The Genders of Citizenship

2007 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN T. LEONARD ◽  
JOAN C. TRONTO

One important legacy of republicanism is the ideal of good citizenship; a related legacy of republicanism is the equation of citizenship and masculinity. These legacies are at once strange and familiar: today, masculinity and citizenship are often conceptualized as discrete and distinctive identities, and some critics, most notably feminists, suggest that in modern democraciesgoodcitizenship and masculinity may even be contradictory ideals. The source of these conceptual paradoxes is the transformation of gender and civic discourse in the early modern period, particularly the “long eighteenth century.” Understanding the implications of these changes helps us better grasp both the relationship of gender and citizenship today, and how a more effectively engaged and meaningfully egalitarian form of democratic citizenship, for men and women, might be realized.

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-142
Author(s):  
Susan North

Chapter 5 begins the exploration of the material culture of clean bodies and clothes in early modern England. What were the ‘linens’ that doctors and moralists insisted must be clean? Linen clothing comprised two main groups: the visible and the invisible. The latter were linen undergarments—shirts, shifts, stockings, and drawers—requiring regular changing but remaining unseen when a person was fully dressed. Accessories worn on the head, around the neck, and at the wrists were the visible linens. Part of fashionable dress in a variety of forms, they were the outward sign that propriety was being observed and maintained. The relationship of visible and invisible linens to prevailing styles of dress is examined and how they changed according to fashion during the early modern period.


Grotiana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. A. Prior

This paper takes up David Armitage’s suggestion that historians should be alert to the various forms which international thinking took in the early modern period. Specifically, it concentrates on Grotius’s contribution to the effort to conceptualise the relationship of church and state, and to settle their relative jurisdictions. It argues that this effort can (and should) be read as part of a process of establishing a set of norms concerning the power of states. However, where some scholars have argued that an important chapter in the emergence of the modern state lies in the assertion of civil dominance over clerical power, this paper argues that a doctrine of civil religion formed the basis of an emerging logic of Protestant politics.


Author(s):  
Heather L. Ferguson

This chapter draws on Katip Çelebi's Düstūrü’l-‘amel li ıṣlāhı ’l-ḥalel, or the Guiding Principles for the Rectification of Defects, to outline how attention to genre, to the relationship between conceptual models and administrative practice, to the role of sultanic authority as an anchor for imperial order, and to the significance of comparative historical analysis offers an alternative approach to Ottoman state-making in the early modern period. It further suggests that the “middle years” of the state might best be understood as a tension between principles of universal rule and the practices designed to entice and co-opt regional elites into a coherent sociopolitical order.


Author(s):  
Laura Marcus

The years of childhood have become increasingly central to autobiographical writing. Historians have linked this development to the new ideas about life-stages that emerged in the early modern period. Philippe Ariès (1914–84) made a key contribution in 1960 with a book on the child and family life in the ancien régime, known in English as Centuries of Childhood. ‘Family histories and the autobiography of childhood’ considers how genealogy (the tracing of family history) and the shaping of family relations by cultural and social forces have been central concerns for many modern autobiographers. It also looks closely at the relationship between child and parent and at the impact of mixed cultures.


2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Lynneth J. Miller

Using writings from observers of the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague, this article explores the various understandings of dancing mania, disease, and divine judgment applied to the dancing plague's interpretation and treatment. It argues that the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague reflects new currents of thought, but remains closely linked to medieval philosophies; it was an event trapped between medieval and modern ideologies and treated according to two very different systems of belief. Understanding the ways in which observers comprehended the dancing plague provides insight into the ways in which, during the early modern period, new perceptions of the relationship between humanity and the divine developed and older conceptions of the body and disease began to change, while at the same time, ideologies surrounding dance and its relationship to sinful behavior remained consistent.


2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-Part2) ◽  
pp. 1531-1560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Forman

This article traces the connections between the circulation of commodities and counterfeit coins in The Roaring Girl. Contextualizing the play's representation of counterfeits within a discussion of the relationship between real and counterfeit money in the early modern period, I argue that the play registers and addresses economic pressures, in part through its commentary on, and revision of, the conventions of stage comedy. In particular, the play offers enhanced forms of realism and the fiction of the “individual” in the title character, Moll, to compensate for the absence of legible material guarantees for value, legitimacy, or status. I conclude with a reading of the play's representation of masterless persons as the necessary shadow side of the plethora of opportunities seemingly offered by the market.


2021 ◽  

The responsibility to protect and intervention possessed a central political importance in the early modern period. This volume asks whether there was also a duty to intervene alongside the right to do so. This draws attention to the relationship between the responsibility to protect, security and reputation, which is the focus of the contributions the book contains. Chronologically, they range from the 15th to the 18th centuries and discuss monarchical duties to protect, alliance commitments, confessional legitimation and motives, as well as those based on patronage, contractual relationships and electoral processes. One of the book’s important findings is a deeper understanding of reputation, which is comprehensively examined here as a political guiding factor with reference to changing understandings of security for the first time.


Moreana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (Number 181- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 186-204
Author(s):  
Anne Geoffroy

Although most critics have focused on the overall negative aspect of Jack Wilton’s Italian tour in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), as suggested in the title of Thomas Nashe’s prose fiction, the specificity of the narrator’s Venetian adventures should be examined more closely. This paper argues that Thomas Nashe’s representation of Venice needs to be reassessed in the context of Thomas More’s Utopia and the question of the ideal commonwealth. Notwithstanding Nashe’s reliance on pervasive irony, the author provides an image of the city-state which – thanks to a retrospective approach – puts the topic of alternative urban spaces in the early modern period into perspective.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 480-503
Author(s):  
Amanda Flather

This paper explores the neglected topic of the organization and use of household space for work (paid and unpaid) during the early modern period. It engages critically with the concept of ‘the open house’ in relation to recent arguments about processes of spatial and social closure of houses and households in the early modern period associated with the development of a capitalist socio-economic system. Drawing on a variety of sources including diaries, autobiographies, inventories and court records the analysis considers how work was organized in the domestic context and how experience varied according to gender, age, status and location as well as time of day, week or year. The paper argues that a perceived dichotomy between an open house and a closed home secluded from the social and business world of community and commerce is inadequate in the consideration of space and attitudes in this period. Individuals in larger houses could control access to certain spaces at specific times and work could be concentrated in certain rooms. But in practice in most households the complicated demands of the household economy required openness to outsiders that rendered the boundaries of houses more permeable and potentially more unstable than they are today. The analysis considers the case of England and compares rural and urban homes in a particular regional context, but it opens up several ways for historians to think about the relationship between work and home in other European regions.


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