A global, interdisciplinary consideration of the relationship between war and women's lives, works, economic situations, religious affiliations and practices in the early modern period, this volume gathers together scholars from literary studies, history, religious studies, and musicology. The juxtapositions, for example, of the impact of religious and economic strife emerging from the violence between European Catholics and Protestants, the civility in Grenada enhanced by Islamic religious codes, and the negotiations between Islamic and Catholic Malaysians, provide specific, telling windows into the complexities of women's lived experiences from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries.
This volume considers women's roles in the conflicts and negotiations of the early modern world. Essays explore the ways that gender shapes women's agency in times of war, religious strife, and economic change. How were conflict and concord gendered in histories, literature, music, and political, legal, didactic, and religious treatises?
Four interdisciplinary plenary topics ground this exploration: Negotiations, Economies, Faiths & Spiritualities, and Pedagogies. Scholars focus upon many regions of the early modern world--the Atlantic world, the Mediterranean world, Granada, Indonesia, the Low Countries, England, and Italy--inflected by such religions as Islam, Catholicism, and Reformed Protestantism, as they came into contact with indigenous spiritualities and with one another.
Essays and workshop summaries analyze how gender and class are implicated in economic change and assess the ways gender and religion map onto voyages of trade, exploration, or imperialism. They investigate how women, as individuals and as members of political or family networks, were instrumental in transmitting, promoting, supporting, or thwarting different religions during times of religious crises. This volume also offers methods for teaching and researching these topics. It will be invaluable to scholars of medieval and early modern women's studies, especially those working in history, literature, languages, musicology, and religious studies.
