Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe

1500 - 1700

Penny Richards, Jessica Munns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317875505
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Surveying court life and urban life, warfare, religion, and peace, this book provides a comprehensive history of how gender was experienced in early modern Europe.

Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe shows how definitions of sexuality and gender roles operated and more particularly, how such definitions--and the activities they generated and reflected--articulated concerns inside a given culture. This means that the volume embodies an interdisciplinary approach: literature as well as history, religious studies, economics, and gender studies form the basis of this cultural history of early modern Europe.

There are new approaches to understanding famous figures, such as Elizabeth I, James VI and I and his wife Anna of Denmark; Francis I; St. Teresa of Avila. Other chapters investigate topics such as militarism and court culture, and wider groups, such as urban citizens and noble families. The collection also studies ways in which gender and sexual orientation were represented in literature, as well as examinations of the theoretical issues involved in studying history from the angle of gender.

CHAPTER ONE
Gender and sexuality in early modern England

FRANCES E. DOLAN

Gender and sexuality have proved highly productive categories of analysis in interdisciplinary studies of early modern England and continue to inspire work that challenges the most fundamental paradigms of historical and cultural understanding, such as progress and decline, inclusion and exclusion, centre and margin, top and bottom. This chapter offers an introduction to terms, debates and directions.

How has gender been defined?

Joan Kelly's highly influential essay 'Did Women Have a Renaissance?' made the question of periodization a foundational concern in women's history.¹ Could women be included in the existing periods and narratives or would their inclusion require revision of our very structures for organizing historical knowledge? While Kelly's question has been rephrased and her conclusion that 'there was no renaissance for women at least, not during the Renaissance' has been challenged, periodization remains a challenge for scholars of women and gender. 'Early modern' can seem Whiggish and anticipatory, claiming significance for the period only as preparing the way for the 'modern'. Yet the term is also practical because it is so broad, allowing attention to continuity and change across a longer span of time. This is especially helpful when attending to the experience of women and of non-elite men, which often changes more slowly and less dramatically than that of the most privileged men.

In studies of early modern England, gender emerged first as a question focused on women. What about women? What were their experiences, perspectives, values, contributions? At first, the operative assumption was that there were two basic groups of historical actors, men and women; men acted considerably more than women, and therefore dominated accounts of the past. Women simply needed to be included, in whatever limited ways were possible, given how little they had accomplished. This first initiative to discover and include women was often accompanied by the assumption that women in the past were invariably oppressed, excluded and marginalized. If they were not, then they were exceptions who proved the rule of victimization. While it is undeniably true that women suffered from various disadvantages and constraints particular to their gender, it is also important to stress that women found many ways to exercise authority, enact resistance, express themselves and pursue their desires, control money and property, exploit or defend the status quo, or effect change. Some students of the early modern period still think that a feminist approach or an emphasis on gender equals a hunt for victims. As I hope this essay will show, this is not the case. Gender can open many doors on the past. Employing gender as a category of analysis has never determined what one would then see or find.

Investigations of gender soon began to complicate a project of inclusion or addition by destabilizing the narratives and categories of analysis themselves. In the past, how did gender shape who got to do what, and what counted as action? what counted as history? what could be recognized as significant? How might our own ideas about gender inflect what we ourselves can recognize or value? Such questions lead in several different directions: the recognition that gender is not naturally given and constant from one place and time to another, but rather busily inculcated and constantly changing, the discovery that there are many differences (of race, class or status; of religion, region, age or marital status) within that category 'woman' or 'women¹ that should be attended to, and the awareness that 'man' is also a constructed and internally divided category. If men were not invariably at the centre of early culture and women at the margins, then not only were some women powerful, authoritative figures, but many men were servants and dependants.

Most histories of women and gender in the period start by mapping how it operates as a 'notion', a language, an idea or an ideology.² In such an approach, gender does not describe whatever sexual difference can be ascribed to bodies, but rather a complex process of social construction by which an identity is created, conferred, and enacted rather than recognized and named. This does not mean that the social is mapped onto or layered over the biological, but rather that the biological is given cultural meaning through the performance of gender in clothing, grooming, speech and conduct. The performance of gender is understood, then, not as an expression of a gender that is prior and stable, but as constitutive of gender. Gender is the effect of the performance rather than its origin. This process of gender performance changes over time and is uneven, flawed and contradictory.³

Given the transvestite stage of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England, at a time when France, Spain and Italy allowed women to take speaking parts in the theatre, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people themselves might well have understood gender as a performance. In the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, the Lord explains how Bartholomew the page should play a wife convincingly: proffering duty 'with soft low tongue and lowly courtesy' and enacting affection with 'kind embracements, tempting kisses,/And with declining head into his bosom', as well as tears of joy. If these do not come readily - the 'woman's gift' - 'an onion will do well for such a shift,/Which in a napkin being close conveyed/ Shall in despite enforce a watery eye' (Induction 1, 110, 1 14-15, 122-4). Here Bartholomew learns to impersonate not only a woman but a gentlewoman and a wife. The Lord expresses his confidence that the page 'will well usurp the grace,/Voice, gait, and action of a gentlewoman' (Induction 1, 127-8).⁴ Indeed, when Bartholomew returns 'in Woman's attire' he has become a Lady, and is referred to as one in the speech prefixes.⁵ Then, in the play proper, we watch two boys playing two young women, Katharine and Bianca, who also learn how to play gentlewomen and wives.

Cross-dressing on the stage was both the dominant theatrical practice and the source of some controversy. Opposition to theatricality often focused on transvestism and pamphlets attacked the practice on stage and off. When the theatres reopened at the restoration of Charles II, having been closed in 1642 and remaining so during the civil war and interregnum, they employed female actors, offering new sources of scandal and titillation. Controversy now surrounds what we are to make of the early modern transvestite stage: Was it merely a convention that everyone took for granted? Was it deeply disturbing to more people than a few anti-theatrical cranks? How widespread was cross-dressing off the stage? Was the process by which a boy became a woman one not of switching genders but of complexly layering visual signals for gender? How are we to understand the relationship between cross-dressing and status impersonation on which the stage, in constant and flagrant transgression of sumptuary laws, relied? Were boys who played men as much in drag as those who played women?⁶ Few, however, dispute that most who attended the theatre accepted the idea that gender, status and age were identified by attributes that were imitable and transferable.

To say that something is a performance is not to say that it is not real or does not have consequences. If gender was fabricated and reiterated through continuous performance, it still powerfully shaped experience; it also mediated between intentions that are often inaccessible to us now and outcomes that may often have been unintended. Thus, while gender constructions imposed limits on the conceptual and practical options available to early modern people, they did not wholly determine them; reconstructing the parameters set by these prescriptions does not exhaust the possibilities that may have been available. Recent scholarship emphasizes the agency of women as well as men, choices as well as constraints, practices as well as prescriptions, and the ways in which persons strategized around and within even the most intractable limits. The contradictions within and among these constructions, as well as how they intersect with or interrupt other categories of social identity, created arenas for agency. Since viewing gender as socially constructed can suggest that some malign and conspiratorial agency - call it 'the patriarchy' perhaps - is inventing gender and imposing it on the unsuspecting and unresisting, theoretical and historical approaches that emphasize the possibilities for agency complicate our understanding of the processes and performances that are gender.

As various theorists have argued, subjects are always simultaneously subjected and active; the process of coming into being as a gendered subject is one of being informed, disciplined and also, in a limited way, enabled.⁷ There is no one location of 'power'. As a consequence, no 'one' is doing the constructing. Rather, everyone in a culture participates in the processes by which gender is produced.⁸ Increasingly, attention is turning to the locations and technologies of dissemination (the pulpit, the printing press, the court, the school, reading, listening, watching). More than the audiences or consumers, silently absorbing lessons in how to 'be and seem', women also participated actively at all of these sites of production.⁹ They were preachers in the dissenting Protestant sects; they were actively involved in printing and publishing and selling print materials; they were queens and ladies in waiting at court; they were teachers, nurses and mothers. Even as consumers, women were actively interpreting what they read or heard. Sometimes they left records of their resistant, critical, or amused responses; often they did not. But various kinds of evidence, such as women's angry critiques to misogynist sermons or texts, suggest that women had a range of reactions to and interactions with attempts to subject them to overly stringent, gendered standards of conduct.

Our best evidence about women's active roles in the production of culture comes from their own writings. Barely available and rarely considered just a few decades ago, these are now readily accessible, and widely taught and studied. Research on women's writings is moving beyond the discovery that women were writers to sustained engagement with women's texts. Women's words do not offer us direct and unmediated access to women's experience any more than men's do. Instead, these texts reveal the complex ways in which women participated in, rather than simply submitted to, the construction, inculcation, interrogation and transformation of gender norms. Women did not all challenge the status quo. Many of the privileged women who wrote and published benefited from and defended the existing social order; it is these women who, according to Paula McDowell, most often articulate a recognizably modern self, 'gendered, autonomous and unique'. For those women actively involved in various forms of protest and activism, who tended to be of the middling or underclass, 'gender was not necessarily the first category of identity'. Instead, such women 'tended to find empowerment in more dispersed modes of being based in religio-political allegiances, trades or occupations, and other collective social identifications' and 'to envision the self in more traditional ways as social, collective and essentially unsexed'. For McDowell, it was only in the course of the eighteenth century that women 'increasingly came to understand themselves as a group with shared interests and, potentially, shared strengths'.¹⁰ McDowell's fascinating arguments suggest just one of the ways in which women's writings provide a rich, rewarding, unpredictable and heterogeneous body of material of which to ask the questions of how, why, when and to whom gender matters. As always, one answer does not fit all cases and none of the answers is determined by the questions themselves.¹¹

If gender was not a fact of life, but rather a practice, then it not only affected the experience of identity, but also provided resources for thinking about and describing the world. David Underdown, for instance, has referred to 'the gendered habit of mind'. As Kim Hall explains this pervasive phenomenon, gender works in many descriptions of difference, verbal and visual, to represent 'the destructive potential of strangeness, disorder, and variety' through 'the familiar, and familiarly threatening, unruliness of gender'. The familiar figure for disorder or inversion is often the 'woman on top', as Natalie Davis argued in a highly influential essay.¹² As Englishness gradually came to be defined through association with masculinity, Protestantism and whiteness, it was also positioned against 'definitional others' who were often allied to the feminine, disorderly women and gender inversion. Gender thus served the complex formation of collective as well as individual identities.¹³

Gender in the early modern period has been described as the focus for 'crisis' or 'panic' by scholars, most notably Susan Amussen and Underdown, who argue that there was widespread anxiety about the gender order from about 1560 to 1660.¹⁴ Others, however, have been challenging this argument as too sweeping or premature. According to David Cressy, for instance: 'Of course there were strains in early modern society, and questions about gender roles and identity, but it is hard to argue that they were more acute than at other times. Nor can it be claimed with confidence that gender mattered more than other social, economic, religious and political problems.' Martin Ingram, too, challenges Underdown's claim that there was a surge in prosecutions of scolds between 1560 and 1640 and questions what this could mean even if there were. Ingram does, however, concede that punishments became more severe in the period. In his view, what singled women out for comment and punishment was not that they were women but that they disturbed the peace; men who spoke or acted in a disorderly way were also disciplined.¹⁵ Cressy and Ingram do not question that scolding and cross-dressing might be found transgressive, but rather question whether it was gender that made them so. They also argue that gender, to a certain extent, is usually in crisis.

Other scholars have also asked whether gender conflicts were really about gender, suggesting that, in a homosocial world, relations between men might have been seen as more valuable, more at risk, and more dangerous than relations between men and women. Thus concerns about conflict, competition or intimacy between men, which were actually more pressing problems, were displaced onto concerns about disorderly women.¹⁶ But how can we be sure which is the real anxiety or the real problem? Gender-as-scapegoat arguments threaten to dismiss gender as a diversionary tactic. They also threaten to redraw the line between the real and the representational, the cause or experience of disorder and the language used to describe it, in too tidy a way. Finally, they sometimes shrink and confine gender into a fixed, separable category and place issues of gender and sexuality into competition. Perhaps, instead, early modern culture was afraid both of secret transactions between men and of those between men and women. Perhaps the threat was intimacy and secrecy as much as anything else.

What's most valuable in the work that argues lor a 'gender crisis' is the fact that it does not understand gender as discrete. Attending to analogies between family and commonwealth, the imbrication of private and public, the complicities of gender and class, and the complex social processes by which some women, but not others, became vulnerable to prosecution, Amussen and Underdown argue that gender conflicts were inseparable from other conflicts. They were part of the fabric of social life, as well as a focus of contestation.

Gender and the body

We may experience our own bodies as what is outside of history and of interpretation, the great equalizers, the flatteners of social and historical difference: everyone shits, pisses, bleeds, dies. But work in the last twenty years has made it possible to begin to think about the early modern body as historically constructed, just like the gender identities it wears. We experience our bodies through cultural expectations, vocabularies and practices, which are, in turn, inflected by and constitutive of, not only gender, but also class, status, age, sexuality and race/ethnicity. For instance, Will Fisher argues that, in the Renaissance, beards not only distinguished men from women but men from boys; crucial rather than 'secondary' markers of sexual difference, beards were also disturbingly prosthetic, as the use of false beards on the stage suggests.¹⁷ The body is not then 'nature' as distinct from 'culture', nor is it the raw material of sexual difference that cultural process moulds into 'gender'. Rather, the two - nature and culture, the sexed body and gender identities - are mutually constitutive.

The early modern body was a 'humoral' body. An elaborate analogy between the body and the elements described the body as governed by four 'humours': yellow and black bile, blood and phlegm. Health and happiness depended on maintaining the proper balance of these humours. Thus bleeding and purges were crucial to medical practice. The fluids in the body were also fungible or interchangeable; breast milk, for instance, was viewed as redirected and purified menstrual bl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Gender and sexuality in early modern England
• 2 Gender and early emancipation in the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and early modern period
• 3 'So was thys castell layd wyde open': Battles for the phallus in early modern responses to Chaucer's Pardoner
• 4 The importance of a name: Gender, power and the strategy of naming a child in a noble Italian family: The Martinengo of Brescia
• 5 'Our Trinity!': Francis I, Louise of Savoy and Marguerite d'Angoulême
• 6 Elizabeth I as Deborah: Biblical typology, prophecy and political power
• 7 Queen Anna bites back: Protest, effeminacy and manliness at the Jacobean court
• 8 Privileges of the soul, pains of the body: Teresa de Jesús, the mystic beatas and the Spanish Inquisition after Trent
• 9 Allarme to England!: Gender and militarism in early modern England
• 10 The Guise women: Politics, war and peace
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index