Book contents
1 - Introduction: Early Modern European Women and the Edge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter introduces the studies presented in Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, situating the chapters within both the burgeoning field of gender studies and the ongoing scholarly debates concerning the lived experiences of early modern women. This chapter contextualises the studies that follow by exploring how gender impeded the exercise of women's personal, political, and religious agency, with an emphasis on both the conflict that occurred when a woman crossed the edges society placed on her gender, and the role scholars have played in reinforcing these (often anachronistic) edges.
Keywords: women; gender; early modern; Europe; edge
In the Blackadder II episode ‘Bells’, Elizabeth I's nurse offers a comment on the way sex and gender affected women in early modern Europe that, for all its ostensible naïveté, is in fact surprisingly astute:
Nursie: You almost were a boy, my little cherry-pip.
Queenie: What?
Nursie: Yeah! Out you popped out of your mummy's tumkin, and everyone shouted, ‘It's a boy, it's a boy!’ And then someone said: ‘But it hasn't got a winkle!’ And then I said: ‘A boy without a winkle? God be praised, it's a miracle. A boy without a winkle!’ And then Sir Thomas More pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl, and everyone was really disappointed.
Lord Melchett: Ah yes, well you see, he was a very perceptive man, Sir Thomas More.
Elizabeth was the child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and was thus royal and eligible to succeed according to English law, but for the absence of a ‘winkle’, her ability to rule—based on her perceived sex—was questioned, and potentially even negated. The point ended up being rather moot: both Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary ruled England as female kings, which has the effect of making Nursie's observation all the more humorous.
As this short interaction demonstrates, gender was a site of contest and anxiety in early modern England, and early modern Europe more broadly.
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- Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe , pp. 15 - 26Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019