Gender and Sexuality Before Modernity
Tutor: Jonathan Davies
Seminar Questions
- To what extent did a 'one-sex' model of the body dominate before the eighteenth century?
- How were gender identities constructed and controlled in premodern societies?
- How far were gender identities circumvented or resisted in premodern societies?
Core reading:
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1992)
Further reading:
Chojnacki, Stanley, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000)
Flather, Amanda, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007)
Gowing, Laura, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (Harlow, 2012)
Heijden, Manon van der, Women and Crime in Early Modern Holland, trans. David McKay (Leiden, 2016)
Karras, Ruth Mazo, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003)
King, Helen, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Farnham, 2013)
Lidman, Satu, Gender, Violence and Attitudes: Lessons from Early Modern Europe, trans. Eva Malkki (London, 2018)
Meade, T.A., and M.E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds, A Companion to Global Gender History, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2020) [Especially Chapters 11-22]
Miller, Naomi J., and Naomi Yavneh, Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (Burlington, VT, 2011)
Munns, Jessica, and Penny Richards, Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 2003)
Muravyeva, Marianna G., and Raisa Maria Toivo, eds, Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York, 2013)
Poska, Allyson M., Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver, eds, The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (London, 2016)
Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996)
Van Gent, Jacqueline, and Susan Broomhall, eds, Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others (London, 2011)