Performing Maternity in Early Modern England

Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity's cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540-1690. The essays interrogate how early modern texts depict fertility, conception, delivery, and gendered constructions of maternity by analyzing a wealth of historical documents and images in conjunction with dramatic and non-dramatic literary texts. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated, and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production of gender identity during the early modern period.

Embodied and enacted: performances of maternity in early modern England
The Performance of Pregnancy
'So troubled with the mother': the politics of pregnancy in The Duchess of Malfi
'Show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to': pregnancy, paternity and the problem of evidence in All's Well That Ends Well
Hermione's suspicious body: adultery and superfetation in The Winter's Tale
False fruit: deceptive maternities and the failure of new comedy in Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters
Maternity in A Woman Killed With Kindness
The Performance of Maternal Authority
'Smock-secrets': birth and women's mysteries on the early modern stage
Disciplining the mother in 17th-century English Puritanism
Male mothering and The Tempest
The Performance of Maternal Suffering
Dramatizing deliverance and devotion: churching in early modern England
Speaking stones: memory and maternity in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
Maternity and child loss in Stuart women's diaries
The Performance of Maternal Erasure
Nursing and influence in Pandosto and The Winter's Tale
Murder as birth in Macbeth
Tamburlaine's domestic threat
'I'll mar the young clerk's pen': sodomy, paternity and circumcision in The Merchant of Venice
Selected bibliography
Index
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Performing Maternity in Early Modern England

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Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials