The Literature of Early Modern Childhoods

The texts adapted for, printed for and marketed to children and youths in the 16th and 17th centuries, the books read by boys and girls in this period, and writings by Renaissance children constitute the literature of early modern childhoods. Yet traditional histories of children’s literature, posing narrow definitions of this genre, have largely overlooked this period. In the past decade, fresh work by early modern scholars attending to the diverse elements of the literature of early modern childhoods has flourished. This essay evaluates the absence of early modern children’s literature from early studies and considers the ways in which this recent work in Renaissance studies has vitally transformed the field through its exploration of alternative definitions of childhood and children’s literature. This work is at an early stage but it has placed the interconnections between early modern childhoods and children’s literature at the centre of both Renaissance studies and childhood studies and has established key topics for future research.

“Shall we playe the good girles”: Playing Girls, Performing Girlhood on Early Modern Stages

This essay investigates the extent to which girlhood functions as a queer category in two theatrical representations of schoolgirls in early seventeenth-century England. It focuses on the depictions of schoolgirls in the anonymous The Wit of a Woman (1604), written for the all-male stage of the professional theatre, and in Robert White’s masque, Cupid’s Banishment (1617), performed by the young Ladies of Deptford Hall before Queen Anna of Denmark, to examine the intersections of age, gender, sexuality and education in early modern concepts of girlhood. Situating these plays within wider debates about female education and the history of the contested role of performance in the schooling of early modern girls, it argues that they deploy the category of girlhood to demonstrate the subversive potential of educating girls. Yet, this essay proposes, these plays simultaneously reveal the potential agency of young women who manipulate girlhood to claim their distinct sexual, aged and gendered states as girls. It argues that early modern girlhood is a state that might be performed by young women to disrupt normative expectations of feminine behaviour and desire. Placing dramatic representations of schoolgirls and the experiences of schoolgirls on the early modern stage side by side, this essay demonstrates that the schoolroom and performance are sites in which this transgressive potential is realised.

Do fertility transitions influence infant mortality declines? Evidence from early modern Germany

The timing and sequencing of fertility transitions and early-life mortality declines in historical Western societies indicate that reductions in sibship (number of siblings) may have contributed to improvements in infant health. Surprisingly, however, this demographic relationship has received little attention in empirical research. We outline the difficulties associated with establishing the effect of sibship on infant mortality and discuss the inherent bias associated with conventional empirical approaches. We offer a solution that permits an empirical test of this relationship while accounting for reverse causality and potential omitted variable bias. Our approach is illustrated by evaluating the causal impact of family size on infant mortality using genealogical data from 13 German parishes spanning the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Overall, our findings do not support the hypothesis that declining fertility led to increased infant survival probabilities in historical populations.

Clothing and Colonialism: The Dungiven costume and the fashioning of early modern identities

The entanglement of identity and personal attire in colonial settings is explored through consideration of a tattered set of clothes from late sixteenth-early seventeenth-century Ireland incorporating elements of Irish, English, and Scots fashion. Reconsideration of the clothing, recovered from a bog, provides a rare opportunity to explore the physical manifestations of processes of hybridity and mimesis, as well as the pragmatic accommodations of impoverishment and displacement in colonial settings. In addition to considering the role of material culture in colonial identity formation and negotiation, examination of what has become known as the Dungiven costume also speaks to the ongoing legacy of early modern colonial encounters, as the cultural associations of the garments, and by extension their past wearer(s), continue to be subjected to the politically charged nature of identity politics in contemporary Northern Ireland.

'O daughter ... forget your people and your father's house': Early Modern Women Writers and the Spanish Imaginary

‘O daughter … forget your people and your father’s house’: Early Modern Women Writers and the Spanish ImaginaryAnne Holloway and Ramona WrayHolloway and Wray consider the perspectives offered by two very different seventeenth-century women (Mary Bonaventure Browne, or Mother Browne (b.1615- and Lady Ann Fanshawe (b.1625) both of whom exchanged Ireland for Spain, and both of whom record journeys both ‘real’ and imagined in their writings. Browne’s deployment of hagiographical tropes in her History of the Poor Clares may reveal the potential impact of Iberian conventual culture; her allusions to the markers of sanctity insistent on the immutability of the body, whilst accepting and anticipating spectral presence in the form of bilocation. Fanshawe’s Memoirs are considered alongside the material legacy of her ‘Booke of Receipts of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordialls, Preserues and Cookery.’ Her impressions both in transit and within the domus are similarly marked by receptivity and sensitivity to the host culture. Amidst a backdrop of religious persecution and political uncertainty, in both cases Spain emerges as a potentially enabling context for creativity and self-expression.Keywords: Memoir; Franciscan; Poor Clares; Fanshawe; Mary Bonaventure Browne; hagiography; life-writing; autobiography, women writers