eager for offspring]. The good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable, benign, of sure remembrance, and shamefast. (107)

But the danger of treating Renaissance misogyny as a cultural constant is the tendency to naturalize it. Whose interest did misogynist discourse serve? (108)

Indeed, the oxymoron by which the most successful English acting company chose to identify itself after 1603, “Gentlemen the King’s Servants,” seems designed to insist precisely on the socially transgressive nature of theatre itself, the medium in which class boundaries are systematically violated and sumptuary laws flouted, as lower-class actors wearing aristocratic clothing and mime greatness. But as the long history of royal and noble patronage of the stage indicates, the transgressiveness is generally more serviceable than threatening to those in power, not least, paradoxically, in the theatre’s ability to imagine and rewrite the nature of power, or masculinity, or the very notion of subjectivity itself. … The transvestite actor… available to interrogate, unsettle, reinterpret the norms, which were always conceived to be unstable—the interrogation, indeed, was an essential part of the never-ending attempt at stabilization. (108)

Beyond the theatre, transvestism was far more obviously a potent issue, highly charged but so hopelessly nonspecific… slippage between sumptuary display the gender transgression … modern critics regularly do the same conflation when they assume that Elizabethan sumptuary laws regulated cross-dressing. …It is to the point that in England, French and Italian fashionable male style was considered effeminate: transvestism is, to a large degree, in the eye of the beholder. (109)

We have seen that the cross-dressing that does not represent but is represented in so much Renaissance drama, the transvestism of Viola, Rosalind, Portia and Nerissa, expresses a wide a variety of patriarchal anxieties, and that these have more to do with the authority of the father within the family structure, with issues relating to inheritance, the transfer of property and the contracting of alliances, than with gender or sexuality. (109)

Women and children (and the society has an investment in representing women as perpetual children) become the cultural metonyms for the working classes generally—all those elements that must be controlled if the patriarchy is to survive. (109)

Witches, though epitomizing what was conceived as a specifically female propensity to wickedness, were also regularly accused to being either unfeminine or androgynous, … Ben Jonson employed a coven of witches to provide the antimasque for The Masque of Queens, his celebration of female heroism and virtue. So conceived, witches and queens are two sides of single coin; the fearsome and the admirable share the same attributes of masculine vigor, strength and independence. (110)

…in a Jacobean context the most striking aspect of Mary Frith was probably not her successful manipulation of the gender codes, but her ability to manipulate them from within her lower-middle-class status. (112)

It has become clear, however, that female transvestism was a fairly widespread practice, especially among lower-class women, as opportunities for work in the seventeenth century were increasingly limited to men. Research has uncovered a significant number of documented cases of women who served as men, in the army and in other traditionally male occupations, and in some cases even took wives. (112)

Transvestism here is not a romantic fiction but a real anitpatriarchal strategy. The question is not how generally feasible such as strategy may have been—obviously there were very few such cases—but how threatening the model they offered—of the woman who appropriated the prerogatives of men—was felt to be. To begin with, we have seen that neither Elizabethan nor Jacobean society finds the most visible symbol of female masculinity, the transvestite woman, sufficiently threatening to enact any law enjoining her behavior. (115)

Bigamy was a crime under canon law, but the punishment was merely that the bigamous marriage was declared void. It only became a felony in 1604—the year before Dudely and Southwell eloped. The change in the law had less to do with the sanctity of matrimony than with parliament’s attempt to limit and control the authority of the ecclesiastical courts over marriage, (115)

Anxieties about bigamy unquestionably have patriarchal roots, but in this case they are not, for once, anxieties about the power of women. The bigamist is almost invariably a man. Of women who violated the marriage bond, for example, by adultery, the law took little notice, both before and after 1604: adultery was a spiritual matter, which remained in the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, and was not prosecutable under the common law. Under canon law it constituted, at most, grounds upon which a husband could repudiate his wife and obtain a legal separation; it was not grounds for what in modern terms would be called divorce; the parties were not free to remarry, and the husband remained liable for the wife’s support. The law here did not favor the man: there was no particular advantage to the husband in this situation, and the statutes provided no relief for the universal figure of fun, the cuckold. Indeed, the children of a legally married woman by an adulterous liaison, even if they were disavowed by her husband, were considered legitimate and took the husband’s name… (116)

The laws relating to marriage, then, were not on the whole concerned with infractions. Instead, the law helped both to define the place of women and to keep them in it by guaranteeing but also limiting their property rights, regulating their rights to contract alliances, and on a lower level, by providing the ducking stool for scolds. …despite the extensive literature addressing the problem of harridans, shrews, and the like, except in the rare cases where the “unfeminine” woman could be defined as a witch, English Renaissance culture on the whole tolerates her. / Perhaps, however, it does more than that: perhaps there is a sense in which it positively wants her around. Within the cultural norms, as Karen Newman observes, “in the daily life of the household, village, and town, women… though always ideologically subject, often had authority over men—over their servants and children, over the less wealthy or wellborn.” We have seen how the image of Queen Elizabeth in full armor, as a later account put it “like some Amazonian empress,” rallying her troops at Tilbury when the attack of the Armada was imminent, served as a potent argument against Caroline effeminacy, and indicates the degree to which the masculine woman could serve as an ideal. (117)

The earliest depiction of her in armor at Tilbury is the Caroline engraving in plate 14, a document in the politics of nostalgia. Elizabeth’s ubiquitously cited speech to her troops on the occasion is also a later confection; it survives in a variety of versions, but the earliest dates from shortly after the event and was intended for publication. It is a characteristic performance, consciously plaing against traditional gender roles. “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king…Rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.” This is not the rhetoric of an Amazon; Amazons do not present themselves as weak and feeble women. It combines the discourse Othello employs when he calls Desdemona his fair warrior with the Petrachan, and more specifically Spenserian, ideology in which masculine heroism consists of service to a noble lady, and its rewards are not the spoils of war but the favor she dispenses. (118)

Transvestism is for us male to female. For the Renaissance it was—normatively, so to [118] speak—female to male, and it took forms that ranged from the personal style exemplified by Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, … to those fashionable accessories of which King James complained to the Bishop of London, and on to outright gender crossing, where the transvestism is intended to deceive… (119)

…pamphlets published in 1620, Hic Mulier, an attack on women in male dress, … That the anxiety has to do with how much more sexually exciting the new fashion renders women is clear from the costume as it is described. … what is construed as “masculine” here is precisely the aggressive sexual display, the flaunting of desire. Masculine dress is conceived as empowering and liberating; it frees its wearers, however, not to be like men—to be soldiers, merchants, artisans, heads of households—but to be sexually active women, harlots. [119] … being masculine in this case means having constant and promiscuous sex: this is what it is to “act” like a man; but the deeper implication is that sexual desire, and the authority to satisfy it, are male prerogatives. [120] … carnal lust, which in woman is insatiable.” (119-121)

Contradictions may be of the essence of a system; and if they are, then to undertake to resolve them will misrepresent the system. This is surely the case with that various and conflicted set of ideologies we call Renaissance patriarchy. …it is also always threatened—this is an essential elements in the way any patriarchy conceives itself. …Authority exists only when it is exerted, and it must be exterted over someone—it must, that is, constantly create or identify its subjects. (123)

Comedies about the management of shrews and tragedies about daughters who disobey their fathers and make disastrous marriages are obviously implicated in it. Those who see in Romeo and Juliet and Othello attacks on patriarchy misunderstand the nature, and more specifically the representation, of the ideology of the age. (123-124)

…the patriarchy of fathers impinged on that of husbands, both were at odds with the patriarchy of the crown, and even the crown could be charged with usurping the prerogatives of God the Father. In short, everyone in this culture was in some respects a woman, feminized in relation to someone. (124)

In short, the ideology of a culture does not describe its operation, only the ideals and assumption, often refracted and unacknowledged, of its ruling elite. …To define Renaissance culture simply as a patriarchy, whatever the term is taken to imply, is then to limit one’s view to the view the dominant culture took of itself; to assert that within it women were domestic creatures and a medium of exchange is to take Renaissance ideology at its word, and thereby to elide and suppress the large number of women who operated outside the family system, and the explicit social and legal structures that enabled them, in this patriarchy, to do so. / In this respect, even the most powerful feminist analyses are often in collusion with precisely the patriarchal assumptions they undertake to displace. (125)

Perhaps the Early Modern conception of male and female did not in fact preclude women from operating in the public world; perhaps it only meant that when they did, they were thought of as “masculine.” (127)

…they are cases that indicate that both the complexities and contradictions in patriarchal attitudes, and the radical inconsistency of the constructions of the feminine. (129)

Adultery and fornication, then, were no bar to preferment in this instance. What was perceived as threatening to the patriarchy, and [132] resulted in social ostracism, was the attempt to move back within its norms, the claim of respectability. (132-133)

…Countess of Shrewsbury—the famous Bess of Hardwick. …Edmund Lodge, in 1791, summed up more than two centuries of hostile criticism when he described her as “a woman of masculine understanding and conduct; proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling.” Doubtless, had her “masculine…conduct” been the work of a man, it would have been found admirable, but her story also illustrates the ways in which the patriarchal system could be made to work for and by women. [133] … married at the age of fifteen to thirteen-year-old Robert Barlow. …marriage was part of a complex scheme to preserve the Barlow property from …custody of the Court of Wards… Her husband died a year and a half later—there were no children, since the marriage, as was common in such youthful matches, had been unconsummated. … In 1547, at the age of twenty, she married Sir William Cavendish, a prosperous civil servant twenty-two years older than she, … Cavendish was shrewd, practical, and exceptionally able; and though his second wife [134] brought him no property, he found a true soulmate in her. Within a few years she was not only managing their several households, but keeping all the accounts. … Cavendish’s embezzlement of funds from his office in the treasury. … Cavendish died, leaving Bess a widow with an immense debt to the crown. / What made the debt manageable was the death of Queen Mary in the following year. The Cavendishes had supported Princess Elizabeth when it was unfashionable and even dangerous to do so—this, indeed, may have been one of the things that Mary distrusted in them—and the new queen rewarded Bess by bringing her to court as lady-in-waiting. She quickly found a third husband there, Sir William St. Loe, … he adored her. The queen eventually remitted all but (lb) 1,000 of the debt; the money was [135] paid by St. Loe. When he died eight years later, in 1565, her own property was unencumbered, and since they had had no children, she was the sole heir to his considerable property, a rich widow with absolute control over her fortune. / So far, Bess had beaten the system by a combination of good luck, good management, and what must have been extraordinary charm. … At this point Bess could have retired to Chatsworth and lived comfortably on her now large income. That she chose not to do so is an index to her ambition both for herself and her children. …she married the wealthiest man at court, the recently widowed George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. This was advantageous for both of them; [136] … To begin with, the marriage seems to have been a success; but from 1569 the earl and countess were totally occupied with the care of Mary Queen of Scots, who had been put into their keeping by Elizabeth. That they should have been chosen fro this complex and dangerous office indicates the depth of the queen’s trust in them, … Bess was equal to the challenge; her husband was not. … irreconcilable quarrels between him and his wife. [137] … Bess survived Mary’s attempts to implicate her in treasonable plots; she also survived extended hostilities and lawsuits on the part of her increasingly estranged husband. Though Elizabethan law was, as a whole, certainly biased in favor of men, … the courts consistently supported the countess against the two earls. In her last years she ran a large financial empire, … Maybe the only ting anomalous about it is the way our history has recorded it. (133-138)

Theatre here holds the mirror up to nature—or more precisely, to culture: this is a world in which masculinity is always in question. In the discourses of patriarchy, gender is the least certain of boundaries. Acting like a man is the most successful, the most compelling way of acting like a woman. The Roaring Girl enacts the dangerous possibility that is articulated in innumerable ways throughout this society, from gynecological theory to sartorial style, from the fear of effeminacy to the stage’s translation of boys into women and women into boys: that women might be not objects but subjects, not the other but the self. (153)

J. E. Bernard, Jr., The Prosody of the Tudor Interlude

J. E. Bernard, Jr., The Prosody of the Tudor Interlude, Archon Books, Yale University Press, 1969

The interludes are considered one by one, each with a tabulation of its metrical nature. The results of an endeavor to link changes in rime scheme with internal changes in the plays are more in the style of observation than conclusions, but from the history of the metres in the course of the century the following may be deduced: / 1. The verse of the Tudor interlude must not be merely condemned by our present syllabic criteria as doggerel. / 2. It was indigenous to England and had no connexion with Continental poetics. / 3. The playwrights were concerned with varying their verse in accord with what took place in the drama. / 4. In general, their concern emphasized the contrast between two systems; for example, virtue and serious passages were often present in ballad measures, and vice and frolicsome passages in rime cou[e]e. / 5. All complicated measures were laid aside with the advent of prose and blank verse about 1588. … (Preface, x)

Interludes were primarily folk-drama, and the verse which more or less confined their lines was a secondary consideration. … The no further rapprochement, certainly no wedding of poetic thought to poetic form. (1)

But just as the authors of the interludes had no concern with poetical content, neither had they any concern with poetic outline as far as individual lines were considered. The line was a matter of little importance to them. That it should embrace now eight syllables, now thirty-eight, did not challenge their sense of form. (2)

The singleness of the dramatic eye which John Heywood and the other writers of interludes possessed thus permitted nearly all focus to be concentrated on groups of lines. Now, prosody is concerned primarily with the single line… In the case of the interludes with the general absence of such interest, the result is that all attention must be brought to bear on groups of lines. Usually these lines are grouped in pairs, providing a minimum of prosodic interest as well as a minimum of effort in the writing. Very often, however, the lines are grouped stanzaically. (2)

The lines cannot all be scanned; few in fact will submit to the straightjackets of iamb and anapaest. [The striking exception to this rule is the work of George Gascoigne, himself in 1575 the author of the earliest modern treatise on English prosody. …] (3)

The survey thus becomes primarily a study in rime, for by this means the lines are linked. In so discussing the versification of the interludes, i.e. strophically, there must be found a means of noting the size of the lines which constitute the stanzas. From the very beginning, the length of the lines varied within wide syllabic limits, and the only common denominator is to be found in the number of stresses which the lines contain. (3)

To generalize, the first writers of the interludes were men of the court circle, often musicians as well. [John Heywood, John Redford, Richard Edwards.] Of the parvenu Tudor aristocracy they made a comparate part; their traditions and their education were English, free from foreign sophistication. The drama with which they were familiar was for the most part that indigenous to English soil, the influence of the quattrocento in Italy not yet having been experienced, and the sotties of the French stage affecting the content of only a handful of plays. The sources for the form of the interludes were to be discovered in the moralities from which they grew, developments of the church-drama which employed complicated verse-forms. (4)

The conditions under which the interludes were written would further condone the “lax” approach of the authors to a rigid versification. The plays were composed by men whose vocations were in other fields. Some were musicians, some were clergymen, some were strolling players; none were vocational poets. [The poetical work of Heywood, Edwards, and Gascoigne scarcely entitles them to be considered “professional,” so to speak, in the sense of Michael Drayton or Edmund Spenser.] The interludes were written to grace a [4] particular occasion, originally the interim between two halves of a banquet, and, having perhaps been put on by children, then to be discarded. (4-5)

Those who wrote the interludes so often made assonance and ocular rime take the place of mere rime… (5)

The present survey includes the seventy-odd interludes which appears between 1497 and 1593, the date of Summer’s Last Will and Testament, the point of climax of this form of drama. Sophistication from the professional drama had so entered into its fibre that the interlude was no longer worthy of the name. (6)

Since the prosody of the drama is separate from that of poetry for the reasons cited above, it has been deemed necessary [6] to omit from this survey the songs which occur in the interludes. The ideals which gave rise to their versification are different, and it often bears no relation to the versification of the play as a whole. (6-7)

There was also a curious revival of the old alliterative verse—if it can be said ever to have died—which escapes all attempt to transfix it. It cannot be scanned; one can merely point it out in places where it becomes apparent. (9)

The work that has already been done on the prosody of the interludes deserves a note of comment before going on to an individual discussion. They are usually dismissed with a word like doggerel, occasionally expanded to Skeltonic doggerel. A few of the more important have merited separate discussion as far as a cataloguing of their rime schemes, but in general little attempt has been made to unravel the various metrical skeins. The dictum of George Saintsbury that this drama was prosodic anarchy and that it contained “doggerel of all kinds” has gone unchallenged. Of course it does contain doggerel of all kinds, but to dismiss [10] it so is inadequate. Conscious cerebral effort is always connected with the sustained production of lines which rime not only by two but in alternation, from which grow the more complicated structures. (10-11)

…in dealing with the Tudor interludes squeamishness is out of place. All subtleties of notation, all delicate attempts to connect this dramatic poetry with music must be put behind in an endeavor to catch the sweep [11] and swing of verse that is intended to carry the listener along, not to titillate his softer emotions. (11-12)

Five works on prosody appeared during the age of the interlude and were ignored. [See G. G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904. 2 vols.). The treatises were: 1575. George Gascoigne, Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rime in English (Ibid., i. 46-57.) / 1582. Richard Stany hurst, “Too tee Learned Reader,” prefatory to Thee First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis. (Ibid., i. 136-47.) / 1585. King James VI., “Ane Schort Treatise Conteining some Reulis and Cautelis to be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie.” (Ibid., i. 208-25.) / 1586. William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetry. (Ibid., i. 226-302.) / 1589. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy. (Ibid., ii. 3-193; see also the edition of G. D. Willcox and A. Walker [Cambridge, 1936], pp. lxiv-lxxiii.) / For a discussion of the above essays, see Smith, loc. cit., pp. xlvi-lx. Fortunately, too, the whole question of quantitative scansion does not enter into the metrics of the interludes. See also Schipper, ii. 223-5.] True, this form of the drama has nearly run its course by their time, but so great is the contrast between the work of Gascoigne in his interludes and that of his contemporaries that one instantly recognizes The Glass of Government as a step-child. (12)

[LXXII. Summer’s Last Will and Testament. Rhythms, heavy. Prevailing metre: blank verse.] The verse is of the doggerel kind, with a general attention to the number of stresses in the line and a vague attention to the number of unstressed auxiliary syllables. (195)

The notion that rime cou[e]e better befitted the scenes of madcap activity, and that ballad measured measured of six, seven, or eight lines were better suited to those of a more serious nature was one which took firm root in the ground of the secular drama whence it drew its strength. (196)

The coming of septenaries in 1569 lent another handle to the machinery of versification, and the result followed that the writers of interludes once again took stock in suiting the verse to the character and to the nature of the episode. / For a few years, perhaps eight, the interest was maintained, occasionally with grave scruples, but thereafter Saintsbury’s term “prosodic anarchy” is particularly appropriate. Blank verse banished the more complex schemes form the repertory. If one takes into account that interludes had been written in rimed prose and that now rime too may be dropped, the effect of the licence is obvious. There had been little evenness in the blank verse of the Aeneid which [201] appeared in 1557, [Books II and IV were translated into an English form of Latini’s verso sciolto by Henry Howard, Early of Surrey; see Berdan, pp. 354-60; Saintsbury, i. 314-6; Schipper, ii. 256-64.] especially if it be so unfairly compared with the elegant and subtly varied metre of Paradise Lost; certainly no strides had been made over dramatic terrain during the intervening quarter-century. With all metrical barriers down, then, it is to be expected that distinction in verse will pass from the drama, and this is indeed the case. At the end one is left with a heritage of prose and blank verse that does not suggest its ancestry, or with a mixture of rimes that signify nothing. (202)

Blank verse—and prose too—first enters the theatre of the interlude in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London in 1588, and its coming is permanent. (210)

Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000

…as the anthropologist Gayle Rubin puts is, “far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities.” (Introduction, 3)

In this view, gender determines sex rather than the other way around, or better said, there is no such thing as true sex difference, only gender difference. (3)

…because all historical sources are produced by individuals with particular interests and biases, we can never know what actually happened and should simply analyze the sources as texts. … for example, because women in the past perceived and described their bodies differently than do women toady, those bodies really were different. Most historians do not take such an extreme approach, but instead treat their sources as referring to something beyond the sources themselves—an author, an event, a physical body—while recognizing that they do not present a perfect reflection. (4)

…early modern period (roughly [4] 1500-1750). European history during those 250 years has traditionally been defined as a series of intellectual movements—the spread of Renaissance culture beyond Italy, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Scientific Revolution—either viewed independently or placed within a political and economic context. The rise of the nation-state, both absolutist and constitutionalist, is generally viewed as the most important political development, and the growth of pre-industrial capitalism the most important economic change. Social historians have stressed the themes of growing geographic mobility, disparity between rich and poor, and social unrest. (4-5)

Joan Kelly, for example, began with a simple question, “Did women have a Renaissance?” Her answer of “no, at least no during the Renaissance” … If a particular development had little, or indeed a negative, effect on women, can we still call a period a “golden age,” a “Renaissance,” … hundreds or perhaps thousands of women were burned as witches on the European continent, … (Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory [Chicago, University of Chicago, 1984] which focus particularly on the relationship between class and gender and on women’s experience in the Renaissance, 5)

This emphasis on women’s private and domestic experiences has been challenged by some historians, who warn of the dangers of equating women’s history with the history of the family or of accepting without comment a division between public and private in which women are relegated to the private sphere. They see a primary task of early modern historians as the investigation of how divisions between what was considered “public” and what was considered “private” were developed and contested. (6)

Women’s experience differed according to categories that we had already set out based on male experience—social class, geographic location, rural or urban setting—but also categories that had previously not been taken into account—marital status, health, number of children. (7)

For some people, such as the very poor, social class was probably more important than gender, though this “equality of misery” was certainly not much consolation to the women experiencing it. For the nobility and urban bourgeoisie, however, the early modern period appears to have been a time when, in the words of Rosemary Radford Ruether, “the perception of women as marginalized by gender became stronger than the perception of women as divided by class.” (7, Rosemary Radform Reuther, Sexism and God-Talk [Boston, Beacon, 1983], which discusses historical and contemporary sexism in theological language.)

Joan Scott, “gender is a primary was of signifying relationships of power” (8)

‘A woman, properly speaking, is not a human being.’ (Jacques Cujas, Observationes et emendations, 6.21 in Opera omnia (Lyons, 1606), 4, 1484. (Ideas and laws regarding women, 13)

‘Women then being the last of creatures, the end, complement and consummation of all the works of God, what Ignorance is there so stupid, or what Impudence can there be so effronted, as to deny her a Prerogative above all other Creatures, without whom the World itself had been imperfect.’ (Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De nobilitate et pracellentia sexus foeminei (1529) in Opera (2 vol., Lyon, 1600? Reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1970), vol. 2; 533.)

Women are created for no other purpose than to serve men and be their helpers. If women grow weary or even die while bearing children, that doesn’t harm anything. Let them bear children to death; they are created for that. (Martin Luther, S[a]mmtliche Werke [Erlangen and Frankfurt, 1826-57], vol. 61; 212)

There is nothing better on earth than a woman’s love. (Martin Luther, S[a]mmtliche Werke [Erlangen and Frankfurt, 1826-57], vol. 61; 212) (pg. 13)

…Wife of Bath… / My God, had women written histories / Like cloistered scholars in oratories / They’d have set down more of men’s wickedness / Than all the sons of Adam could redress. (Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, trans. David Wright [London, Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 236.) (14)

Jewish traditions… and were regarded as ritually impure for about half of each month because of menstruation. They were also viewed as unclean after giving birth, for forty days after the birth of a boy and eighty after the birth of a girl. (15)

…by the first century A. D. Jewish men included a special thank-you to God “who has not made me a woman” [15] in their regular morning prayers. (15-16)

…women should be silent in churches, though this latter statement is now held to have been written by another author and simply attributed to Paul. (16)

Women were very active in the early church. Some acted as missionaries or carried out priestly functions such as baptism. … Many of these experiments were eventually rejected by church leaders as they attempted to make Christian teachings appear less threatening to Roman authorities, in order to gain still more followers and lessen the amount of persecution. Women were gradually excluded from church [16] offices and priestly functions as the church became more hierarchical, using as its model Roman political structures which also excluded women from positions of authority. (16-17)

The most important early Christian philosopher, St. Augustine (354-430), asserted that the initial decision by Adam and Even had ended human free will for all time, and also created sexual desire; … After Augustine, even sexuality within marriage was considered sinful by most church leaders, and both clergy and laymen were warned against temptations of women more emphatically. Augustine also saw female subordination as intrinsic in God’s original creation, for only men were fully created in the image of God and women were intellectually, physically, and morally inferior. Augustine’s contemporary St. Jerome (ca. 347-419/20) largely agreed, although both he and his female patrons asserted that women could move up the spiritual hierarchy by choosing a live of virginity: “As long as women is for birth and children, she is as different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a women and will be called a man.” (Saint Jerome, Commentaries on the Letter to the Ephesians, book 16, cited in Vern Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History [Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976], p. 365) (17)

To Aristotle, women were imperfect men, the result of something wrong with the conceptions that created them—their parents were too young or too old, or too diverse in age, or one of them was not healthy. Nature always aimed at perfection, and Aristotle termed anything less than perfect “monstrous”; a woman was thus “a deformity, but one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.” [Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classics [Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1943], Book IV, vi, p. 460.] Aristotle was not sure exactly why imperfect men were required in the natural scheme of things, but decided that it must be because they performed a function necessary for me, so that his fundamental question about women was “What are women for?” whereas about men it was “What is man?” Aristotle did view the household and women’s role within it as important, but because he regarded women as fundamentally intellectually inferior, he saw their primary function as procreation, not companionship. The philosopher Plato agreed, for he viewed the best love and friendship as that between men, and commented in one of his dialogues that originally all humans had been male, but some had been reborn as women when they proved to be cowardly and wicked. In his most important work, the Republic, Plato does include women among the group of people who governed the rest, but because he also abolishes the families for this group, these are women who, like celibate women in early Christianity, have rejected or escaped the traditional female role and become more like men. (18)

Thomas Aquinas… Even in procreation her role was minimal, for the mother provided simply the material substance in the child, while the father supplied the active force. (An idea Aquinas drew largely from Aristotle.) (18)

During its early centuries, Christianity had not stressed the role of Mary because it wanted to differentiate itself from pagan religions with female goddesses. By the twelfth century, all of Europe was more or less Christian, … Mary’s peculiar status as virgin and mother allowed her to be honored as both pure and nurturing at the same time, and she came to be viewed as the exact opposite of Eve, creating a good woman/bad women dichotomy… Mary represented an unattainable ideal for all other women, for no other women could hope to give birth to the Messiah. (19)

Beginning in the twelfth century, poetry and songs no longer celebrated simply the great military deeds of warriors and fighters, but also their passion and respect for women. … generally described women as pure and virtuous. It thus presented a more positive view of women than religious literature, and actual women were involved in its production both as patrons of poets and as troubador poets themselves. We should not overemphasize its impact, however, because it is unclear whether the conventions of [19] chivalry actually changed male behavior toward women very much. Even within the songs and poems, women often play a very passive role; … (20)

Around 1380, Giovanni Boccaccio compiled a long list of famous and praiseworthy women, De mulieribus claris, describing women from classical history who were exemplary for their loyalty, bravery, and morality. This was the first such list since the Roman writer Plutarch’s Mulierum virtues, … Boccaccio’s work and those modeled on it appear at first glace to be unqualified tributes to women, but they are actually more ambiguous, for the highest praise they can bestow on a woman is that she is like a man. (20)

Christine de Pizan, the first female author to enter this debate, … City of Ladies (1405) [20] … the language of the attacks… often based on men’s projection of their own fears and weaknesses. Instead of using extraordinary female counter-examples to argue against women’s inferiority, she admits that women are inferior in many things, but that this comes from their lack of education, economic dependence, and subordinate status. (20-21)

Christine’s work was not printed in France during the early modern period (though an English translation appeared in 1521) and most of the later defences of women follow more closely the pattern set by Boccaccio, whose work was printed and translated frequently. Juan Luis Vives, Desiderius Erasmus, and Thomas Elyot, three important humanists, all viewed women as spiritually equal, and argued for the education of at least upper-class girls. (21)

…Baldassar Castiglione in The Courtier, included both sides of the argument in a single work, so that it is difficult to gauge their actual opinions. This has led some modern analysts to view the entire debate about women as a literary game, an issue used by male writers and intellectuals to show off their rhetorical skills and classical or biblical knowledge but which did not reflect their actual opinions of women. (22)

In 1615 Joseph Swetnam published The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, which was not very original in content, but very popular becase of its human and middle-class emphasis. This provoked three direct responses, all published under the name of female authors. Rachel Speght published A Muzzle for Melastomus (1617) under her own name, carefully refuting his grammar and logic. Esther hath Hanged Human (1617) appeared under the name Esther Sowernam (a clear play on Swetnam’s name) and The Worming of a Mad Dog (1617) under the name Constantia Munda, both of which replied to Swetnam with invective and rational argument. (24)

In Italy, Laura Terracina, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella in the late sixteenth century all wrote vernacular defenses of women… (24)

…misogunist sentiments find expression much more often than praises of women, and the praise of women that does appear is generally of women, and the praise of women that does appear is generally for qualities like obedience, piety, and submissiveness. (34)

The debate about women also found visual expression in the early modern period, particularly in single-sheet prints which were hung in taverns or people’s homes, again an indication that this was not simply a [24] debate among intellectuals. Prints that juxtaposed female virtues and vices were very popular, with the virtuous women depicted as those of the classical or biblical past, and the vice-ridden dressed in contemporary clothes. The favorite metaphor for the virtuous wife was either the snail or the tortoise, both animals that never leave their “houses” and are totally silent, although such images were never as widespread as those depicting wives beating their husbands or hiding their lovers from them. Most of the prints, which people purchased to hang on their walls or were published as part of emblem books, portrayed the same negative stereotypes of women that the written attacks on women did; women are shown with their hands in men’s purses, tempting men by displaying naked breasts, or neglecting their housework. (24-25)

…two quotations from Martin Luther which open the chapter. Many of the most important religious leaders of the period were not consistent, expressing strongly negative opinions of women at some points and very positive ones at others. Other leaders, such as John Calvin, expressed their view of women only obliquely while considering other issues,… (26)

For Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and the leaders of the English Puritans, women were created by God and could be saved through faith; spiritually women and men were equal. In every other respect, however, women were to be subordinate to men. (26)

Women’s subjection was inherent in their very being and was present from creation—in this the reformers agreed with Aristotle and the classical tradition, though Luther in particular denounced the ideas of Aristotle on other matters and saw the scholastic attempt to reconcile Aristotle and the Bible as misguided. (26)

The Protestants supported the Pauline teaching that women should be silent in church, though Calvin noted that this was determined by tradition [26] and custom rather than divine commandment and so might be open to change; he did not see this change as happening in the foreseeable future or make any practical attempts to bring it about, however. (26-27)

Protestant writers championed marriage with greater vigor… in this pro-marriage literature that we find the most positive statements about women, for the writers recognized that many of their readers were former priests or monks who had been trained to regard marriage, sexuality, and women in general as destroyers of their spiritual well-being; Johannes Mathesius, for example, a Lutheran pastor, writes: “A man without a wife is only half a person and has only half a body and is a needy and miserable man who lacks help and assistance.” [Johannes Mathesius, Ehestand und Hauswesen (Nuremberg, 1564), XIII, p. xx, 11. ii.) Many of the writers… use the story of Eve being created out of Adam’s rib as proof that God wanted women to stand by the side of men as their assistants and not be trampled on or trod underfoot (for then Eve would have been created out of Adam’s foot); these directives always mention as well, however, that women should never claim authority over men, for Eve had not been created out of Adam’s head. (27)

Protestant writers generally cite the same three purposes of marriage, in the same order of importance, that pre-Reformation writers did—the procreation of children, the avoidance of sin, and mutual help and companionship—though Calvin did view the last purpose as the most important. Some of them did interpret “mutual help and companionship” to have a romantic and sensual side, so there tends to be less of an antipathy towards sexuality (as long as it was within marriage) among Protestant than Catholics. / The ideal of mutuality in marriage was not an ideal of equality, however, and Protestant marriage manuals, household guides, and marriage sermons all stress the importance of husbandly authority and wifely obedience. (27)

…some of the radical reformers, who did allow women to leave their unbelieving spouses, but the women who did so were expected to remarry quickly and thus come under the control of the male beliver. …we can tell somewhat from private letters that women knew they were expected to be obedient and silent, for they often excused their action when they did not conform to the ideal. Such letters also indicate, however, that women’s view of the ideal wife was one in which competence and companionship were as important as submissiveness. (28)

…the Tudor homily on marriage, which the crown required to be read out loud regularly in all English churches: / ‘Truth it is, that they [women] must specifically feel the griefs and pains of matrimony, in that they relinquish the liberty of their own rule, in the pain of their travailing [i.e., labor and delivery], in the bringin up of their own children, in which offices they be in great perils, and be grieved with many afflictions, which they might be without, if they lived out of matrimony [Church of England, The Two Books of Homilies (Oxford, 1859), p. 505] … Unmarried women were thus suspect, both because they were fighting their natural sex drive and because they were upsetting the divinely imposed order, which made women subject to man. (28)

Catholic Reformation…reaffirmed traditional doctrine and agreed that the most worthy type of Christian life was one both celibate and chaste. …in general there was a strong sense that all sexuality, including marital, was sinful and disruptive. (29)

Catholic leaders from the late sixteenth century on often recognized that women were useful allies in the fight to reconvert or hold areas to the Catholic faith, so did not openly express the type of harshly misogynist ideas that were common in early Christian thinkers or medieval theologians. / Catholic authors also realized that despite exhortations to celibacy, most women in Europe would marry, and so wrote marriage manuals to counteract those written by Protestant. The ideal wife they described was exactly the same as that proposed by Protestant authors—obedient, silent, pious—and their words give clear indication that they still regarded women as totally inferior. [29] … Thus the opinions of learned Catholic authors about women, as well as marriage, tended to reaffirm traditional negative ideas, though the harshest criticisms were generally reserved for specific women who challenged male authority in some way rather than simply being addressed to women in general in the style of Tertullian or Jerome. (29-30)

In Jewish opinion, like Protestant, all women should marry, and the qualities of the ideal wife had changed little since Old Testament times. According to Isaac ben Eliakim, the author of a Yiddish ethical manual written in the early seventeenth century and frequently reprinted, the ideal wife was thrifty, cheerful, obedient, never jealous, and always responsive to her husband’s physical and emotional needs. Though this differs little form contemporary Christian opinion, the tone of the manual is a bit less dreary, commenting practically, “If you treat him like a king, then he, in turn, will treat you like a queen,” rather than dwelling on obedience as a religious duty (30)

During the last half of sixteenth century, female anatomy and physiology became a popular topic for medical authorities, who based their opinions somewhat on the recent actual anatomical experiements of Andreas Vesalius and Gabriele Fallopia, but more on the works of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen which had just been reedited and reprinted, though the newest of these was 1,300 years old. The major dispute became one between Aristotelians and Galenists over the existence and function of female semen. Aristotelians generally held that women produce no semen or anything comparable, and so contribute nothing to the form [30] intellect, or spirit of a fetus; their menstrual blood simply produces the matter out of which the fetus is formed. Galenists believed that women also produce semen which contributes to the form of the fetus, though they thought this was colder and less active than that of the male… female semen, in their opinion, also played a role in determining the sex of a child, while Aristotelians held that the father’s semen alone determined this, though it was influenced by conditions at the time of intercourse; optimum conditions would always produce male offspring. / The Galenic view gradually gained more adherents, particularly as it made it much easier to explain why some children looked like their mothers, but some of Europe’s leading scientists began to view the male semen as even more important than Aristotle had. William Harvey was in many ways a Galenist, … but… sperm could act at a distance, just like a magnet. Male semen not only fertilized the egg, but also “has such prodigious power of fecundation, that the whole woman both in mind and body undergoes a change.” [William Harvey, Works, trans. Robert Willis (London, Sydenham Society, 1847), p. 576] Anton von Leeuwenhoek supported the Aristotelian position with what he viewed as physical evidence; using the newly developed microscope, he thought he could see preformed humans in sperm, … He could see slight differences in them, which attributed to sex, … A few other scientists took an opposite preformationist position, arguing that humans are preformed in the female egg, rather than the male sperm. This “ovist” position was very threatening to the male scientific community, which reacted generally with ridicule, … The female ovum was not definitively identified until 1827, however, a remarkably late date considering its size relative to that of spermatozoa, which Leeuwenhoek had identified correctly in the 1670s. (31)

Though they disagreed about the mechanism of conception, Galenists and Aristotelians agreed about many other aspects of human anatomy and physiology. All believed in the existence of bodily humors, … with men generally believed to be hotter and drier and women colder and wetter. / Heat was viewed as the most positive of these qualities. It was the force within the body that could most easily change one kind of fluid into another, and it rose naturally toward the heavens and toward the brain, which explained why men, being hot and dry, were more rational and creative; women, being cold and wet, were more like the earth. Women’s lack of heat was seen as the reason they menstruated (men “burned up” unneeded blood internally), did not go bald (men “burned up” the hair), and had wider hips and narrower shoulders (women did not have enough heat to drive matter towards their heads.) Men’s greater heat also meant they more often possessed qualities associated with heat—courage, honesty, reason, physical and moral strength. … Not until the late eighteenth century would the idea of the psychological effects of the humours die out among learned Europeans, and not until the nineteenth did bloodletting completely lose favor. (32)

Aristotelians…women as imperfect or misbegotten males, whose lack of body heat had kept their sex organs inside rather than pushing them out… Galenists generally viewed men and women as equally perfect in their sex, a view that became more common after 1600. They thus stressed that males and females comple-[32]mented one another, and held that each sex desired the other mutually, whereas Aristotelians asserted that women desired men more because imperfect things always strive after perfection. The idea that women had a greater sexual drive than men did not die out in popular understanding with the triumph of Galenic ideas among learned writers, however, but remained constant until very late in the eighteenth century. (32-33)

Illness in women was very often attributed to the power of the uterus, particularly mental illnesses… the word “hysteria” is, in fact, derived from the Greek word for uterus. Plato had proposed that the uterus was an independent animal that could smell and move on its own, an idea hotly debated in the sixteenth century; the ability to smell was generally rejected, but the notion of a “wandering womb” retained. Wombs were most likely to wander when they were not filled regularly through sexual intercourse and reproduction, and both male and female authors suggested various alternative remedies for single women and nuns. The uterus was also thought to be influenced by the moon… Anger was regarded as particularly dangerous, for its “heat” could cause the woman’s blood which normally nourished the fetus to destroy it instead. (33)

The Scientific Revolution… some historians, most prominently Carolyn Merchant and David Noble, have argued that it depened that inferiority by championing reason, order, control, and mechanical processes, all associated with men or defined as somehow masculine, while continuing to link women with irrationality, disorder, and nature. (33)

Londa Schiebinger has pointed out that the acceptance of Galenic ideas of the complementarity of the two sexes, far from leading to greater egalitarianism, led instead by the end of the eighteenth century to the idea that gender differences pervaded every aspect of human experience, biological, intellectual, and moral; (33)

..white women were viewed as mast likely to incorporate female qualities viewed as positive, such as piety and purity, while non-white (especially Black) women were seen as incorporating negative female traits, such as disobedience and sensuality. White men, in this view, were more rational because of their sex and their race, while non-white men were more likely to demonstrate negative or ambiguous male qualities such as anger or physical prowess. Exactly how these two hierarchies intersected was a matter of dispute for European thinkers, who also debated the ways in which class distinctions further complicated the picture. (35)

It is important to recognize that laws are yet another type of theory; like sermons and domestic guides, they describe an ideal situation that their authors are trying to create, and do not describe reality. To some degree, laws may be used as evidence that the [35] actions they attempt to prohibit or regulate are in fact going on, … we cannot carry this too far, because all lawmakers in early modern Europe, except for a few queens, were male; laws thus reflect male notions and worries more than real female actions. (36)

Traditional medieval law codes in Europe had accorded women a secondary legal status, based generally on their inability to perform feudal military service; the oldest legal codes required every woman who was not married to have a male legal guardian who could undergo such procedures as trial by combat or trial by ordeal for her. This gender-based guardianship gradually died out in the later Middle Ages as court proceedings replaced physical trials, and unmarried women and widows generally gained the right to hold land on their own and appear in court on their own behalf. (36)

Marriage was cited as the key reason for excluding women from public offices and duties, for their duty to obey their husbands prevented them from acting as independent persons; the fact that an unmarried women or widow might possibly get married meant that they, too, were included in this exclusion. A married women was legally subject to her husband in all things; she could not sue, make contracts, or go to court for any reason without his approval, and in many areas of Europe could not be sued or charged with any civil crime of her own. … In England, a married woman was not even considered a legal person under common law, but was totally subsumed within the legal identity of her husband; she could not accept a gift from her husband or make a will separate from his because they were “one person.” (37)

The husband’s control of his wife’s property could be modified somewhat by a marriage contract which gave her legal ownership of the dowry she brought into the marriage. The husband then had the use of this money, goods, or property as long as both spouses were alive, but she or her heirs were to receive the actual property or something of comparable value at his death. (37)

In almost all city law codes beginning in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, married women who carried out business on their own, or alongside their husbands, were allowed to declare themselves unmarried (feme [sic] sole) for legal purposes. This meant they could borrow and loan money and make contracts on their own, though sometimes the amounts were still limited. They could also be jailed for debt or for violating civil laws. Wives were also gradually allowed to retain control over some family property if they could prove that their husbands were squandering everything through [37] drink, gambling, or bad investments; (37-38)

The proliferation of exceptions and the fact that women were often able to slip through the cracks of urban law codes began to bother jurists in many parts of Europe who were becoming educated in Roman law…additional grounds for women’s secondary legal status… women’s alleged physical and mental weaknesses, their “fragility, imbecility, irresponsibility, and ignorance,” in the words of Justinian’s code. … Ironically, Roman law itself had not required unmarried adult women to have guardians, but had only known guardianship for children. Early modern jurists were thus selective in what they took from Roman law … [38] Early medieval law codes had known only fatherly authority, but the concept of joint parental authority over children had grown gradually in the Middle Ages. This died out again with the reception of Roman law, … The spread of Roman law thus had a largely negative effect on women’s civil legal status in the early modern period both because of the views of women which jurists chose to adopt from it and the stricter enforcement of existing laws to which it gave rise. (38-39)

Women were often executed in a manner different from men, buried alive or drowned instead of being beheaded, largely because city executioners thought women would faint at the sight of the sword or ax and make their job more difficult. (39)

For upper-class men, honor still revolved around notions of physical bravery and loyalty, a link that was also accepted by journey men and marginal groups such as professional criminals. For bourgeois and most working men, honor was primarily related to honesty, good craftsmanship, and integrity. For all women, honor was a sexual matter. … women, particularly those in the middle- and upper-middle classes, were never regarded as able to defend their own honor completely without male assistance. Lower-class women might trade insults or physically fight one another,… (40)

The difference in conceptualization both reflected and shaped social reality. For the vast majority of women in early modern Europe, the most important change in their lives was marriage. The choice of a spouse, whether made by themselves or their parents or a larger kin group, determined their social and economic status and place of residence. (52)

It is also very difficult to know how much differentiation by gender there was in the treatment of most infants and small children. Though society had sharply defined gender roles for adults, children were all dressed alike for the first several years of their lives (there is no early modern equivalent of the pink and blue dichotomy), and comments by parents about their small children show less gender stereotyping than is evident among many contemporary parents. It was when children began their training for adult life, at the age of four or five, that clear distinctions became evident. (53)

We know that the average age at menarche had declined in the western world for the last century, from about 15.5 in the 1890s to less than 13 today, but it is not clear that the average age in the early modern period was significantly higher than that in the nineteenth century. In fact, it may even have been lower, because age at menarche is affected by nutrition and other environmental factors, and many girls in the nineteenth century had a poorer diet and performed more physically debilitating work than those of earlier centuries. (54)

Because the actual biological function of menstruation had not yet been discovered, menstruation was viewed medically as either a process that purified women’s blood or that removed excess blood from their bodies. … Menstrual blood was thought to nourish the fetus during pregnancy, and because the body was regarded as capable of transforming one sort of fluid into another, to become milk during lactation. (In the same way, male blood was held to become semen during intercourse.) Semen and mild were not viewed as gender-specific fluids, however, for “virile” women who had more body heat than normal were seen as capable of producing semen, and effeminate men who lacked normal masculine heat were thought to lactate. (54)

The cessation of menstruation (amenorrhea) was regarded as extremely dangerous for a woman, either because it left impure blood in her which might harden into an abnormal growth, or because it would allow excess blood to run to her brain, which would become overheated. (The opposite idea would be cited as a reason for barring women from higher education in the nineteenth century; education would cause all their blood to remain in their brains, which would halt menstruation and eventually cause the uterus to shrivel away.) (54)

Hebrew Scripture held that menstruation made a woman ritually impure, so that everything she touched was unclean and her presence was to avoided by all. By the early modern period in Jewish communities, this taboo was limited to sexual relations and a few other contacts between wife and husband for the seven days of her period and seven days afterwards. At the end of this time, a woman was expected to take a ritual bath (mikvah) before beginning sexual relations again. Among the Orthodox Slavs in eastern Europe, menstruating women could not enter churches or take communion. Western Christian churches were a bit milder, but canon lawyers and other Catholic and Protestant commentators advised against sexual relations during menstruation. (55)

…with English Protestants, for example, calling the soul of the pope a “menstruous rag.” According to popular beliefs, menstruating women could by their touch, glance, or mere presence rust iron, turn wine sour, spoil meat, or dull knives. Though these ideas declined among educated Europeans during the seventeenth century, they are recorded well into the twentieth century among many populations. (55)

…autobiography of Isabella de Moerloose, published in Amsterdam in 1695, in which she writes that she asked her husband to sleep separately while she was menstruating because “the stink will cause thee to feel aversion for me.” He would not allow it because he feared people might think they were Jews, though he, too, commented that he was “so terribly disgusted” by the smell. (55)

Most women seemed to view menstruation not as an illness or a sign of divine displeasure, but as a normal part of life; only in the nineteenth century would normal menstruation come to be regarded as pathological. (56)

In medical terms, male sexuality was the baseline for any perception of human sexuality, … Renaissance discovery of the clitoris, … (56)

…for many medical [56] doctors throughout Europe solemnly reported cases of young women whose sex organs suddenly emerged during vigorous physical activity, transforming them into men; (57-58)

…early modern sex manuals, … Two of the most frequently published were Aristotle’s Master-Piece, in English, first published in 1684, and Venus Minsieke Gasthuis, published in French and Dutch in Amsterdam in the 1680s. … women as sexually insatiable, as witnessed by their ability to have multiple orgasms. … female orgasm as necessary for procreation, for only through this would female “seed” be released. … This idea was common throughout Europe in the early modern period, which was unfortunate for women who were raped, as pregnancy was widely viewed as proof that the woman had had an orgasm, signaling her enjoyment of the experience, which proved it wasn’t rape. This supposed connection between female orgasm and procreation allowed the manuals to go into great detail about ways to heighten sexual pleasure, … (57)

Orthodox Slavs in eastern Europe had the most negative opinion, seeing all sexuality as evil… large number of miraculous virgin births among Russian saints, and to the popular idea that Jesus was born out of Mary’s ear, … (57)

In general, early modern Catholic doctrine held that sexual relations were acceptable as long as they were within marriage, not done on Sundays or other church holidays, done in a way that would allow procreation, and did not upset the proper sexual order, which meant the man had to be on top. (58)

The Protestant reformers broke clearly with Catholicism in their view that marriage was a spiritually preferable state to celibacy, and saw the most important function of marital sex not as procreation, but as increasing spousal affection. Based on his own experience, Luther … This approval of marital sexuality did not lead to a lessening of the notion that female sexuality in general was dangerous, however. (58)

Written works known to be by women stem mostly from the middle- and upper-classes, and rarely include any discussion of sexual feelings. (59)

Because the consequences of sexual misconduct became visible within the bodies of women, they appeared more frequently then men in the courts that handled moral behavior, which confirmed people’s notions that women were more sexual. (60)

…researchers in various counties have found that between one-fifth and one-third of brides were pregnant upon marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and up to one-half in the eighteenth. Much of this was because by the sixteenth century, the marriage ceremony involved several stages, a contract between the two parties agreeing to get married, and then, often much later, a formal ceremony in the church. Though officially the couple was not married until after the church ceremony, if they had agreed to marry or were regarded simply as seriously courting, sexual relations between them were not condemned in the popular mind… not true in Scotland, where people never regarded sex as a normal part of courting. (60)

…though notions of female honor might keep upper-class women secluded in their homes, in most parts of Europe there was little attempt to shield female servants or day-laborers from the risk of seduction or rape. (60)

The woman might also charge the man concerned with rape. Rape was a capital crime in many parts of Europe, but the actual sentences handed out were more likely to be fines and brief imprisonments, with the severity of sentence dependent on the social status of the victim and perpetrator. The victim had to prove that she had cried out and made attempts to repel the attacker, … As noted above, her pregnancy might be used as disproof that a rape had occurred, but not all jurists accepted the notion that conception proved consent. Charges of rape were fairly rare, which suggests that it was underreported, but examinations of trial records indicate that rape charges were usually taken seriously, with judges and lawyers rarely suggesting the woman herself provoked the attack. Women bringing rape charges were often more interested in getting their own honorable reputations back than in punishing the perpetrator, and for this reason sometimes requested that the judge force their rapists to marry them. (61)

…both doctors and everyday people regarded regular menstruation as essential to maintaining a woman’s health, so anything that stopped [61] her periods was dangerous. Pregnancy was only one possible reason, and a woman cold not be absolutely sure she was pregnant until she quickened, that is, felt the child move within her. This was the point at which the child was regarded as gaining a soul to become fully alive—that is what “quickening” originally meant-so that a woman taking medicine to start her period before quickening was generally not regarded as attempting an abortion. (61-62)

Penalties for attempting or performing an abortion after the child had quickened grew increasingly harsh during the early modern period. In the Holy Roman Empire, aborting a “living” child was made a capital offense in 1532, with death to be by decapitation for men and by drowning for women. … (Contraception was een harder to detect, and though religious and secular authorities all opposed it, there were almost no cases in which it was an issue.) (62)

…it was illegal in many part of Europe to harbor an unmarried pregnant woman. (62)

Even in areas where the stigma attached to giving birth out of wedlock was strong, such as English, some women gave birth to two or three children without marrying, and Peter Laslett has discovered that certain families were particularly prone to unwed parenthood among both their female and male members. / For many unmarried women, however, pregnancy meant disaster. This was particularly the case for pregnancies in which the father was the woman’s married employer… (63)

Women in such a situation might decide to hide the birth. They gave birth in outhouses, cowstalls, hay mounds, and dung heaps, hoping that they would be able to avoid public notice, and took the infant to one of the new foundling homes which had opened during the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries in many cities, or killed it. (63)

Before the sixteenth century, church and secular courts heard very few cases of infanticide, as jurists recognized that physicians could not make an infallible distinction between a stillbirth, a newborn who had died of natural causes, and one who had been murdered. This leniency changed in the sixteenth century, when infanticide became legally equated with murder in most areas of Europe… A French royal edict promulgated in 1556 carried this even further, requiring all unmarried women to make an official declaration of their pregnancy and decreeing the death penalty for any women whose infant died before baptism after a concealed pregnancy or delivery, whether or not there was evidence of actual infanticide. A similar [63] statute was passed in England in 1624 and in Scotland in 1690, and in various German states throughout the seventeenth century. / These stringent statutes were quite rigorously enforced. … In England the conviction rate went down after 1680 when women successfully argued that they had not intended to kill the child because they had prepared linen for it, or had killed it accidentally or through ignorance. Women were still executed for presumed infanticide in Scotland until 1776, however. (63-64)

Midwives were enlisted to help enforce the statutes. They were to report all births, and attempt to find out the name of the father by asking the mother “during the pains of birth.” (64)

In many southern European cities, women charged with [64] fornication or even unseemly behavior such as flirting or physically demonstrative conduct might be locked up in institutions established by church or city authorities for repentant prostitutes and other “fallen women.” Such houses, often dedicated to Mary Magdalene, also began to admit women who were regarded as in danger of becoming prostitutes, generally poor women with no male relatives; the ordinances stated explicitly that the women admitted had to be pretty or at least acceptable looking, for ugly women did not have to worry about their honor. Many of these asylums were started by reforming bishops or leaders of religious orders, and some began to admit a variety of other types of women along with prostitutes, such as girls who had been raped, women whose husbands threatened them, attractive daughters of prostitutes, poor young widows, or young women regarded as in danger of losing their sexual honor. These various types of resident were supposed to be separated, and those still “honorable” taught a trade and given the opportunity to earn a dowry; in practice the residents were often housed together. … In such asylums, the women did not take vows and could leave to marry, but otherwise they were much like convents, with the women following a daily regimen of work and prayer. Some of them stressed penitence and moral reform while others were more purely punitive, closer to prisons than convents. (65)

In 1658, Louis XIV ordered the imprisonment there of all women found guilty of prostitution, fornication, or adultery, with release only coming once the priests and sisters in charge determined the inmate was truly penitent and had changed her ways. Imprisoning women for sexual crimes marks the first time that prison was used as a punishment in Europe rather than simply as a place to hold people until their trial or before deportation such prisons later became the model for similar institutions for men and young people—often specifically called “reformatories”—in which the inmate’s level of repentance determined to a great degree the length of incarceration. (66)

Courts were only successful in imposing standards that most members of the community already accepted, as witnessed by their largely unsuccessful campaign against intercourse between engaged persons. (66)

Jewish tradition from Biblical times though the early modern period prohibited female homosexuality, but the punishment was much less than for male. This New Testament makes no clear mention of it, [66] though medieval Christian [66] commentators including Augustine and Aquinas interpreted a vague reference in Paul’s Letter to the Romans to refer to it. Guide to priests and monks about what penances to set for various sins specifically refer to female homosexuality, generally setting lower penances than for male, though higher if the women involved were nuns or used dildos. (66-67)

Among the Orthodox Slavs in Eastern Europe, female homosexuals were accused of praying to female spirits and charged with paganism as well as deviant sexual behavior; (67)

Though the more enlightened sex manuals such as Aristotle’s Masterpiece mentioned the role of the clitoris in female orgasm, male authors could not imagine satisfying sex without penetration. For many of them, there was simply no sex without penetration, so that they regarded female homosexuality as a kind of masturbation. (67)

Women using dildos show up in early modern pornography in both text and illustrations, but pornography reflects fantasies (largely male, as were its authors in this period) rather than reality, (67)

A woman using a dildo was, of course, taking the male role, and most authorities regarded such gender inversion as much more serious than female homoeroticism. (In the same way, many punishments for male homosexual activity were more severe for the man who took the passive role because he was perceived as letting himself become feminized.) (68)

Of the small number of cases involving female-female sex which actually came on trial, most involved transvestite dress or women who had otherwise usurped male prerogatives, … Many of the women who were discovered dressed in men’s clothes were serving as soldiers and sailors, and reported that they dressed as men primarily to gain the greater opportunities and mobility available to men, rather than for sexual reasons. … A few cross-dressing women actually married other women, however, including Maria of Antwerp (1719-81) who was arrested twice for marrying a woman. In her trial, she described herself not as a woman who was sexually attracted to women, but as a man in a woman’s body,… In all of these cases, the “wife,” [68] that is, the woman who remained in women’s clothing, received a milder punishment, … (69-70)

Maria of Antwerp had difficulty describing herself as a woman attracted to another woman, but other early modern women did not, though they generally expressed their emotions in sentimental and sensual, rather than explicitly sexual, terms. Recent studies of women’s letters, poetry, diaries, and drama reveal passionate attachment and close friendships to other women, both among the female characters they create and between themselves and other actual individuals. Such “romantic friendships,” as they came to be termed in the eighteenth century, were expressed physically through kissing and caressing, but did not necessarily include genital sex. This has led some analysts to deny that they were “lesbian” – a word that came into common usage only in the nineteenth century—but more recent scholarship has stressed that the notion of a “sexual identity” as heterosexual or homosexual is also more recent than the early modern period and a focus only on genital sexual acts misrepresents how women expressed erotic feelings in earlier centuries. (70)

The most dramatic difference was between the area of northwestern Europe, including the British Isles, Scandinavia, France, and Germany, and eastern and southern Europe. In northwestern Europe, historians have identified a marriage pattern unique in the world, with couples waiting until their mid-or late twenties to marry, long beyond the age of sexual maturity, and then immediately setting up an independent household. Husbands were likely to be only two or three years older than their wives at first marriage, … In most of the rest of the world, including southern and eastern Europe, marriage was between teenagers who lived with one set of parents for a long time, or between a man in his late twenties or thirties and a much younger women, with households again containing several generations. The northwestern European marriage pattern resulted largely from the idea that couples should be economically independent before they married, … This period of waiting was so long, and the economic requirements for marriage set so high, that many women did not marry until they were in their thirties, and a significant number never married at all. / The most unusual feature of this pattern was the late age of marriage for women. Women entered marriage as adults … thus not as dependent on their husbands…. They were not under the authority of their moth-[71]ers in-law… Did this also mean that women had a greater say in who they married? This has been a hotly debated question lately, particularly England,… (71-72)

In the vast majority of marriages, the aims of the woman involved and her parents, kin, and community were the same; the best husband was the one who could provide security, honor, and status. Therefore even women who were the most free to choose their own husbands, such as widows or women whose parents had died, were motivated more by what we would regard as pragmatic concerns than romantic love. This is not to say that their choice was unemotional, but that the need for economic security, the desire for social prestige, and the hope for children were as important emotions as sexual passion. The love and attraction a women felt for a man could be based on any combination of these. (72)

…theoretical differences. Protestant marriage regulations stressed the importance of parental consent more than Catholic ones, and allowed the possibility of divorce with remarriage for adultery or impotence, and in some areas also for refusal to have sexual relations, deadly abuse, abandonment, or incurable diseases such as leprosy; Orthodox courts in eastern Europe allowed divorce for adultery or the taking of religious vows. The numbers of women who actually used the courts to escape an unpleasant marriage were very small, however, and apparently everywhere smaller than the number of couples who informally divorced by simply moving apart from one another. Women more often used the courts to attempt to form a marriage (i.e., in breach of promise cases, or to renew a marriage in which their spouse had deserted them), than to end one. (73)

The impossibility of divorce in Catholic areas was mitigated somewhat by the possibility of annulment and by institutions were not found in Protestant areas. … Throughout Europe, rural residents married earlier than urban ones, and were more likely to live in complex households of several generations or married brother and their families living together. They also remarried faster and more often. Women from the upper classes married earlier than those from the lower, and the age difference between spouses was greater for upper-class women. (73)

Somewhere around one-fifth of all marriages were remarriages for at least one of the partners, with widowers much more likely to remarry than widows and to remarry faster. The reasons for this differ according to social class; wealthy or comfortable widows may have seen no advantage in remarrying, for this would put them under the legal control of a man again, and poor widows, particularly elderly ones, found it very difficult to find marriage partners. (73)

Which injunction was followed more in practice, that of husbandly authority or that of mutual respect? Studies that address these questions have been undertaken for various parts of Europe for the last twenty years, but little consensus has developed. …marriages appear to have been most egalitarian when husband and wife were near in age, of the same or relatively the same social class, when the woman had brought some property or cash to the marriage as her dowry, and when her birth family supported her in disputes with her husband. (74)

Marriage was the clearest mark of social adulthood for both women and men; for men marriage often meant that they could now be part of the governing body of their village or town, a role from which unmarried men were excluded, and for women that they would have authority over dependent members of the household. … Medieval urban “housewives” had had very little time for purely domestic labor; cooking was simple, cleaning tasks were few, and many domestic tasks such as baking and laundry were hired out. This began to change in the sixteenth and even more in the seventeenth centuries, when foodstuffs were more likely to come into households in a less finished state and middle-class households contained more consumer goods that needed cleaning and care. …things which had been unavailable or unimportant in the Middle Ages—glass windows, a stone floor instead of a dirt one, several courses at dinner—became important signs of middle-class status. Now the ideal wife was not simply one who showed religious virtues such as piety and modesty, but also economic ones such as order, industriousness, and thrift. (75)

In southern Europe, wealthy or middle-class women who chose not to marry or whose parents could not raise a dowry large enough to obtain an appropriate husband also ended up in convents, [75] whose standards about austerity were often not very high so that the women lived the same comfortable life-style they would have on the outside. In 1552 in Florence, for example, there were 441 male friars and 2,786 nuns, out of a population of 59,000; the difference between the two numbers results not from women’s great religious fervor, but from a staggering increase in the size of the dowry required for a middle- or upper-class woman to marry. (75-76)

Entrance fees for convents were too high for poor women, however, and, as noted above, special institutions were opened in Italian cities by the Catholic Church and municipal governments for young, attractive unmarried women to allow them to earn a dowry and thus perhaps a husband. Women whose marriage chances were seen as unlikely in any case were also often sent to convent-like religious institutions, where they did not take formal vows and worked at spinning or sewing to support themselves. Unmarried poor women also worked as domestic servants for their entire lives, living in the household of their employer and so under his control. (76)

Demographers estimate that between 10 to 15 percent of the northwestern European population never married in the early modern period, … Cities attracted unmarried women with the possibility of employment as domestic servants or in cloth production, … (76)

…unattached women often had to live together in order to survive . (76)

In the late Middle Ages, city governments worried about how to keep unmarried women and widows from needing public support, and in the sixteenth century, cities began to view women living independently as a moral, as well as an economic problem. They were “masterless,” that is not members of a male-headed household, at a time when greater stress [76] was being laid on the authority of the husband and father, and so were perceived as a possible threat to the social order. Laws were passed forbidding unmarried women to move into cities and ordering unmarried female servants who had left one domestic position to leave the city, should they refuse to take another one. … Suspicion unmarried women was not completely new in the sixteenth century, for medieval religious groups such as the Beguines had also experienced it, but this was the first time actual laws had been enacted against secular unmarried women. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities increasingly viewed marriage as the “natural” vocation for women—for all women in Protestant areas and for most women in Catholic areas… The funeral sermons of unmarried women, for which the women themselves often chose their own Biblical texts and wrote the biographical segment, explain that the deceased was not simply a person who had lost out in the marriage market, but one who had fulfilled her Christian duties in other ways than being a wife or mother, such as taking care of elderly parents or serving the needy. (76-77)

…despite the fact that many people regarded the man as the source of all the active forces in the creation of a child and the woman simply as the vessel, childlessness was invariably seen as the woman’s fault. … Childless men could test their fertility outside of marriage with little public condemnation (though not officially condoned, adultery if one’s wife was barren was rarely punished,) … (78)

Until the late eighteenth century on the Continent and the nineteenth century in England, quickening was also viewed as the point at which a child gained a soul, …This legal definition affected the way that women thought about their own pregnancies, for they did not describe a miscarriage before the quickening as the end of a pregnancy or the death of a child, but as the expulsion of blood curds or leathery stuff or wrong growths. (78)

The sixteenth century saw the publication of the first midwives’ manuals in most European languages, … reprinted and pirated for centuries, and new ones published in the seventeenth century, but their advice for expectant mothers changed little. Much of what they advise is still recommended today: pregnant women should eat moderately of nourishing foods, including a good amount of protein, and avoid foods that make them nauseous or that are highly spiced; they should moderate their drinking and avoid strong liquors; they should get regular exercise but avoid strenuous lifting; … (79)

…strong belief in the power of the maternal imagination. Both learned and uneducated people in early modern Europe believed that what a woman saw or experienced during pregnancy could affect the child. The desire to drink red wine or eat strawberries might lead to children with red birthmarks; being frightened by a hare or longing to eat hare caused harelip; sudden frights might cause a miscarriage or deform the fetus in some way. (79)

If she lived in a town where the services of professional midwives were available, the mother chose which midwife would direct the birth. If she lived in a rural area, she would generally contact a woman known to be experienced in the handling childbirths, for midwives who had undergone some theoretical training in childbirth procedure were rare in the countryside. (79)

Until the mid-seventeenth century, and until the twentieth in many parts of Europe for most women, childbirth was strictly a female affair. The husband was not present unless his wife was dying. [79] … This began to change in France in the mid-seventeenth century, where some male barber-surgeons began to advertise their services for childbirth as well, and the use of “man-midwives” came to be fashionable among the wealthy. … gradually the training of male midwives improved as they took part in dissections and anatomical classes, from which women were excluded. / Male midwifery spread to England, where sometime in the seventeenth century the forceps was invented by the Chamberlen brothers, … there was still a strong sense of the impropriety of male practitioners touching women in childbirth among rural residents and lower-class urban dwellers, who could not pay the fees demanded by male midwives in any case. (81)

Once labor had begun, the women assisting transformed the room, or in small houses the bed, into a “lying-in chamber,” … In many parts of Europe, air was viewed as harmful to the mother, so doors and windows were shut and candles lit. (81)

Rural midwives did not until the eighteenth century have much opportunity for training, and are sharply criticized in the guides and diaries written by their urban colleagues. (82)

Using English statistics, it has been estimated that the maternal morality rate in the past was about 1 percent for each birth, which would make a lifetime risk of 5 to 7 percent. Women knew these risks, which is why they attempted to obtain the services of the midwife they regarded as the most skilled. (83)

Midwives were responsible for the spiritual as well as the physical well-being of the children they delivered. In both Catholic and Protestant areas, they were allowed to perform emergency baptisms on children they thought might die, … (83)

Mothers of all religions in Europe recognized that the dangers of childbirth might be intensified when children were born too close together, and attempted to space births through a variety of means. (85)

The experience of childbirth did not end with actual birth. In most parts of Europe, mothers were advised to undergo a period of “lying-in” after the birth, in which they sharply restricted their activities and contacts with the outside world. Although this was difficult for many rural and poor women, religious taboos which made a recently delivered mother impure meant that such restrictions were often followed [85] even when they were economically disadvantageous. … Judaism and Catholicism had a similar ritual of purification, though contacts with the mother were not so sharply restricted. Her movements outside the home were, however, which meant a Catholic woman could not attend her child’s baptism; in Italy the midwife who carried the child was the only woman normally present at a baptism. … Protestants rejected the idea that women needed to be purified after giving birth, but Anglicans and some continental Protestants retained the ceremony, commonly called churching, terming it instead a service of thanksgiving. … Churching was violently opposed by English Puritan men in the seventeenth century as a Catholic holdover, but many Puritan women continued to demand it, as did English women well into the twentieth century even if they never attended other church services. We may view churching and similar ceremonies as stemming from clerical hostility toward the female body and childbirth, but there is evidence that early modern women rejected this interpretation and instead regarded churching as a necessary final act of closure to a period of childbirth. (86)

The vast majority of women during the early modern period nursed their own children, often until they were more than two years old and on demand rather than on a set schedule. Women who could not produce their own milk and middle- and upper-class women in many parts of Europe relied on wet nurses, the very wealthy hiring the nurse to come into their own homes, and the rest sending the child to the home of the wet nurse, often for two or three years. Though by the eighteenth century this practice came to be viewed by moralists like Rousseau as a sign of the heartless and decadence of wealthy women, it actually stemmed from the fact that nursing was incompatible with many of their familial and social duties. Wealthy women were pressured to produce many heirs, and people seem to have been aware of the contraceptive effects of lactation; they were advised that nursing would ruin their physical attractiveness; they were taught that sexual intercourse would corrupt their milk and that their first duty was to their husbands. The decision to hire a wet nurse was often made not by the woman herself but by her husband, who made a contract with the wet nurse’s husband for her services. (87)

Along with the children of the wealthy, wet nurses also cared for the children of the poor; communities hired wet nurses to suckle foundlings and orphans, … Many of these poor children died, as did many of the wealthy, some no doubt because of neglect of carelessness, but also because the wet nurses themselves were generally poor and took on more children than they had milk; (87)

Some historians have speculated that children in early modern Europe also suffered emotional distress because of the wet-nursing system; frequent changes in wet nurses, the absence of their biological mother, and permanent separation from the wet nurse at weaning could prevent small children from forming good relationships with women. Because the infant feelings affect later psychological development, wet nursing has been seen as contributing to negative ideas about women, particularly their fickleness and changeability. The irony of these possible consequences is the fact that, until the mid-eighteenth century, it was husbands who made the decision about how a child would be nursed. (88)

The word “widower,” in fact, does not enter common usage until the eighteenth century, when people began to think about the loss of a spouse more as an emotional than an economic issue. (89)

In many parts of the world women who became widowed returned to their birth families or entered the household of a brother or brother-in-law, but in most areas of Europe widows because heads of households [89] …widowhood generally brought a decline in a woman’s economic status, … (89-90)

In actual practice, whether a widow remarried or not was more determined by her economic and personal situation than by laws or theoretical concerns. Younger widows remarried much more readily than those with many. (the opposite is true in the case of widowers; those with many children were most likely to remarry, and to remarry quickly.) Widowers were far more likely to remarry than widows; French statistics from the seventeenth century indicate that 50 percent of widowers remarried, while only 20 percent of widows did so. (91)

For women, the best marker might be menopause, which usually occurred somewhere in a woman’s forties; the mean age at which women in northwestern Europe bore their last child was forty. … Because like expectancy was less than it was today, however, even if a women stopped having children before forty she still had children in her household for most of her later years of life. (91)

Evidence from England indicates that middle-class children were more likely to assist their elderly parents by providing them with servants so that they could stay in their own households rather than taking them in; the elderly lived with their married children only among the poor. (92)

Younger relatives were also more willing to take in elderly men than women; older women often formed joint households with other older female relatives or simply acquaintances to pool their resources and expenses, a practice almost unknown among men. …by the eighteenth century in France, female life expectancy at birth was about thirty-four and male about thirty-one. (92)

…Marxist economic history, which persuasively argue that work and other economic activities cannot be detached from the family and political and social institutions. … reproduction is defined not simply as childbearing, but as the care and nurturing of all family members, which allowed them to take part in productive labor. (102)

It is also important to recognize that in early modern Europe a family’s economic status might be more dependent on its access to royal or noble favors than on anything we would recognize as labor. The training of upper-class girls and young women in decorum and dancing which we will examine in the next chapter was carried out by families not for the girls’ own enjoyment, but to allow them to catch a royal eye and perhaps gain a lucrative post for a family member; (103)

Though the actual work that men and women performed in the early modern economy was often very similar or the same, … Male work rhythms… age, lass, and training, with boys and men often moving as a group from one level of employment to the next. Female work rhythms were also determined by age and class, but even more so by individual biological and social events… Women often changed occupations several times during their lives or performed many different types of jobs at once, so that their identification with any one occupation was not strong. (103)

Popular rituals such as festivals and processions strengthened men’s identification with their profession, … Women had no similar rituals to mark their solidarity with other women performing the same types of work; their rituals revolved around family or neighborhood events… (103)

Women rarely received formal training in a trade, and during the early modern period many occupations professionalized, setting up required amounts of formal training and a licensing… Thus in the Middle Ages both male and female practitioners of medicine were often called “physicians,” but by the sixteenth century though women still healed people, only men who had attended university medical school could be called a “physician.” This professionalism trickled down to occupations that did not require university training; women might brew herbal remedies, but only men could use the title “apothecary.” Professionalization did not simply affect titles, but also the fees… (104)

Protestant writers describes all occupations as “vocations” for men, that is, activities to which a man could be called by God and be blessed through his labor; for a woman, however, the only possible vocation was wife and mother. Advice manuals and sermons by Protestant clergy, and later in the sixteenth century by Catholic clergy as well, all viewed whatever productive labor a woman did as simply part of her domestic role… When a woman performed an activity, such as sewing clothes, it was defended as “domestic work” or as “housekeeping,” even if those clothes were not for her own family’s use; tax records note that the woman had an income, but neglect to mention how she received it. When men did the same activity, also in their own homes, it was regarded as “production”; only very rarely do tax records fail to mention explicitly what this production was. (104)

During the early modern period, gender also became an important factor in separating what was considered skilled from what was considered unskilled work. Women were judged to be unfit for certain tasks, such as glass-cutting, because they were too clumsy and “unskilled,” yet those same women made lace or silk thread, jobs which required an even higher level of dexterity than glass-cutting. … During the sixteenth century, wherever the knitting frame was introduced, men began to argue that using it was so complicated that only men could possibly learn; the frame actually made knitting easier and much faster, but women were prohibited from using it anyway with the excuse that they were unskilled. They were relegated to knitting by hand, and had to sell their products more cheaply to complete with stockings made much more quickly by male frame-knitters. (105)

…the meaning of work changed because the rise of capitalism from a medieval notion of work as all tasks that contributed to a family sustenance, to work as participation in the market economy and particularly in production. Thus a woman’s finding food for her children by begging or keeping her family solvent through efficient management of the family budget were no longer considered work. (105)

Because, as we saw in the last chapter, all women were thought of as “married or to be married,” women were usually paid about half of what men were paid, even for the same tasks, with the reasoning that they were either single and had only themselves to support, or married and so were simply helping their husbands support the family. (106)

Agricultural tasks were highly, though not completely, gender-specific, though exactly which tasks were regarded as female and which as male varied widely throughout Europe. (106)

…women in parts of Norway, for example, sowed all grain because people felt this would ensure a bigger harvest. (106)

…gender divisions meant that the proper functioning of a rural household required at least one adult male and one adult female; remarriage after the death of a spouse was much faster in the countryside than in the cities, … Those who could not find a husband were often forced into the city for work, … (106)

Rural women…also worked in the fields during harvest time, particularly in areas where gain harvesting was done with a sickle; a recent study of harvesting in seventeenth-century Yorkshire finds that women put in 38 percent of the time needed to bring in the grain. In areas where the harvesting was done with a scythe, women gathered and bound and grain and gleaned the fields, jobs that were actually physically more taxing than cutting because they involved constant stooping and bending. (107)

During the seventeenth century, turnips and other root crops were increasingly grown in many parts of Europe, crops that were very labor-intensive and seen as women’s responsibility because they were generally fed to animals. (107)

Women in parts of Italy tended and harvested olive trees and grape vines, and carried out most of the tasks associated with the production of silk: gathering leaves from mulberry trees, raising silk cocoons, and processing cocoons into raw silk by reeling and spinning. (107)

In fact, some historians would even see that late seventeenth and early eighteenth century as a period of the feminization of agriculture especially in central Europe, where the demand for female agricultural workers grew faster than that for male, … Demographic statistics supports this view, with the significant increase in female life expectancy that began in the early nineteenth century attributed largely to the mechanization of agriculture, … (107)

In only a few parts of Europe were rural households still solely subsistence producers by the early modern period; most participated to some degree in a Markey economy,… Unlike the sale of grain, which their husbands controlled, women’s products were sold your-round, making such good a particularly important part of the household economy. (108)

Women thus served as an important human link between the rural and urban economies, with rural women traveling to town to sell their products of their labor, and urban women going out to rural areas to but products to sell or to work on parcels of land that were still owned by their families. (108)

The sixteenth century was a period of inflation in most of Europe, and governments responded by attempting to limit wages and prices. From their maximum wage regulations, we can see that female agricultural laborers were to be paid about half of what men were, and were also to be given less and poorer quality food, which often formed the most important part of an agricultural worker’s income. An ordinance from south Germany in 1550, for example, notes that male laborers were to be fed soup and wine for breakfast, beer vegetables, and mean at midday, and vegetables and wine at night, while women were to receive only soup and vegetables in the morning, milk and bread at midday, and nothing in the evening; they thus received less food, decidedly less protein, and no alcohol. (108)

Women’s cash wages appear to have been determined more by custom than by the market, for they fluctuated much less than men’s both over the life-cycle and with shifts in the economy; even during periods of rising wages, women’s wages rose more slowly. (109)

The inflation of the sixteenth centuries, … It appeared to many contemporaries that …an alarming rate, and that more of the poor were what they termed “sturdy beggars,” that is, able-bodied people who could work if they chose rather than those who were poor through no fault of their own such as orphans, infirm elderly people, or the handicapped. Most cities in Europe began to pass laws forbidding healthy people to beg, ordering them to go back to their home area, or forcing them into workhouses. These laws were motivated both by increases in the actual numbers of the poor, and changes in attitudes toward them, as Protestant and Catholic authorities came to regard beggars not as opportunities to show one’s Christian charity, but as dangerous vagrant to be expelled or locked up. / Rural women who migrated to cities in search of employment were particularly suspect, for any woman traveling on her own without a clear destination was thought to be dishonourable. (109)

In Ireland, impoverished women were sometimes captured by press gangs and sent against their will to the English colonies of the New World, for English authorities saw this as a way to rid themselves of “dangerous rogues,” and explicitly discussed the women’s procreative role in increasing colonial populations. (110)

Ann Kussmaul has discovered that in England, … 66 percent of rural women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four were servants. … Servants were hired annually, often at local hiring fairs, and were supposed to say with their employer for at least one year. … Young women generally regarded service as a time to save a dowry for later marriage though they were also occasionally forced into service to pay off the parents’ feudal dues, … (110)

…women were usually paid less for the same tasks, so that vineyard owners preferred them for all tasks other than those for which they regarded great physical strength as important. (111)

…spin, for this was the occupation most clearly identified as female in the pre-industrial world, … (112)

…in parts of Europe where the land was poorest and the agriculture was more or less subsistence. [112] …labor to become a more important economic commodity than property, … A woman’s labor, rather than her father’s occupation or wealth, determined her value as a marriage partner, giving her more power within the family and in the community at large. (112-113)

Between 15 and 30 percent of the population of most cities was made up of domestic servants; the larger commercial and manufacturing centers had a higher percentage of servants than the smaller cities, whose economies were more dependent on agriculture. (113)

Some servants in Europe were, in fact, slaves, purchased from eastern Europe in Italian households or from northern and western Africa in Spanish and Portuguese ones. (114)

Most households that had servants could afford only one, a woman whose tasks were thus highly varied. … Even in middle- or upper-class households that did have many rooms, servants were rarely separated from their employers the way they would be in the nineteenth century, but lived on quite intimate terms with them. Though they usually came from poor families, they identified in many ways with their employers, and tended to wear fancier clothing than other lower-class women. This upset bourgeois notions of the proper social order, and beginning in the sixteenth century many cities passed sumptuary laws, in essence urban dress codes that forbade servants to wear fine materials or jewels. Such laws were never very effective, for finer clothing was one of the ways in which servants tried to attract better marriage partners, a key aim of their deciding to go into service. (114)

Male heads of household in particular were [114] expected to oversee the conduct of their servants at all times; employers in Frankfurt whose maids became pregnant were required to pay the costs of the delivery and care for the maid and her infant for three months no matter who the father was, because this would not have happened had they been fulfilling their duty. This dependent position meant that by law or custom servants were generally prohibited from marrying, and most women regarded service as a stage in life rather than a lifelong career. (114-115)

In Italian and German cities, being a servant was often seen as not entirely honorable, as it left a woman open to her master’s sexual advances. (115)

The hospitals, orphanages, and infirmaries run by the Catholic church were largely staffed by women, as were similar secular institutions that many cities set up beginning in the fifteenth century. These were not hospitals in the modern sense, but places where those with chronic, non-contagious diseases, poor expectant mothers, the handicapped, poor people recovering from injuries, foundling children, and mentally retarded or psychologically disturbed… (115)

University medical training in the early modern period still largely depended on the teachings of Galen, however, so that most diagnoses were made by examining a patient’s urine or eyes, and the most common treatment for any illness was bloodletting. (116)

The city marketplace, the economic as well as geographic center of most cities, was filled with women; more than three-quarters of the traders in the markets of early modern Polish cities were women. Along with rural women with their agricultural and animal products were city women with sausage, pretzels, meat pies, cookies, candles, soap, and wooden implements that they had made. Women sold fresh and salted fish that their husbands had caught or that they had purchased from fisherman, game and fowl they had brought from hunters, and imported food items such as oranges, and in the eighteenth century tea and coffee brought from international merchants. … Because there was no way to preserve food easily, women or their female servants had to shop every day, and the marketplace was where they met their neighbors, exchanged information, and talked over recent events. (117)

Along with selling at the marketplace, women also ran small retail establishments throughout the city. They made beer, mead, and hard cider, and ran taverns and inns to dispense their beverages and provide sleeping quarters for those too poor to stay in the more established inns. (117)

Because retail trade was so clearly dominated by women, city governments in 1500 often appointed women to official positions as inspectors and overseers. (118)

As we have seen, in the rural areas both men and women might spin, but in the cities economic need appeared never to be strong enough to break down the association of spinning with women, and men beyond adolescence simply did not spin. (118)

…many occupations which had been open to women in the Middle Ages were closed to them by law or custom, so that spinning was often the only possible employment; only in the seventeenth century do unmarried women in England all come to be called “spinsters.” (119)

Spinners’ wages were also kept low for noneconomic reasons. …view spinning as simply a stopgap employment until women attained, or returned to, their “natural” married state, even though they knew that in reality many women supported themselves with spinning for decades. They also hoped that low wages would encourage women to live in the households of master-weavers or other male artisans rather than live on their own. (119)

Religious and civic authorities also worried about what went on at spinning bees in both town and countryside, evening gatherings where young women brought their wheels or distaffs and spindles; they recognized that young men also gravitated to them, and that the spinning was accompanied by songs, jokes, and drinking. They often tried to prohibit spinning bees, though the mercantilists countered that such gatherings actually promoted marriage by allowing young men to compare the skill the industriousness of various marriage partners, and also promoted higher production levels because the young spinners competed with one another. Most authorities were more at ease when spinning bees were gradually replaced in urban areas by centralized locations at which women spun and wove under the direction of male overseers. (121)

In Florence, for example, women… concentrated in low-skill jobs, and only in those such as weaving that could be carried out in the home and did not require them to go out in public. This was not only because women were primarily responsible for domestic duties and child care along with their paid labor, but also because in Italy, more than in northern Europe, women where seen as the moral guardians of family honor whose reputations needed to be kept from any hint of scandal. Respectable women, even among the poor, were to avoid any jobs that put them in contact with men other than family members, so the range of paid employment open to them was even smaller than it was in northern Europe. (122)

During the late Middle Ages, most major cities in Europe and many of the smaller ones had an official brothel or an area of the city in which selling sex was permitted. Many cities in the fifteenth century set down rules for the women and their customers, and justified the existence of municipal brothels with the comment that such women protected honorable girls and women from the uncontrollable lust of young men, an argument at least as old as Augustine. In a few cities, such as Florence, authorities also noted that brothels might keep young men from homosexual relations. …Visiting brothels was associated with achieving manhood in the eyes of young men, … Poor women—and men—also sold sex illegally outside of city brothels, combining this with other sorts of part-time work such as laundering or sewing. (122)

…in the late fifteenth [122] century cities began to limit brothel residents’ freedom of movement and choice of clothing, requiring them to wear distinctive head coverings or bands on their clothing so that they would not be mistaken for “honorable” women. They also began to impose harsher penalties on women who did not live in the designated house or section of town. Such restrictions increased dramatically after the Protestant Reformation, with most Protestant and then Catholic cities closing their municipal brothels, arguing that the possible benefits they provided did not outweigh their moral detriments. (122-123)

Government policy toward selling sex for money from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth varied throughout Europe, and in many places was typified by alternating periods of tolerance and suppression. In general, major Italian cities such as Florence and Venice were the most tolerant, favoring regulation over suppression and often viewing prostitutes as significant sources of municipal income. (123)

(In the nineteenth century, most of continental Europe except for Spain permitted prostitution again, as long as women registered and submitted themselves to weekly examinations for venereal disease.) …large cities like Rome where their number remained high despite all attempts at prohibition. Roman prostitutes often offered their customers music and poetry along with sexual services, and worked independently, living with other women or with their mothers or children; they often described their occupation in [123] terms of the quality of their clients instead of simply monetary terms. Their neighbors did not shun them, but socialized with them and defended them against verbal and physical attacks. The clear distinction in the minds of Italian authorities between respectable and unrespectable women may have kept most women out of jobs that required regular contact with men, but it did not separate prostitutes and their neighbors on the streets of Florence or Rome. / In both Italian cities and the capitals of northern Europe such as Paris or London, there were always a few women who achieved great prominence, wealth, and near-respectability through their sexual connections with nobles, intellectuals, and officials, … (123-124)

If prostitution and crime represented the low end of the spectrum of urban female occupations in terms of respectability, honor, and what we might call status, the high end was represented by women who participated in craft guilds. Craft guilds were the most important way that production was organized in European cities in 1500, and continued to dominate the production and distribution of most products throughout the early modern period. … Women fit into guilds much more informally. When urban economies were expanding in the High Middle Ages, the master’s wife and daughters worked alongside him and the journeymen and apprentices, and female domestic servants also carried out productive tasks. (125)

…the development of capitalism had both positive and negative effects on working women, on the one hand providing them with jobs that allowed them to contribute to a family income or to earn wages on their own, but on the other lessening the value of their unpaid domestic tasks and only rarely offering jobs that provided more than subsistence wages. (129)

The great merchant trading companies of Italy usually seen as the founders of commercial capitalism such as the Datini and the Medici were family firms, and female family members often invested money that they had inherited or acquired through marriage in business ventures. Widows were generally the most active in terms of independent investment, … (130)

Widows in England ran coal mines, trades foodstuffs and wool wholesale, and made shipping contracts with the army and navy. (130)

The capital available to female investors generally came to them through inheritance or dowries, and in many parts of Europe there were increasing restrictions on women’s ability to invest that capital in any way that might threaten their children’s inheritance. (131)

Women were also increasingly limited in their access to the other major form of wealth in the early modern economy—land. From the thirteenth century on, most areas of Europe passed laws that either established primogeniture… (131)

Though land and liquid capital were the most important forms of wealth, most people had access to neither of these, and the property that they held or handed down to the next generation was solely in the form of movable goods; women form landed families might also have access only to movables once systems of primogeniture were established. Thus women’s most important function in the transfer of property, … Most legal systems limited a wife’s ability to bequeath property without the express approval of her husband, but widows and unmarried women were not restricted in their disposition of movables, and women’s wills include bequests not only of clothing and household goods, but also books, art objects, and in parts of Europe that still had slavery, slaves. … Women were more likely than men to pass property to other women, and tended to specify a wider circle of relatives and friends for specific bequests than did men. They also generally included members of both their birth and marital families in their wills, and often contributed to the dowries of nieces from both birth and marital families with grants of property or cash while they were still alive. (132)

When we evaluate women’s economic role during this period, however, we find that continuities outweigh the changes. Women were increasingly pushed out of craft guilds, but they had only rarely been full members in the first place. They took over new types of agricultural tasks, but continued to be paid half of what men were paid no matter what types of work they did. They dominated the urban marketplace, but only rarely were able to amass much profit. (134)

One recent study of the London labor market found that 72 percent of women in 1700 were doing full- or part-time paid work outside the home. Historians have suggested many reason s for the dramatic growth of the European economy and for European expansion around the world, including an “Industrious Revolution” in which Europeans reduced their leisure time and worked more in order to have money to purchase consumer goods. This Industrious Revolution not only involved women; it required their labor. (134)

The early modern period also saw numerous calls for the improvement of women’s education, particularly from women who had gained access to learning themselves, but the liens of argument were very different. Learning, by which its advocates meant training in classical languages, philosophy, the sciences, theology, and history, was primarily for a woman’s individual fulfillment or to make her a better Christian; it was not linked with political or vocational aims. Anna Maria van Schurman, quoted above and widely regarded as the most highly educated woman in Europe, stated plainly that “the pursuit of letters does not involve any interface with public affairs.” [Anna Maria von Schurman, “Letter to Dr. Rivert” quoted in Una Birch, Anna van Schurman: Artist, Scholar, Saint (London, Longman, 1909), p. 70.] …class-biased …learning was only for women (quoting Schurman again) who are “provided with necessaries and not oppressed with want… (144)

Early modern supporters of women’s learning felt it necessary to stress that their demands would not lead to social or political upheaval… (144)

…formal educational opportunities for boys and men grew steadily during the early modern period. With the development of the printing press, … Protestant reformers in many areas supported the opening of vernacular-language schools to allow the individuals to read the Bible… [144] For middle- and upper-class boys, training in Latin began at seven or eight, preparing them for later attendance at a university and an eventual professional career as a physician, lawyer, university professor, or government or church official. …Why should parents forgo the help of their daughters in the household while they learned things they would never use in later life? Why should women learn Latin, when they were forbidden to attend universities and none of the professions that required it were open to women? Why did women need to read the Bible themselves, when they could listen to their fathers, brothers, or husbands read from it? (144-145)

First in Protestant areas and then in Catholic, learning to read was viewed as a part of religious instruction, and political and religious authorities encouraged the opening of girls’ elementary school to teach girls who could not learn at home. (146)

Even where schools were established, the education the yoffered was meager. Girls attended for an hour or so a day, for one to two years, and were to learn, “reading and writing, and if both of these can’t be mastered, at least some writing, the catechism learned by heart, a little figuring, a few psalms to sing.” What did Protestant authorities see as the aim of girls’ education? “[To habituate girls to the catechism, to the psalms, to honorable behavior and Christian virtue, and especially to prayer, and make them memorize verses from Holy Scripture so that they may grow up to be Christian and praiseworthy matrons and housekeepers.” While boys were engaged in competitions in Latin rhetoric, the best student in the Memmingen girls’ school in 1587 was chose on the basis of her “great diligence and application in learning her catechism, modesty, obedience, and excellent penmanship.” Along with reading, writing, and religion, sewing and other domestic skills were also often part of the curriculum at these schools… A potential teacher’s intellectual abilities often came third in the minds of city councils establishing girls’ schools, after her “honorable lifestyle” and ability to teach domestic skills. (148)

During the sixteenth century instruction for girls in Catholic areas, other than in convents, which were largely limited to the nobility and wealthy, lagged behind even the meager offerings of Protestant areas. (149)

Where girls’ schools did exist, girls attended for a much briefer period than their brothers, which often meant that they learned to read but not to write because the two were not taught simultaneously. (149)

…by 1750 almost all upper-class men and women could read, and only a small minority of male or female peasants could. (150)

…not until the early eighteenth century had improvements in the printing process made books cheap enough so that most artisan households cold afford more than a few small books. During the sixteenth century, the vast majority of reading material produced was religious, ranging from expensive illustrated Bibles to small collections of psalms or devotional verse to even less expensive pamphlets of religious controversy or saints’ lives. From wills and inventories, it appears that women were slightly more likely than men to limit their book ownership to religious works in the sixteenth century, and to works of a pious and devotional nature rather than those of religious controversy; when parents divided their books among their children, daughters usually received fewer and smaller books, and only rarely any that were not religious. The proportion of non-religious books produced increased steadily throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, [150] so that women were reading a wider variety of materials in 1750 than they were in 1500. How-to manuals and household guides were popular, as were letter-writing manuals, travel reports, translations of classical Greek and Roman authors, and increasingly chivalric romances and books of stories, often produced as small chapbooks with paper covers which made them affordable. (151)

The first books written solely for girls were Protestant religious works, especially prayer books and books about virtuous young women in the Bible, whose authors often dedicated them to their daughter and envisioned the girls reading them aloud to their friends and servants who cold not read. They differed from religious books for adults both in language and tone, with shorter, easier sentences, and a milder tone, rarely mentioning hell and damnation. … By the late seventeenth century, a few secular books were written specifically for girls, such as guides to conversation and manners, and even romances, though they continued to be strongly moral… (151)

Books addressed to adult women readers were also largely devotional and published in small format so that they would be relatively cheap. There were books on marriage and general guides for how to be a Christian wife and mother written by men, though not nearly as many as similar guides directed to male heads of household. There were small books of devotions and consolation specifically designed for pregnant… several cookbooks were addressed specifically to women and a few written by women, … (151)

The vast majority of books for women, even midwives’ guides and those discussing needlework, were written by men, … gender and class distinctions are paramount. … male authorities and authors worried about the possible effects of even the most pious material. The most extreme example of this was an act of Henry VIII of England in 1543, which forbade women to read the Bible except for “noblewomen and gentlemen [who] might read it privately, but not to others.” [Quoted in Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640 (San Marino, Calif., Huntington Library, 1982), p. xii.] (152)

Humanist teachers in Italian cities and courts established schools in which pupils began with Latin… and then [152] learned Greek… Humanists… taught that a public political career or the creation of a public reputation through writing should be the aim of all educated individuals, for the best life was not a contemplative one, but a life of action. In this they disagreed with medieval scholars, who had viewed the best use of an education to be the glorification of God through prayer, manuscript copying, writing, or teaching. Education, humanists taught, was not simply for individual or religious purposes, but directly benefited the public good by providing knowledgeable public servants. / This emphasis on the public role and reputation of the educated individual made humanists ambivalent in their attitudes towards education for women… in the words of one fifteenth-century Italian humanist, “an eloquent women is never chaste”? [Translated and quoted in Margaret King, “Thwarted ambitions: six learned women of the early Italian Renaissance,” Soundings 76 (1976), 284.] (153)

Male humanists resolved these ambiguities in several ways. Some, such as Juan Luis Vives, restricted the class of women for whom a humanist education was proper to those who might be forced into public service, such as Princess Mary Tudor, for whom he wrote Instruction of a Christian Woman in 1523. Even princesses were not to participate fully in humanists training, however, for Vives advocated omitting rhetoric from any program of study for girls… Jean Marot, a French humanist, commented in Doctrinal des princesses et nobles dames (Paris, 1537) that all women, including rulers, must be taught to speak the plain truth at all times, though he recognized the importance for effective governing of [153] evasive speech concealing one’s motives. …All humanists—even Thomas More whose daughters were viewed as the most highly educated women in Europe in the sixteenth century—emphasized Christian reading material for women in preference to pagan classics, and totally omitted satires and comedies, which they felt contained immoral allusions. (153-154)

The first of these women, such as Laura Cereta, lived in Italian cities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where they wrote and recited public orations, and corresponded with leading male scholars. The most learned among these, such as Cassandra Fedele and Isotta Nogarola, received the highest praise possible from their male colleagues: they were judged to have overcome their sex. … Many humanist women internalized such values, regretting having been born women because of “the boundaries of my sex and mental powers,” and sought to distance themselves from other “babbling and chattering women.” [Cassandra Fedele and Laura Cereta, translated and quoted in ibid., pp. 71, 73.] (154)

Sixteenth-century French humanist women were more willing to show their learning in public than their English or Italian counterparts, and to use it to suggest reforms or to question commonly accepted notions. (155)

…middle-class French women, … Louise Lab[e],… primarily concerned herself with romantic love, which was viewed as a highly inappropriate topic for women. … Her work shows great familiarity with classical literature and skill at the conventions of [156] classical rhetoric, and treats the issue of unrequited love both tragically and humourously. (156-157)

Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, a mother and daughter who also published their own work and were the center of a humanist circle in Poitiers, … On the other hand, Madeleine deplored the poverty of women’s education: … Yet Catherine also expressed ambivalence about whether she wanted to leave the domestic world of women completely and try to gain public recognition through her writing: (157)

The combination of the spread of humanism and the Protestant rejection of celibacy meant that men no longer had to choose between marriage and the life of a scholar as they had had to in the Middle Ages; indeed, both humanism and Protestantism argued that the best life for any man was that of husband, father, and head of household. Those few women with access to humanist training still had to choose, however, … most humanist women stopped studying and writing once they married, so that their reputations are those of youthful prodigies rather than mature scholars. (158)

In English, French, and German cities, a few boarding schools for upper- and middle-class girls were opened, which offered subjects judged to make their pupils more attractive marriage partners. These were usually termed “accomplishments,” and included needlework, dancing, calligraphy, drawing and painting, moral instruction, domestic skills appropriate to their class such as planning meals, and in England, the Low Countries, and Germany, some instruction in French. … Critics of such school decried their shallowness, arguing that by not teaching Latin they cut women off from classical culture and instead taught them frivolous ways to fill their time rather than things that were morally, spiritually, or socially useful. (159)

…Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-78) was often described as the ultimate learned women; … Born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, she was educated at her father’s command alongside her two brothers. … but only for unmarried middle- or upper-class women who [160] ... education in subjects such as science and languages would lead to stronger faith, moral improvement, and “a more tranquil and free life.” By stressing this last result and seeing educating as an end in itself, Schurman opposed the humanist contention that all education must have some further purpose, [161] …Schurman… educating women would not cause them to upset the political or social status quo but would lead them to support it: … Her call for women’s education was thus a very conservative one, and it is perhaps not surprising that during her later life she rejected her earlier learning and argued that reading the Scriptures while guided by the Holy Spirit was all the education and Christian, male or female, needed. (160-162)

In 1673, Bathsua Makin, who had admired and corresponded with Schurman, … argues that education will… allow widows to “be able to understand and manage their own Affairs,” wives to “be very useful to their Husbands in their Trades,” and mothers to assist “their Children by timely instructing them.” She states clearly that educating women whose families are wealthy enough to allow it will benefit the public good, but also that she does not see this as leading to greater calls for equality: [162] … ‘My intention is not to Equalize Women to Men, much less to make them superior. They are the weaker Sex, yet capable to impressions of great things, something like to the best of Men.’ (162-163)

…Mary Astell (1666-1731) returned to Schurman’s idea that at least some women could claim an education solely for their own benefit. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies…By a Lover of Her Sex (London, 1694 and 1697) she called for the establishment of a spiritual and intellectual retreat for unmarried women and widows which would give them freedom to study away from male society. …led her proposal to be ridiculed and attacked as a “Protestant nunnery.” Though she denies this by noting that there would be no vows, Astell was not alone among Protestant women, especially in England, who regretted the closing of the convents as an option for single women. Hostility to institutions that both looked Catholic and offered women a chance to be independent from men was so strong that Astell’s proposal was never followed until the nineteenth century… classical and practical training advocated by Schurman, Makin, and Astell did not begin until the late eighteenth century in northern Europe, and until the mid-nineteenth century in southern and eastern Europe. (163)

If we think of education as a lifelong process of acquiring skills and deepening one’s understanding of the world, courts and salons were probably more important than school in educating women from Europe’s elite and allowing them to gain intellectual influence. (164)

Upper-class families generally attempted to arrange a period of service for their daughters in the household of a family of higher status or at the court of their territorial ruler if their own status was high and the daughter physically attractive, especially intelligent, or unusually talented in things like music. … young women serving as ladies-in-waiting at a court oculd often come into contact with an area’a leading intellectuals, and expand their own learning through informal discussions or more formally arranged classes. At the English court, for example, young women from the most prominent noble families not only learned to play musical instruments, dance, and recite poetry, but also joined the monarch’s daughters and nieces for lessons in Latin, French, and history. Scottish noble daughters, by contrast, were rarely sent to London once Scotland had been joined to England, so that their level of education and sophistication lagged far behind that of their brothers who felt it important to spend time at court. (164)

In France, Spain, and Portugal beginning in the sixteenth century, and then later in central and eastern Europe, territorial rulers claimed greater personal political power, gradually building up absolutist states. Nobel families who had long held power independently became more dependent on the wishes and whims of the rulers, … Nobleman had to learn their new roles as courtiers, for which the best guide was the Italian courtier Baldassar Castiglione’s handbook The Book of the Courtier. In many ways Castiglione’s advice to men was that they act more like women were supposed to—pay attention to their appearance, flatter those with power, never speak too forcefully, never appear too skilled at any one thing but show interest in whatever those power are interested in, be discreet in all matters, and pay careful attention to their reputations. [164] Castiglione’s advice to female courtiers was largely the same, and women who were able to learn the new role well could gain great influence over a ruler, which resulted in financial benefits and political offices for the male members of their families. … The most prestigious tasks were those associated with the physical needs of the monarch—bringing in breakfast, handing napkins, emptying the royal chamber pot. Though we may view these activities as demeaning or disgusting, they offered great opportunities for personal access to the ruler. (165)

Though Castiglione emphasized the importance for court ladies of both chastity and the reputation for chastity, at many courts young women quickly learned that sexual favors were one of their most powerful tools, and the women who achieved the most personal and familial power were often royal mistresses. … Though Mme. de Pompadour was the antithesis of Mary Astell’s learned woman, with an education geared almost completely to making her more appealing to the king, she fulfilled the humanist goal of education as training for public service in one of the few ways possible for early modern women. (165)

The early modern period saw a large number of queens and other types of female rulers throughout Europe, [165] … Fortunately for their subjects, many of these women had not been limited to “accomplishments” in their education, but had been given training in Latin and modern languages, … lessons in history and the natural sciences, … and practical training in political skills, … (165-166)

During the middle of the seventeenth century, several women in Paris created another institution that would allow them to gain access to the world of learning and “letters” … the salon. Salons were gatherings of men and women for formal and informal discussion of topics decided upon by the women who ran them, held in the drawing rooms … The salon hostess selected the guests, determined whether the conversation on any particular night would be serious or light, and decided on any particular night would be serious or light, and decided whether additional activities such as singing, poetry readings, or dramatic productions would be part of the evening’s offerings. The first real salon is often regarded as that of Madame Rambouillet (1588-1666), and by the last quarter of the seventeenth century a number of other Parisian women had followed her example. / The women who ran and attended salons in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were generally from noble families, but families who had been ennobled relatively recently. Often these women married into families or higher standing and prestige, and the salons themselves mixed old and new nobles and wealthier non-nobles. … The women who founded and attended salons had generally been educated at convent schools, with their emphasis on piety and morals. The women recognized the deficiencies in their own education, and explicitly viewed the salon as a place to improve their understanding of the world. [166] … mocked by writers like Moliere as intellectually pretentious and more interested in style than substance, but recent research has demonstrated that some were extremely powerful, … During the second half of the eighteenth century, salons were also created by women in England, where they supported women writers, and in Germany, where they were one of the few places where Christians and Jews could mix. Though particularly in France salons were still centered on male intellectuals and writers, with women acting more as facilitators, … allowed some women to play a quasi-public role, leading conservatives particularly in France to warn of the resultant “feminization” of culture and weakening of the country’s military and work ethic. … but in terms of women’s educations they were unique, the only place in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries where women were actually encouraged to be in the company of other educated women and men. (166-167)

…early modern Europe… patronage was the most important factor in a literary or artistic career. (167)

Many patrons were very particular in their demands, suggesting themes and styles, ordering specific types of work, and requiring changes while a work was in progress. As certain artists, writers, and composers became popular and well known, they could assert their own artistic style and pay less attention to the wishes of a patron, although even major artists like Raphael or Rubens generally worked according to a patron’s specific guidelines. (168)

Throughout the Middle Ages, queens and noblewomen had supported artists, musicians, writers, and poets, for artistic and literary matters were considered part of women’s sphere; their influence was certainly felt in the development of courtly love literature, … The new ideal for rulers created by humanists in the sixteenth century made the arts and literature a male concern as well, for Renaissance monarchs were expected to support cultural activities as part of proving themselves well-rounded… Female rulers and the wives of rulers also established permanent positions as their courts, hiring court composers and musicians, official portrait artists, and by the very late seventeenth century, scientists and philosophers. (168)

Though a small commercial market in art and literature development during the early modern period, most writers and artists still sought individuals who would provide them monetary support in return for being depicted as classical figures or pious onlookers in religious scenes, their work might not be acceptable for some reason took special care to find a powerful dedicatee, hoping that this individual would be flattered enough not only to provide a financial grant but also to push for the work’s publication and sale. (169)

Because they were often not rulers themselves, but the wives of female relatives or rulers, women were slightly freer than men to support religious thinkers who were regarded as questionable or suspect. Advocates of church reform in sixteenth-century France, for example, were protected and supported by a group of royal women, though discussion of reform was officially unacceptable. (170)

…in the sixteenth century women were more likely to support projects with religious themes and purposes than were the men of their families, … (170)

…the women who ran salons regarded themselves as better arbiters of graces and style in writing than the men they supported, and specifically favored language they thought more refined, delicate, and “feminine.” (170)

Elizabeth of Bohemia and Christina of Sweden, Descartes’s noble patrons, were both especially concerned with the duality of matter and spirit, a philosophical issue generally connected to ideas about gender differences in the early modern period, when women were thought to be dominated more by matter and men by spirit. (170)

The early modern period has often been described as a time of one educational advance after another: humanism, with its emphasis on practi-[170]cal training in writing and speaking; the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on basic literacy; the beginnings of publicly funded schooling, with the goal of mass literacy. According to some commentators, it was during this period that Europe was transformed from an oral to a written culture. As we have seen in this chapter, however, women did not share equally in these educational advances. (170-171)

During the Middle Ages,… most philosophers and scientists were members of the clergy and viewed these topics as intimately related to theology, most musicians were clerics. This began to change in Italy during the fourteenth century… the bulk of cultural creation in the early modern period was no longer tied to the church. Scientists and philosophers in particular divorced themselves from religious institutions, … (175)

A new attitude towards artists, writers, composers, and other creators of culture also developed during the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages, such individuals had been viewed as artisans just like shoemakers or bakers, and their products the creation of a workshop, not an individual; this is the reason we know the names of so few medieval artists. During the Renaissance, the notion of the artist or writer as creative genius began to develop; artists started to sign their works, and certain branches of art—in particular painting, sculpture, and architecture—were deemed more significant than other types of art, such as needlework, porcelain manufacture, goldsmithing, and furniture making. This division hardened in the sixteenth century, particularly through the influence of Giorgio Vasari, who is often described as the first art historian. Painting, sculpture, and architecture were termed the “major” arts and everything else the “minor” or “decorative” arts. A similar split occurred in literature, with certain types of writing, such as poetry, history, and epics, now defined as “literature” and other types of writing, such as letters and diaries, excluded from this category. (176)

…growing split between learned and popular culture in early modern Europe, and between professional and amateur. They also had dramatic effects on women’s ability to participate in the creation of culture, … Women were often by regulation or practice excluded from schools and academies, and their writings were rarely accepted by literary journals. The self-promotion required by an artist, writer, composer, or thinker attempting to gain the support of a patron was judged unacceptable behavior when done by a women. (176)

The major arts, the most celebrated forms of music and literature, and the most noted philosophical ideas were all regarded as tied to characteristics deemed masculine—forcefulness, strength, power, logic, singularity of purpose. The work that women artists, writers, an scientists did produce was often judged to be the result not of genius, but of nimble fingers, diligence in observation, skill at following the example of a male teacher, or bee-like industriousness, in other words, “craft,” not “art” or “science.” If her work could not be dismissed in this way, the woman was said to have “overcome the limitations of her sex”… (177)

…at no time was the gender of the creator not a factor in how a work was judged. (177)

…new genres which women created would never achieve the status of major arts, … miniature portraits painted on ivory, invented by Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757) and paper collage, invented by Mary Delany (1700-88). (177)

The best example of loss of status in an art form is embroidery, which in the Middle Ages was practiced by both women and men often organized into male-directed craft guilds and paid on a scale equivalent to painting, but which throughout the early modern period became increasingly identified as feminine. … Because embroidery was a visual art created primarily by women, … (178)

…there were women who did not accept the general view that only men could paint professionally. … The majority of female painters were the daughters of painters; … Those who were not the daughters of painters were often the daughters of intellectuals or minor noblemen with ties to intellectual or artistic circles. Many were eldest daughters or came from families in which there were no sons, so their fathers took unusual interest in their careers. … Many women began their careers before they were twenty, and produced far fewer paintings after they married, or stopped painting entirely. Of those who married, many married painters. / Women were not allowed to study the male nude, which was viewed as essential if one wanted to paint large history paintings with many figures, so they generally painted portraits, ... [179] still life and interior scenes. … national academies of art form the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries ranked them much lower in importance, which meant female painters could never gain the highest level of official recognition. Women could also not learn the technique of fresco, in which colors are applied directly to wet plaster walls, because such works had to be done out in public, … (179-180)

Though sixteenth-century writers worried about women using music to lure men into the dangers of love, by the seventeenth century singing and playing an instruments became suitable “accomplishments” for middle- and upper-class young women. As the of The Young Ladies Conduct wrote, “Music refines the Taste, polished the Mind; and is an Entertainment, without other views, that preserves them [young women] from the Rust of Idleness, that most pernicious Enemy to Virtue.” Writers such as Mary Astell who favored a serious education for women were critical of the amount of time young women were expected to devote to their musical lessons, … (185)

For most middle- and upper-class women, there was no acceptable public outlet for their years of musical training. They were to perform only for their own families, and not even in the semi-public performances which typically brought together professionals and amateurs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (185)

…training in music was not a standard part of the education of an upper- or middle-class man… many women gave up their music when they married, though music was often used as a symbol of marital bliss, its harmony a parallel to marital harmony. (185)

…folk ballads, songs, lullabies, and other types of popular music. … There is no reason to assume that women did not write any of them—as one historian has put it “anonymous was a woman”—especially because many of them were songs that accompanied traditionally women’s work such as child care or weaving. (186)

Until 1500 these were almost all men, but gradually singing became one of the duties expected of court ladies at many northern Italian courts. Women were taken on specifically for their singing abilities, more music was written that required trained women’s voices, and in 1580 the Duke of Ferrara established a separate group of singing women, the concerto di donna. (186)

Like female painters, many female musicians were the daughters of musicians or came from musical families, and their fathers not only trained them but helped them to get their music published. (186)

By 1700, twenty-three women in Italy had had their music published, and during the early part of the next century women began to compose larger pieces as well. (187)

Along with the courts, convents also provided opportunities for female musicians and composers; more than half of the women whose music was published before 1700 were nuns who wrote both secular and sacred music. (187)

After the Council of Trent in 1563, the Venetian Ospedali and women’s convents throughout Italy were ordered by the Catholic hierarchy to stop their performances of polyphonic music and the playing of any instrument except the organ. The Venetian city government was strong enough to ignore this order, and some convents were as well, especially those in Milan and Bologna, but in general the opportunities for convent residents to perform and create music began to decrease. In [187] 1686 Pope Innocent XI extended this prohibition, forbidding all women—single, married, or widowed as well as nuns—to learn music for any reason from any man, including their fathers or husbands, or to play any musical instrument, “because music is completely injurious to the modesty that is proper for the [female] sex.” [Translated and quoted in Jane Bowers, “The emergence of women composers in Italy, 1566-1700,” in Bowers and Judith Tick (eds.), Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950 (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 139.] This edict was renewed in 1703, and, though it was certainly not enforced everywhere, it does reflect a negative attitude towards women’s musical creativity, … (187-188)

Many of the women who became noted as singers were also actresses, both in opera and spoken theater. From the middle of the seventeenth century opera began to use women instead of castrati for female parts, and starting in the late sixteenth century, female actresses began to appear in French and Italian court performances and in wandering troupes of players who performed comedy for popular audiences. Previously all parts had been taken by men and boys, a tradition that continued in school and religious drama throughout the early modern period and in England until the restoration of the monarchy after the civil war in 1660. … In general, however, actresses, opera singers, and ballerinas were not regarded as honorable women, and many were able to support themselves only by also being the mistress of an artistically inclined male patron. (188)

Letters often contained political news as well as personal matters, and their writers knew that they would be circulated among a group of people, for this was a period before regular newspapers. … Women in particular realized that letters might be the best or only place they could demonstrate their learning and creativity with language, and so used letters to develop a personal literary style. (189)

Women’s public speech was often linked with sexual dishonor in many people’s minds; a “loose” tongue implied other sorts of loose behavior, and a woman who wanted her thoughts known by others was suspected of wanting to make her body available as well. (189)

Even those who published women’s works posthumously, often their husbands or other male relatives, included such justifications, noting that the author had been a paragon of female modesty whose writing had been done only out of duty to God or her children and had never interfered with her household or marital duties. … By 1750, as more women began to publish, such explanations are slightly less frequent and less abject, but they are still there. (190)

Patrician Crawford has determined that women’s works comprise only 1.2 percent of the publications in England from 1640 to 1700, though even this figure represents a doubling of their pre-Civil War rate. It is more difficult to make statistical comparisons for other countries, but publications by women probably accounted for less than 1 percent of the total, though their share elsewhere also increased during the early modern period.

Authors who cold not pay for a work to be published themselves had to find a patron who would, or convince a publisher that a work would sell enough to earn back the investment. This was much more difficult for women than men, so that the most prolific female authors were those who paid for the publication themselves, … (191)

The majority of women’s published works were religious, particularly in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when the vast majority [191] of all publications were religious. … Most women authors did not write such dramatic or doctrinal works, however, but chose forms that were considered more acceptable for women—prayers, meditations, poems based on the psalms or epistles, spiritual and moral advice to children, reflections on death, or translations of works by men. (191-192)

…women use female metaphors for religious experiences in a way that stresses how faith and devotions can overcome differences between people and between the believer and God, while men use female metaphors more often to stress the distinction between the human and the divine. …once she was a widow, she notes, God became her husband, impregnated her with spiritual seed and then sustained her during the delivery as any good husband would. (192)

Many women who wrote religious works, and the majority of women who wrote about non-religious topics, chose poetry as their preferred mode of expression. Most female poets, in fact, wrote both religious and secular poetry, and even their secular poetry includes moral advice or overtone of divine love; they were less likely than their male counterparts to use literary forms such as the pastoral, elegy, or love sonnet without in some way Christianizing or moralizing them, although a few women did write purely secular love lyrics. (192)

In England, the most prolific writer was Aphra Behn (1640?-1689), who is usually described as the first British woman (and sometimes as the first woman anywhere) to earn her living by selling her writing. …Behn defended herself (often in her next play) against these charges, stating clearly that such criticism was largely the result of her sex: … (192)

Many women, including Behn and her fellow English playwrights Margaret Cavendish… Frances Boothby…and Elizabeth Polwhele all regarded marriage, whether arranged or for love, as problematic for women. As one female character in Cavendish’s Love’s Adventures , refusing a public celebration of her wedding, states bluntly: “Do you call that a triumphant day, that enslaves a woman all her life after? No, I will make no triumph on that day.” [Margaret Cavendish, Love’s Adventures (London, 1662), p. 66] (194)

Along with revealing a more negative view of the effects of marriage on women, women also create heroic female characters more often than do male authors. Their female heroes do not necessarily challenge convention, however, for the virtues for which they are most praised are those that are culturally approved: constancy, modesty, patience, chastity. Mariam in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Marian, the Jewish queen executed by her tyrant husband through no fault of her own, all the while worrying whether she is guilty of wifely disobedience, Pamphilia in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, who remains true to her beloved despite his inconstancy, and Mandane in Madeleine de Scud[e]ry’s Grand Cyrus, who survives a series of abductions with her honor intact, are prime examples of this conventional, though heroic, behavior. (195)

Female authors were more likely than male to include moral advice in their poetry, drama, and fiction, … (195)

Up to the middle of the seventeenth century, most autobiographies by both women and men were spiritual,… After that point, men began to write autobiographical works generally describing their public careers, and women ones that delved more deeply into emotional matters. (196)

Though women’s autobiographical writings differ widely in form, style, and intent,… common features. The authors all compare themselves with the accepted standards for female behavior, and often discuss some kind of oppression they have experienced; they are very conscious of the actual writing process and frequently discuss their problems in achieving objectivity and “truth.” (196)

Though no major seventeenth-century scientist openly broke his ties with the Christian church, and religion remained an important justification for the pursuit [197] of science, greater emphasis was placed on secular interpretations and natural explanations. (197-198)

…public lectures and classes in anatomy, astronomy, physics, and chemistry drew large audiences, and books that explained complex scientific ideas to the layperson were published in England, France, Germany, and Italy. (198)

…decreasing price of books relative to other commodities in the seventeenth century. (198)

Women formed a significant share of the audience for all of these activities, and some books and lectures were directed specifically to them. Many of the popular scientific works, such as Baron de Fontenelle’s The Plurality of Worlds, which discusses Descartes’s cosmology, were written as dialogues between a woman and a man, and others bore titles such as Newtonsim for the Ladies. We can tell that women read or at least purchased these books by the fact that they show up in women’s personal libraries,… (198)

..du Ch[a]telet was also typical of many women known to have scientific or philosophical interests in the early modern period: she was a member of the nobility who learned her science through personal contacts; created a scientific circle in her household which drew learned men to her; published only translations or derivatives works while keeping her original work unpublished. (199)

Not all women scientists were members of the nobility, however. A few, particularly in Italy, were the daughters of university professors and went on to receive university degrees themselves. … it is not certain that any of these women actually attended classes at a university, however. Several women in France and Germany, usually trained by their fathers, … (199)

Astronomy was another science initially open to the work of women. Most astronomical observatories in seventeenth-century Germany, for example, were in private homes rather than public buildings or universities, and the daughters and wives of male astronomers peered through telescopes and calculated the movement of heavenly bodies along with their fathers and husbands. These women were not simply assistants, however, but made observations and sometimes published findings on their own. (200)

Though in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries science and mathematics have become fields of study clearly identified as masculine, in the early modern period experimental science, especially on the Continent, was sometimes regarded as feminine. Those who had a negative view of women’s intellectual capacities saw laboratory experiments as not too different from cooking, and observation of the natural world, especially botany, as likely to induce greater religious reverence. Science was also something women could do in their own homes, for even the most advanced scientific equipment, such as the microscope, was within the budgets of many upper-middle class and noble households and mathematics required no equipment at all. Classics, on the other hand, was regarded as masculine, for only the stronger male mind was up to the rigors of learning Latin and Greek, … Those who had a positive view of women’s intellect also saw science and women as made for each other, for women’s lack of a classical education would enable them to carry out more objective and original research, not influence by the mistaken ideas of the past. Women, or better said, ladies, also had more time to speculate on scientific matters, as they were unable to participate in politics and generally did not have to concern themselves with economic matters. / In some ways, then, an interest in science was yet another “accomplishment” welcomed in middle- and upper-class women, but never to be used professionally. … Francis Bacon and other English scientists, who regarded continental scientists with their frequent ties to noblewomen as “effeminate,” and called for a “masculine” science. (200)

Anatomy and astronomy also became more closely tied to institutions that excluded women during the early modern period. … proposals by female midwives for similar training, … were never granted except in Italy, where male midwives remained completely unacceptable to all social classes. Scientific academies opened astronomical observatories, where official positions were reserved for men. …because such positions were public ones and therefore closed women. (201)

Women might call their embroidery “art” (although usually downplaying it with the term “domestic arts”) but did not call themselves artists. They played the harpsichord or sang, but were not musicians, or only “lady musicians,” a term that became popular in the eighteenth century; they observed the stars but were not scientists. (202)

‘Lord of my soul, you did not hate women when You walked in the world; rather you favored them always with much pity and found in them as much love and more faith than in men. It is not enough, Lord, that the world has intimidated us… so that we may not do anything worthwhile for You in public?’ / St. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection, (1560s) quoted and translated in Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 41. (213)

…though we may view the arrangement of women’s hair as trivial, it had tremendous social and symbolic importance. Immediately upon marriage, women covered their hair, for long flowing hair was the mark of someone who was sexually available, either as a virgin or prostitute. (213)

Women had to choose between what male political and religious authorities, and sometimes even their fathers and husbands, told them to do, and what they perceived as God’s plan for their lives. (214)

…boundaries between public and private; early modern women frequently argued that their religious actions were private matters and that only God could be the true judge. (214)

…it was the language of religious texts, and the example of pious women who preceded them, which were used most often by women to subvert or directly oppose male directives. Religion was even used as the reason why women should study secular philosophy; … (214)

The most powerful and in many ways independent women in the late medieval church were the abbesses of certain convents, who controlled large amounts of property and often had jurisdiction over many subjects. (215)

Since their foundings in the early the high Middle Ages, many convents had been open only to members of the nobility and were thus socially exclusive; lower-class women might be associated with a convent as lay sisters to do the harder physical labor or routine maintenance, but they could not become professed nuns. (215)

The high point of many convents in terms of intellectual accomplishments and political power was the tenth and eleventh centuries, … Beginning in the late eleventh century, a reform movement usually termed the “Gregorian reform”… attempted to cut the connections between the church and secular leaders, and also to restrict all links between male celibacy and women. Decrees were passed ordering clerical celibacy and declaring priestly marriages that did exist invalid. …clerical celibacy became the policy of the western church from that point on. Priests were ordered to live separately from their female relatives, and convents that had both male and female residents… were dissolved. Women religious were to be cut off from the world, … These moves reduced the abbesses’ power and visibility in the surrounding community, and at the same time, universities, which were closed to women, replaced monasteries as the main intellectual centers of Europe. In their writings and in their spiritual life, nuns in the late Middle Ages turned to mysticism and personal devotions, rather than giving political advice or writing plays for public performance. (216)

By the fifteenth century, it appeared to some church officials and the more rigorous nuns as if many convents had forgotten their spiritual focus. In many ways this is not surprising, as some convent residents were not there willingly, but had been placed in a convent by their parents because the cost of a dowry for marriage was too high; the entrance fees demanded by convents were generally lower than the dowry that a husband of one’s own social class would expect. Such nuns often continued to live as they would outside the convent—they wore secular clothing and jewelry, entertained visitors, ate fancy food, retained servants, and frequently left the convent to visit family or friends. (216)

In areas of Europe where Orthodox Christianity was dominant, such as eastern Europe and Russia, women’s convents were rarely enclosed and the women did not live communally, but retained their own incomes, clothing, and food. … Unlike western convents, the women in Orthodox convents were not expected to have a strong religious vocation, but simply lead respectable lives; as the accounts of Russian saints’ lives demonstrate, the ideal holy woman in Russia was not a nun, as she was in the West, but a devout mother who lived quietly at home and did her miracles and good deeds in private. Orthodoxy was not affected by the Protestant or Catholic Reformations, so that women’s convents in eastern Europe continued to operate into the eighteenth century just as they had in the Middle Ages. (217)

Because a dowry was required for either marriage or entrance into a convent, many poor women remained unmarried all their lives, and some chose to live communally in informal religious groups, supporting themselves by weaving, sewing, or caring for the sick. These women were often called Beguines, and were initially ignored by the church, but in the fourteenth century were increasingly regarded as suspect because they were not under male supervision nor did they take formal vows. They were also regarded as cheap competition in the labor market by craft guilds which were establishing themselves in many cities, and so attempts were made to forbid women to live together unless they were cloistered in a convent. These attempts were sporadically successful, … (217)

In fifteenth-century Italy, what were termed open monasteries for women could be found in every town, in which widows, unmarried women, and sometimes even former prostitutes and concubines chose to live a life or religious purpose but without formal vows. (218)

Anchoresses, who were especially common in England. (218)

In the early Middle Ages women who were regarded as particularly holy were almost all virgins, but by the late Middle Ages there were even a number of saints who were wives and mothers. (218)

Mary was a particularly popular subject, being shown so often that many people felt she was one member of the Trinity. Because of her singular status as both virgin and mother, Mary was a problematic model for normal women, who could never hope to achieve what she had. In fact, the cult of the Virgin was often strongest among celibate male misogynists such as Bernhard of Clairvaux who used her example to castigate all other women. …Mary’s mother Anne, a non-biblical figure whose life was first discussed in written documents in the second century, … Veneration of Anne grew throughout the Middle Ages, when her life story was embellished with legends about her own mother Emerentia, her three marriages, and her children other than Mary. Stories of her life, frequently reprinted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in vernacular languages as small pamphlets, were popular with the urban middle classes… often illustrated with a female trinity—Mary, Anne, and Emerentia—and provided examples of normal women, even older ones, acting in divinely approved ways. (219)

Scholars are only beginning to ask in what ways women’s understanding of Christianity differed from men’s and whether there were certain religious activities and ideas that were particularly attractive to women. (220)

Woodcuts and engraving of late medieval services show women more often than men carrying out an alternative religious action, such as saying a rosary or reading in a prayer book, while the priest in conducting the service. It is difficult to know, however, if the artist was representing reality or implicitly criticizing women for not paying attention. (220)

The God of the Protestant reformers was a transcendent one, not … surrounded by a group of semi-divine saints who could serve as intermediaries. In their opinion, the clergy were no better than anyone else—the standard phrase expressing this is “the priesthood of all believers”—and the Bible and all church services should be in the vernacular so that all Christians could have access to them. … The period in which women were the most active was the decade or so immediately following an area’s decision to break with the Catholic Church or while this decision was being made. … Sometimes this popular pressure took the form of religious riots, in which women and men destroy paintings, statues, stained-glass windows or other objects that symbolized the old religion, or protected such objects from destruction at the hands of government officials; in 1536 at Exeter in England, for example, a group of women armed with shovels and pikes attacked workers who had been hired by the government to dismantle a monastery. Sometimes this popular pressure took the form of writing when women and men who did not have formal theological training took the notion of the “priesthood of all believers” literally and preached or published polemical religious literature explaining their own ideas. / Women’s preaching or publishing religious material stood in direct opposition to the words ascribed to St. Paul… when I see that no man will or can speak, I am driven by the word of God... [222] “If all women were forbidden to speak, how could daughters prophecy as Joel predicted? … (222-223)

Once Protestant churches were institutionalized, polemical writings by women (and untrained men) largely stopped. Women contributed to write hymns and devotional literature, but these were often published posthumously or were designed for private use. (223)

Women’s actions as well as their writings in the first years of the Reformation upset political and religious authorities. Many cities prohibited women form even getting together to discuss religious matters, and in 1543 an Act of Parliament in England banned all women except those of the gentry and nobility form reading the Bible; upper-class women were also prohibited from reading the Bible aloud to others. (223)

Luther corresponded regularly with a number of prominent noblewomen, and Calvin was even more assiduous at trying to win noblewomen to his cause. (224)

Once the Reformation was established, most women expressed their religious convictions in a domestic, rather than public setting. (334)

If there was disagreement, however, continental Protestands generally urged the wife to obey her husband rather than what she perceived as God’s will. She could pray for his conversion, but was not to leave him or actively oppose his wishes; in Calvin’s words, a woman “should not desert the partner who is hostile.” English Puritans were less restricted, urging their female followers to act as “domestic missionaries” and attempt to convert their children, servants, and husbands. During the first decades after the Reformation, marriages between spouses of different faiths were much more common than they would be later in the century when the lines of religious confession hardened. … By the seventeenth century… authorities in many areas prohibiting their citizens from marrying those of different denominations, … (225)

Whereas priests’ concubines had generally been from a lower social class, by the second generation Protestant pastors had little difficulty finding wives from among the same social class as themselves, a trend that further aided the acceptance of clerical marriage. (226)

Long after continental pastors’ wives had succeeded in making theirs a respectable position, bishops’ wives in England still had not achieved even legal recognition despite all of their efforts at maintaining pious households. (226)

Of the people martyred during the reign of Mary, one-fifth were women, and most of these were quite poor; wealthy people who opposed Mary fled to the Continent. / Most of the women executed for religious reasons in early modern Europe were Anabaptists, religious radicals who were hated and hunted by Catholics and Protestants alike. Most Anabaptist groups were very [226] small, and they had widely divergent ideas, … (226-227)

The interrogations of Anabaptists are one of the few sources we have for the religious ideas of people who were illiterate; from these records, we learn that many women could argue complicated theological concepts and had memorized large parts of the Bible by heart. (227)

Protestants teachings also rejecting many of the activities that had given women’s lives religious meaning, however, … sumptuary laws restricted the celebrations of baptism, weddings, and funerals, all ceremonies in which women had played a major role. Lay female confraternities, which had provided emotional and economic assistance for their members and charity for the needy, were also forbidden, … (228)

One of the first moves of an area rejecting Catholicism was to close the monasteries and convents, … In England and Ireland, where all monasteries and convents were taken over by the Crown, most nuns got very small pensions and were expected to return to their families, though not all did. (228)

The link between convents and prominent families was most pronounced in the Holy Roman Empire, where many convents had been established by regional ruling houses or by the wives and daughters of emperors. …resolute opponents of the Protestant Reformation. (229)

Some convents also survived as religious institutions by accepting Lutheran theology except for its rejection of the monastic life. (230)

The distinction between Protestant and Catholic that is so important in understanding the religious and intellectual history of sixteenth-century Europe may have ultimately been less important to the women who lived in convents or other communal groups than the distinction between their pattern of life and that of the majority of lay women. (231)

The response of the Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation is often described as two interrelated movements. One, a Counter-Reformation which attempted to win territory and people back to loyalty to Rome and prevent further spread of Protestant ideas, and the other a reform of abuses and problems within the Catholic Church which had been recognized as problems by many long before the Protestant Reformation. Thus the Catholic Reformation was both a continuation of medieval reform movements and a new crusade. (231)

The masculine nature of the Counter-Reformation was intimately related to one of the key aspects of church reform—an enforcement of cloistering for women. (231)

…in 1541, Isabel Roser decided to go one step further and ask for papal approval for an order of religious women with a similar mission. Roser had been an associate of Igantius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, in Barcelona. She saw her group as a female order of Jesuits… Loyola was horrified at the thought of religious women in constant contact with lay people and Pope Paul III refused to grant his approval. (232)

The Council of Trent, the church council that met between 1545 and 1563 to define what Catholic positions would be on matters of doctrine and discipline, reaffirmed the necessity of cloister for all women religious and called for an end to open monasteries and other uncloistered communities. Enforcement of this decree came slowly, however, for several reasons. First, women’s communities themselves fought it or ignored it. [232] … Second, church officials themselves recognized the value of the services performed by such communities, particularly in the area of girls’ education and care of the sick. (232-233)

The exclusion of women from what were judged the most exciting and important parts of the Catholic Reformation—countering Protestants and winning new converts—is reflected in the relative lack of women from the sixteenth century who were made saints. (234)

…18.1 percent of those who reached the top of the ladder from the sixteenth century were women, whereas 27.7 percent of those from the fifteenth century had been female. Most of the women who did achieve sainthood followed a very different path, one of the mysticism or reforming existing orders, a path in some ways set by the most famous religious woman of the sixteenth century, Teresa of Avila. (235)

Teresa was a Carmelite nun who took her vows at twenty, and then spent the next twenty-five years in relative obscurity in her convent at Avila. … She went through extremes of exaltation and melancholy, suffering physical effects such as illness, trances, and paralysis. Her mystical path was not one of extreme mortification of the flesh, but of prayer, purification of the spirit, and assistance to the women of her convent. At other times or places she might have spent her life unnoticed, but this was Spain during the sixteenth century, when the Spanish crown was using its own Inquisition to stamp out any sign of humanist, Lutheran, or other vocation (beatas) had been accused of heresy and questioned, so Teresa’s writing, but to reflect on them and try to explain why she thought these were happening to her. Though Teresa complained about having to do this, she also clearly developed a sense of passion about her writing, for she edited and refined her work, transforming it into a full spiritual autobiography. Like many of the authors discussed in the last chapter, she manipulated stereotypes of femininity, conceding women’s weakness, powerlessness, and inferiority so often that it appears ironic, and using informal language both to appeal to a wider audience and deflect charges that she was teaching theology. … When she was fifty-two, she also began to [235] reform her Carmelite order, attempting to return it to its original standards of spirituality and poverty. To do this she traveled all around Spain, founding new convents, writing meditations, instructions for monastic administrators, and hundreds of letters, provoking the wrath or annoyance of some church authorities; … Teresa’s success in reforming the Carmelite won her more supporters that critics within the church, however, … The version of Teresa that was presented for her canonization proceedings, held very shortly after her death, was one that fit her into the acceptable model of women mystic and reformer, assuming a public role only when ordered to do so by her confessor or superior; only recently have we begun to understand that Teresa thought of herself as a Counter-Reformation fighter, .. It is easy to view Teresa as a complete anomaly, but in many ways she fits into a pattern of women’s religious experience that was quite common in Spain, the Spanish colonies, and Italy. Other nuns also composed spiritual autobiographies and shared them with others, and they, as well as lay holy women (beatas), acted as reformers and social critics, combining mysticism and activism. Their visions and ecstatic trances sometimes led to their being investigated by the Inquisition. [236] …The respect accorded to Teresa and other “holy women” did not lead to any lessening of the call for the cloistering of religious women, however. Their separation from the world lessened the ability of women’s communities to solicit funds, and the post-Tridentine emphasis on the sacraments meant that most benefactors preferred to give donations to a male house whose resident could say Mass. Thus many female houses grew increasingly impoverished, or more interested in the size of the dowry of a prospective entrant than the depth of her religious vocation. By the seventeenth century, convents in many parts of Europe were both shrinking and becoming increasingly aristocratic; in Venice, for example, nearly 60 percent of all women of the upper class joined convents. The long-range effects of claustration were not an increase but a decrease in spiritual vigor. (237)

Catholic authors criticized the veneration of Anne, seeing the intercession of an older woman as no longer an appropriate avenue to God; the depiction of an all-female trinity disappeared from religious pamphlets, replaced by illustrations of Mary with both of her parents. Mary herself was also portrayed differently. Up to the early sixteenth [237] century she was generally shown as an adult woman, capably caring for the infant Jesus while an older Joseph hovered in the background or was not shown at all. By the late sixteenth she was depicted as an adolescent girl, clearly under the protection of a strong and vigorous Joseph, who was not a much more dominant figure. Joseph replaced Anne as the fully human individual most often held up for emulation, and his cult grew in popularity with the spread of the Catholic Reformation. (238)

In Catholic theory marriage was indissoluble, but in practice the Malmaritate houses offered women who had been abandoned or victimized by their husbands a respectable place to live, an alternative that was unavailable in Protestant areas. (238)

No Catholic author went so far as to recommend that Catholic wives leave Protestant husbands, but in practice Catholic authorities put fewer blocks in the path of a woman who did. (238)

In 1559 Queen Elizabeth ordered that everyone attend services in the Anglican church or be penalized with fines or imprisonment. Many English and Irish Catholics outwardly conformed, but others did not, becoming what were termed recusants. Among these were a large percentage of women, who posed a special problem for royal officials. …a married women, according to common law, controlled no property, and imprisoning her would disrupt her family life and harm her husband, who might not even share her religious convictions. … Catholic husbands often outwardly conformed and attended services, leaving their wives to arrange for private masses held in the home, … Catholicism in England and Ireland grew increasingly domestic. (239)

Beginning in the seventeenth century, lay women in some parts of Europe were slowly able to create what had been so forcibly forbidden to religious women—a community of women with an active mission out in the world. …founders privately thought of the group as a religious community, they realized that outwardly maintaining secular status was the only thing that would allow them to serve the poor and ill. [239] … This subversion of the rules was successful, for the Daughters of Charity received papal approval and served as the model for other women’s communities that emphasized educating the poor or girls; by 1700 numerous teaching and charitable “congregations” were found throughout Catholic Europe. (239-240)

The choice that the Council of Trent had attempted to impose on women, maritus aut murus (a husband or a cloister), was simply not acceptable to many women, and had by the seventeenth century been transformed by them into a range of religious options. (240)

Orthodox Christianity in eastern Europe did not experience a permanent division in the sixteenth century as did western Christianity, although during the seventeenth century, a number of reformers emerged in the Russian Orthodox Church. [240] … The modest adoption of western practices which so horrified Old Believers paled in comparison with those demanded in the late seventeenth century by tsar Peter I (ruled 1682-1725), who became known as Peter the Great. Peter was intent on modernizing and westernizing Russia, in order to make it a larger and more powerful state. To this end he engaged in nearly constant warfare, and so favored anything that would increase the Russian population. Peter was convinced that unhappy marriages produced fewer children, so in 1722 he added his voice to that of the Orthodox Church forbidding forced marriages at all social levels. … Because Peter saw no purpose in wasting human resources on monastic life, he forbade physically capable men and women of childbearing years from taking vows. …difficult to alter ingrained attitudes and behavior. Nobles successfully lobbied Peter’s successors to undo some of his laws concerning parental consent to marriage and effectively prevented their serfs from marrying. Rules concerning entrance into monasteries were relaxed, ... [241] seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some analysts see this period as the one in which western European religion was feminized, in the same way that American religious life was feminized in the nineteenth century. Large numbers of people thought the established churches, both Protestant and Catholic, had lost their spiritual vigor, and turned to groups that emphasized personal conversion, direct communication with God, and moral regeneration. Some of these groups survived only briefly, others became involved in social and political changes, such as the Quakers, … Many of these groups were inspired by or even founded by women, and had a disproportionate number of women among their followers. This female influence was recognized by contemporaries had seen as a reason for criticism. (241-242)

…English Civil War…the hiatus in censorship during the war allowed many religious works by women to be published. (2420

…certain aspects of Puritan theology and practice prepared women for a more active role. All believers, male and female, were to engage in spiritual introspection, and in particularly to focus on their experience of conversion. [242] … Women’s conversion narratives… nuns were the only other women whose spiritual growth and trials had been viewed as at all important, and not even St. Teresa’s autobiography made it into print during her lifetime. (242-243)

It is difficult to know how common female preaching actually was during the Civil War decades, for most reports of it come from extremely hostile observers such as Thomas Edwards who were in turn criticized for making up some of their accounts. Women tended to preach spontaneously at informal or clandestine meetings, and their listeners never thought to record the content of their sermons, so it is unclear how much sustained influence they exerted. (244)

Puritan women had often organized prayer meetings and conventicles in their houses during the early part of the seventeenth century, and after the Restoration (which restored the Anglican Church as the official religion of England when it restored the monarchy) continued to open their homes to Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and other groups. (244)

…with the Restoration, and most of the radical groups in which women had participated died out. The most important exception to this were the Quakers, who had been the most supportive of women’s independent religious actions throughout the decades of the Civil War. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, did not advocate women’s social or political equality, but did support women’s preaching and separate women’s meetings charged with caring for the poor, ill, prisoner, and children. …advocated qualities for all believers similar to those which most Protestant stressed for women: humility, self-denial, piety, devotion, modesty. (245)

…social and political revolts in the seventeenth century…female religious writers and thinkers on the Continent were generally not involved in them in the way Leveller thinkers were mystics and ecstatics, who might have visions of political events, but did not work to bring these about. (246)

Judaism in the early modern period did not go through the same type of schism that western Christianity did, but did suffer from increasing repression, restriction, and in some cases outright prohibition; Jews thus gathered in cities that were less hostile, such s those of Italy and the Low Countries. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain ordered all Jews to leave Spain or convert, and during the next several centuries those who converted and their descendents (termed “New Christians”) were frequently targets of the Inquisition. (249)

Like Christian women, Jewish were excluded from publish religious life; they rarely learned Hebrew, did not receive training in Jewish law (halakhah) or religious literature (the Torah and Talmud), and were excluded from rabbinical courts. (250)

Jews lived in many parts of Europe during the early modern period, but Muslims lived primarily in the Iberian peninsula and southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman Turks were expanding their territory. At roughly the same time that they ordered Jews to leave or convert, Spanish or Portuguese authorities also outlawed the practice of Islam, … Muslims—termed “Moriscos”—made up a large share of the population in many parts of Spain, however, and many lived in rural areas, sot that it was difficult for the Inquisition actually to exert control, … (252)

‘As for the most question, why a greater number of witches is found in the fragile feminine sex than among men… the first reason is, that they are more credulous, and since the chief aim of the devil is to corrupt faith, therefore he rather attacks them… the second reason is, that women are naturally more impressionable, and… the third reason is that they have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know… But the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives… And this is indicated by the etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Fe and Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve the faith… To conclude. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is women insatiable. (Malleus Maleficarum (1486) translated and quoted in Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters (eds.), Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700: A Documentary History (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 114-127.) [p.264]

It is commonly the nature of women to be timid and to be afraid of everything. That is why they busy themselves so much about witchcraft and superstitions and run hither and thither, uttering a magic formula here and a magic formula there. / Sermon by Martin Luther on I Peter, translated and quoted in Sigrid Brauner, “Martin Luther on witchcraft: a true reformer?” in Jean R. Brink, et. al. (eds.), The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 12 (Kirksville, Mo., Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989), p. 34. [p. 264]

And then the Devil said, “Thee art a poor overworked body. Will thee be my servant and I will give thee abundance and thee shall never want.” / Confession of Bessie Wilson in Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The With Hunt in Scotland (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 95. [264]

These three statements, the first two by two Dominican monks in the most influential witch-hunters’ manual of the early modern period, the second [264] by Martin Luther in a sermon on Christian marriage, and the third by a Scottish woman during her interrogation for witchcraft, … the three things they point to—sex, fear, and poverty—can in many ways be seen as the three most important reason why between 75 and 85 percent of those questioned, tried, and executed for witchcraft after 1500 were women. (264-265)

Anthropologists and historians have demonstrated that nearly all pre-modern societies believe in witchcraft and make some attempts to control witches. It was only in early modern central and northern Europe and the English colony in Massachusetts, however, that these beliefs led to wide-scale hunts and mass execution. Because so many records have been lost or destroyed, it is difficult to make an estimate for all of Europe, but most scholars agree that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people were officially tried and between 50,000 and 100,000 executed. Given the much smaller size of the European population in comparison with today, these are enormous numbers. (265)

Educated Christian thinkers in some parts of Europe began to view the essence of witchcraft as making a pact with the devil, a pact that required the witch to do the devil’s bidding. Witches were no longer simply people who used magical power to get what they wanted, but people used by the devil to do what he wanted. (The devil is always described and portrayed visually as male.) Witchcraft was thus not a question of what one did, but of what one was, and proving that a witch had committed maleficia was no longer necessary for conviction. (265)

Though witch trials died down somewhat during the first decades after the Protestant Reformation when Protestants and Catholics were busy fighting each other, they picked up again more strongly than ever about 1560. Protestants rejected many Catholic teachings, but not demonology, and the Malleus was just as popular in Protestant areas as Catholic, for they rejected rituals such as exorcism which Catholics believed could counter the power of a witch. The Reformations may have contributed to the spread of deomonological ideas about wider groups of the population, for both Catholics and Protestants increased their religious instruction of lay people during the sixteenth century. (266)

Christina Larner had effectively argued that [266] with the Reformation, Christianity became a political ideology, and rulers felt compelled to prove their piety and the depth of their religious commitment to their subjects and other rulers. They could do this by fighting religious wars or by cracking down on heretics and witches within their own borders. Because many of the people actually accused or tried were old, poor women, political authorities felt compelled to stress the ideas of an international conspiracy of witches so as not to look foolish and to justify the time, money, and energy spent on hunting witches. Witchcraft was used as a symbol of total evil, total hostility to the community, the state the church, and God. Only when authorities came to be more concerned with purely secular aims such as nationalism, the defense of property, or the creation of empires did trials for witchcraft cease. (266-267)

Legal changes were also instrumental in causing, or at least allowing for, massive witches trials. One of these was a change form an accusatorial legal procedure to an inquisitorial procedure. In the former, a suspect knew her accusers and the charges they had brought, and an accuser could in turn be liable for trial if the charges were not proven; in the latter, legal authorities themselves brought the case. This change made people much more willing to accuse others, for they never had to take personal responsibility for the accusation or face the accused’s relatives. Inquisitorial procedure involved intense questioning of the suspect, often with torture, and the areas in Europe that did not make this change saw very few trials and almost no mass panics. (267)

The most famous Inquisitions in early modern Europe, those in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, were in fact very lenient in their treatment of those accused of witchcraft: the Inquisition of Spain executed only a handful of witches, the Portuguese Inquisition only one, and the Roman Inquisition none, though in each of these areas there were hundreds of cases. …they doubted very much whether the people accused of doing maleficia had actually made a pact with the devil that gave them special powers. They [267] viewed them not as diabolical devil-worshippers, but as superstitious and ignorant peasants who should be educated rather than executed. Their main crime was not heresy, but rather undermining the church’s monopoly on supernatural remedies by claiming they had special powers. Thus Inquisitors set witchcraft with in the context of false magical and spiritual claims, rather than within the context of heresy and apostasy, and sent the accused home with a warning an a penance. This view was not shared by Catholic authorities in central and northern Europe, however. (267-268)

Demographic changes may have also played a part. During the sixteenth century, the age at first marriage appears to have risen, and the number of people who never married at all increased. The reason for these changes are not entirely clear, but this meant that there was a large number of women unattached to a man, and therefore more suspect in the eyes of their neighbors. (268)

We might assume that women would do everything they could to avoid such a reputation, but in actuality the stereotype could protect a woman for many years. Neighbors would be less likely to refuse assistance, and the wood, gain, or milk which she needed to survive would be given to her or paid as fees for her magical services such as finding lost objects, attracting desirable suitors, or harming enemies. (270)

Late medieval and Renaissance authors used this and women’s capacity for multiple orgasm as an explanation for what they regarded as female sexual voraciousness; … Male authors also worried about the effects of too much sexual intercourse on their won sex, for brain tissue, bone marrow, and semen were widely regarded as the same thing. Sexual intercourse was thought to draw brain tissue down the spine and out the penis, making all intercourse a threat to a man’s reason and health. This worried even such leading intellectuals as Leonardo da Vinci and Francis Bacon, and men were advised to limit their sexual relations if they wished to live a long life. Intercourse with female demons (succubi) was especially threatening, [272] for such creatures attempted to draw out as much semen as possible, thus drastically debilitating any man. (272-273)

Female sexual drive was viewed as increasing throughout a woman’s life, making, in learned eyes, the post-menopausal woman most vulnerable to the blandishments of a demonic suitor. If this older woman was widowed or single, she of course had no legitimate sexual outlets, and even if she was married, sex with her husband was officially frowned upon because it could not result in children. (273)

In demonolgical theory, sex with the devil was not satisfying, for his penis was cold and hard, and so witches also had sex with other demons, their animal familiars, and with each other. (274)

Suspects were generally stripped and shaved in a search for this “witch’s mark”; if no wart or mole could be found that could be viewed as such a mark, she might be “pricked” with a needle in an attempt to discover a spot that was insensitive to pain, also regarded as a sign from the devil. These investigations were generally carried out by a group of male officials—judges, notaries who recorded the witch’s answers, the executioner who did the actual pricking or other types of torture—with the witch at least partially naked, so that it is difficult not to view them as at least partly motivated by sexual sadism. (274)

Sexual relations with the devil rarely (and in some parts of Europe, especially Scandinavia, never) formed part of popular ideas about witchcraft, and other aspects of the learned stereotype of the witch also never became part of the popular stereotype. (274)

In areas of Europe in which the demonic concepts of witchcraft never took hold, such as Finland, Iceland, Estonia, and Russia, witchcraft did not become female-identified and there were no large-scale hunts. In Finland and Estonia about half of those prosecuted for witchcraft cases were male, and in Iceland and Muscovite Russia, the vast majority of those prosecuted were men charged with sorcery or using their skills as healers to harm people or animals instead. (275)

The witch was also the inversion of a “good woman,” … “turning away from men, fleeing men, hiding, wanting to be alone, not attracting men, not looking men in the eye, lying alone, refusing men.” … poisoning children with food. (276)

Just as subjects were deemed to have no or only a very limited right of rebellion against their ruler, so women and children were not to dispute the authority of the husband/father, because both kings and fathers were held to have received their authority from God; the household was not viewed as private, but as the smallest political unit and so part of the public realm. (293)

Many analysts see the Protestant Reformation and, in England, Puritanism as further strengthening this paternal authority by granting male heads of household a much larger religious and supervisory role than they had under Catholicism. The fact that Protestant clergy were themselves generally married heads of household also meant that ideas about clerical authority reinforced notions of paternal and husbandly authority; priests were now husbands, and husbands priests. (293)

In France, for example, a series of laws were enacted between 1556 and 1789 which increased both paternal and state control of marriage. Parental consent was required for marriage, and severe penalties, including capital punishment, were prescribed for minors who married against the parents’ wishes. (Minors were defined as men under 30 and women under 25.) Marriages without parental consent were defined as rapt (abduction), even if they had involved no violence (such cases were termed rapt de seduction). Though in actuality they were not executed, young people who defied their parents were sometimes imprisoned by what were termed letters de cachet, documents that families obtained form royal officials authorizing the imprisonment without trials of a family member who was seen as a source of dishonor. Lettres de cachet were also used against young people who refused to go into convents or monasteries when their families wished them to, or against individuals whose behavior was regarded as in some way scandalous, such as wives [295] whose husbands suspected them of adultery of men from prominent families who engaged in homosexual activities; this practice was often abused, and individuals imprisoned for years if their families refused to agree to their release. These laws and practices were proposed and supported by French officials because they increased their personal authority within their own families, and simultaneously increased the authority of the state vis-à-vis the Catholic Church,… (296)

Husbandly power was not simply a matter of theory. In France, men occasionally used letters de cachet as a means of solving marital disputes convincing authorities that family honor demanded the imprisonment of their wives, while in Italy or Spain, a “disobedient” wife could be sent to a convent or house of refuge for repentant prostitutes. Courts generally held that a husband had the right to beat his wife in order to correct her behavior as long as this was not extreme, with a common standard being that he did not draw blood, or the diameter of the stick he use did not exceed that of his thumb. (This is the origin of the term “rule of thumb.”) A husband accused of abuse in court was generally simply admonished to behave better, and only on a third or fourth court appearance might stricter punishment be set. (296)

Because adultery by men did not threaten the family and lineage the way that adultery by a married women did, however, the severity of penalties remained tied to gender. In the 1566 Genevan law, an adulterous married man and his lover were to be punished by twelve days in prison, but in England, adultery was made a capital offence for a married woman and her partner, but was only punished by three months’ imprisonments for a married man. (297)

Women’s legal dependence might actually have been a factor increasing their participants in certain types of political activities, particularly riots and popular protests. A husband was legally responsible for many of his wife’s actions in most parts of Europe, leading people to think women could not be prosecuted for rioting. For example, a crowd in Holland in 1628 protesting the renting out of what they viewed as common land, chased the renter into the town hall, and then the women of the group cried, “Let us sound the drum and send our husbands home. We will catch the villain and beat him, as we cannot be tried for fighting.” Criminal records reveal that women actually were tried and even executed for their part in disturbances, but this did not lessen their participation. They were often the instigators of food riots, protesting scarcities of food and high prices, and took part in iconoclastic and other types of religious riots, threatening clergy, plundering churches, and carrying information. (299)

Men who otherwise broke with tradition in early modern Europe did not change their ideas about the proper roles of men and women, as we have seen with Martin Luther. In England, even the most radical groups in the Civil War did not call for extending political rights to women or suggest that ending the power of the monarch over his subjects should be matched by ending the power of husbands over their wives. (301)

Once the decision of al all-male parliament became the most important factor in determining who would rule, women even lost the uncontrollable power over political succession they had through bearing children. (The fact that parliamentary power over the choice of a monarch freed men from being dependent on women’s biology was not lost on early modern advocates of limited monarchy.) (302)

As Jean Bodin put it, “To be a good man is also to be a good citizen”; to be a good woman was still to be a good Christian. Though in the sixteenth century Christian virtues such as piety, charity, and humility were regarded as equal to or more important than secular ones, by the eighteenth century secular qualities such as reason, good judgment, and comradeship were clearly more significant. Christian virtues were privatized and feminized,… Qualities such as reason which were becoming the most important public virtues were characteristics that had long been viewed as masculine, making it even more difficult for women to play a public role. (302)

Of all early modern political philosophers, John Locke appears to have offered the greatest possibilities for women, for he described marriage as a voluntary compact which could be terminated and whose conditions could be set by the two spouses; as long as the children were cared for, Locke did not see any natural necessity for following traditional patterns of authority in a marriage. This possibility of equality within marriage did not translate into a possibility of political equality for Locke, however, because he did not see the family as analogous to civil society. Rather than basing the rights of a citizen of a man’s power as head of household, he based it on the ownership of property, which just as effectively excluded most women. … In a similar way, the thought of Thomas Hobbes could have offered women the possibility of greater political rights, because he based male authority on social custom and agreement between the parties involved (what he terms a “contract”) rather than on a notion of natural male superiority. [303] Thus both Locke and Hobbes are simply unable (or unwilling) to consider the implications of their thoughts for women. (303-304)

The dominant notion of the “true” man in early modern Europe was that of the married head of household, so that men whose class and age would have normally conferred political power but who remained unmarried did not participate to the same level as their married brothers; … (304)

The English Civil War, for example, is often portrayed as a battle between Royalist cavaliers in their long [304] hair and fancy silk knee-breeches opposing Puritan parliamentarians with their short hair and somber clothing, clearly two conflicting notions of masculinity. Parliamentary criticism of the court was often expressed in gendered and sexualized terminology, with frequent veiled or open references to aristocratic weakness and inability to control the passions. Thus ideas about masculinity were to some degree class-specific, … (305)

Jeffrey Merrick has demonstrated, for example, that French monarchs and their supporters used the image of a beehive under a “king bee” as a model of harmony under royal rule and a community whose existence depended on the health of its monarch; even scientists spoke of the beehive in this way, for they regarded nature as the best source of examples for appropriate political structures, which they then termed “natural.” When the invention of the microscope made it clear the king bee was a queen, both royal propagandists and scientists tried to downplay her sex as long as possible, embarrassed that nature would provide such a demonstration of “unnatural” female power. (By the eighteenth century the sex of the queen bee was no longer ignored, but her role was now described as totally maternal, a symbol of motherhood rather than monarchy.) (305)

…Machiavelli, who used “effeminate” to describe the worst kind of ruler. Effeminate in the sixteenth century carried slightly different connotations than it does today, however, for strong heterosexual passion was not a sign of manliness, but could make one “effeminate” (i.e., dominated by as well as similar to a woman.) (305)