Challenging Women's Agency and Activism in Early Modernity

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the long-time Senior Editor of The Sixteenth Century Journal, and the author or editor of more than 30 books that have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean.

Introduction (Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks)
Part I Choosing and Creating
1. Bad Habits and Female Agency: Attending to Early Modern Women in the Material History of Intoxication (Angela McShane)
2. Setting up House: Artisan Women's Trousseaux in Seventeenth-century Bologna (Joyce de Vries)
3. Crafting Habits of Resistance (Susan Dinan, Karen Nelson, and Michele I. Osherow)
Part II Confronting Power
4. Confronting Women's Actions in History: Female Crown Fief Holders in Denmark (Grethe Jacobsen)
5. Divisive Speech in Divided Times? Women and the Politics of Slander, Sedition, and Informing during the English Revolution (Caroline Boswell)
6. Why Political Theory is Women's Work: Freedom and Justice in Moderata Fonte's The Worth of Women (1600) (Caroline Castiglione)
7. 'Wrestling the World from Fools': Teaching Historical Empathy and Critical Engagement (Jennifer Selwyn
Part III. Challenging Representations
8. Thinking Beings and Animate Matter: Margaret Cavendish's Challenge to the Early Modern Order of Things (Mihoko Suzuki)
9. The Agency of Portrayal: The Active Portrait in the Early Modern Period (Saskia Beranek and Sheila ffolliott)
10. Rethinking the 'Medieval Housebook': A Gendered Intervention and its Consequences (Andrea Pearson)
Part IV Forming Communities
11. Claude-Catherine de Clermont and Proto-salon Society (Julie D. Campbell)
12. Religious Spaces and Alliances in the Far East: Women's Travel and Writing in Manila and Macao (Sarah E. Owens)
13. Accounting for Early Modern Women in the Arts: Reconsidering the Economic Role of their Networks and Relationships (Theresa Kemp, Catherine Powell, and Beth Link)
Index