Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640

Since the 1980s David Underdown and Susan Amussen have produced a series of publications in which gender is utilised to analyse early modern social, cultural and political history.This co-authored book (completed by Amussen after the death of Underdown from cancer) serves as the apotheosis of these projects.Based on research in national and local archives, and influenced by the work of literature scholars as well as historians, the authors argue that, counter to the arguments of Peter Lake, it was gender rather than sin which offers the key to understanding ideas about the world turned upside down, and that, counter to the arguments of Christopher Hill, such an inverted society was as much feared as it was desired by contemporaries.For Underdown and Amussen, the world turned upside down provided 'an integrative framework for thinking' (p.19) which was vital to maintaining what the medievalist and feminist Judith Bennett has termed 'patriarchal equilibrium

Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity