Telling the story of humankind from the Paleolithic to the present, this book widens and lengthens human history. Renowned historian Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks brings a new perspective to world history by examining social and cultural developments across the globe, including families, kin groups, gender hierarchies, sexuality, race and ethnicity, labor, religion, consumption, and material culture. She examines how these structures and activities changed over time, highlighting key developments that defined eras, such as the growth of cities or the creation of a global trading network. The book makes comparisons and generalizations, but also notes diversities and particularities. This new edition includes updates to each chapter, drawing on material from the history of the emotions, Indigenous history, material culture studies, and the history of sexuality. Wiesner-Hanks also expands discussions of climate and the environment, and examines the matters that are at the heart of big questions in world history today.

What would a nonessentialist history of gender look like? In this paper, we suggest that mainstream gender history, archaeology, and related disciplines have inadvertently black boxed some of the most interesting questions about what past gender may have been like. Traditional Eurocentric approaches treat gender as variable but only within certain predefined limits; they do not radically question what happens if we shift the term definitionally. This constrains both the stories we can tell about gender and the questions we can ask about it. In contrast, we draw upon feminist conceptions of difference to offer alternative histories ranging from where and how gender may have first emerged to its transitions in Europe over the last 7,000 years. Assumptions about gender in Europe have played an outsized role in mainstream and hegemonic accounts. By problematizing how gender emerged and changed in Europe, we can help decenter this narrative. Drawing on notions of protean difference, this reconceptualizes gender as a form of identity that is not automatically applicable to all human societies and has a specific history and, potentially, a shelf life. Wie s & auml;he eine nicht-essentialistische Geschichte der Geschlechter aus? In diesem Beitrag argumentieren wir, dass Mainstream-Geschlechtergeschichte in der Arch & auml;ologie und in verwandten Disziplinen einige der interessantesten Fragen dar & uuml;ber, wie Gender in der Vergangenheit ausgesehen haben k & ouml;nnte, unbeabsichtigt verborgen hat. Traditionelle, eurozentrische Ans & auml;tze behandeln Geschlecht als variabel, aber nur innerhalb bestimmter vordefinierter Grenzen, sie stellen nicht radikal in Frage, was passiert, wenn wir den Begriff definitorisch verschieben. Dies schr & auml;nkt sowohl die Geschichten, die wir & uuml;ber Gender erz & auml;hlen k & ouml;nnen, als auch die Fragen, die wir stellen k & ouml;nnen, ein. Im Gegensatz dazu st & uuml;tzen wir uns auf feministische Konzepte von Differenz, um alternative Geschichten anzubieten, die von der Frage, wo und wie Gender entstanden sein k & ouml;nnte, bis hin zu seinen & Uuml;berg & auml;ngen in Europa w & auml;hrend der letzten 7000 Jahre reichen. In Europa haben Annahmen & uuml;ber Gender in den gewohnten und hegemonialen Darstellungen eine & uuml;bergeordnete Rolle gespielt. Indem wir problematisieren, wie Genderin Europa entstanden ist und sich ver & auml;ndert hat, k & ouml;nnen wir dazu beitragen, dieses Narrativ zu dezentrieren. Indem wir uns auf den Begriff der proteischen Differenz st & uuml;tzen, wird Geschlecht als eine Form der Identit & auml;t neu konzeptualisiert, die nicht automatisch auf alle menschlichen Gesellschaften anwendbar ist, eine spezifische Geschichte hat und m & ouml;glicherweise nicht ewig haltbar ist. & iquest;C & oacute;mo ser & iacute;a un historia no esencialista del g & eacute;nero? En este trabajo sugerimos que las corrientes predominantes en historia y arqueolog & iacute;a de g & eacute;nero y en disciplinas relacionadas han soslayado, sin pretenderlo, algunas de las cuestiones m & aacute;s interesantes acerca de lo que el g & eacute;nero ha podido ser en el pasado. Las perspectivas euroc & eacute;ntricas tradicionales configuran el g & eacute;nero como variable, pero s & oacute;lo dentro de ciertos l & iacute;mites predeterminados, sin cuestionar de forma radical qu & eacute; ocurre si cambiamos la definici & oacute;n del t & eacute;rmino. Esto limita tanto las narrativas que podemos contar como las preguntas que podemos hacer. Para contrarrestar esto, usamos concepciones feministas de diferencia para ofrecer narrativas alternativas sobre preguntas que incluyen d & oacute;nde y c & oacute;mo pudo el g & eacute;nero emerger originalmente y cu & aacute;les fueron sus transiciones en Europa en los & uacute;ltimos siete mil a & ntilde;os. Las asunciones sobre el g & eacute;nero en Europa han tenido demasiado peso en las narrativas predominantes y hegem & oacute;nicas. Al problematizar c & oacute;mo el g & eacute;nero emergi & oacute; y cambi & oacute; en Europa podemos quitar el foco sobre estas narrativas. Al usar nociones de diferencia proteica, reconceptualizamos el g & eacute;nero como una forma de identidad que no puede aplicarse autom & aacute;ticamente a todas las sociedades humanas, que tiene una historia espec & iacute;fica y, potencialmente, una fecha de caducidad.

This article surveys recent thinking about agency as a concept, both in general and within women’s and gender history, and then discusses some of the ways in which women’s agency has figured in early modern cultural and economic history over the last several decades. It considers whether women’s agency might have been a matter of norms as well as actions, that is, whether people expected women to be capable, economically productive, qualified, and skilled while simultaneously ascribing to patriarchal norms about women’s weakness. It highlights several research areas in which women’s agency has been a particularly important theme in recent scholarship and examines arguments about women’s and girls’ agency that have emerged in debates about the role of women’s work in European economic expansion. At the end, it briefly connects early modern developments with some trends in women’s lives that have emerged because of the COVID pandemic.

This introduction summarizes and notes connections among the essays in this collection, which consider women's agency in the Renaissance and early modern period, an era that saw both increasing patriarchal constraints and new forms of women's actions and activism. The volume includes thirteen essays by scholars from many disciplines, which analyze people, texts, objects, and images from many different parts of Europe, as well as things and people that crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific. The essays address a capacious set of questions about how women, from their teenage years through older adulthood, asserted agency through social practices, speech acts, legal disputes, writing, viewing and exchanging images, travel, and community building.

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the senior editor of The Sixteenth Century Journal and the author or editor of more than thirty books and numerous articles or book chapters that have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean.

Historians of early modern Europe were prominent among those who created women's and gender history. Women's historians increasingly moved away from talking about the 'status of women' in general, and examined differences and hierarchies among women along many lines and the ways these intersected. They thus viewed gender in conjunction with other social structures and identities. In the early modern economy, women were much less likely than men to have received formal training or an apprenticeship, although surviving apprenticeship contracts indicate that they occasionally were, particularly if learning a trade was combined with being a domestic servant. The amplification of social discipline after the Reformation had an even greater impact on women's lives. In the 1980s, scholars familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men, and to use the word 'gender' to describe these culturally created and often unstable systems.

This fourth edition of Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks's prize-winning survey features significant changes to every chapter, designed to reflect the newest scholarship. Global issues have been threaded throughout the book, while still preserving the clear thematic structure of previous editions. Thus readers will find expanded discussions of gendered racial hierarchies, migration, missionaries, and consumer goods. In addition, there is enhanced coverage of recent theoretical directions; the ideas, beliefs, and practices of ordinary people; early industrialization; women's learning, letter writing, and artistic activities; emotions and sentiments; single women and same-sex relations; masculinities; mixed-race and enslaved women; and the life course from birth to death. With geographically broad coverage, including Russia, Scandinavia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula, this remains the leading text on women and gender in Europe in this period. Accompanying this essential reading is a completely revised website featuring extensive updated bibliographies, web links, and primary source material.

Is time gendered? This international, interdisciplinary anthology studies the early modern era to analyse how material objects express, shape, complicate, and extend human concepts of time and how people commemorate time differently. It examines conceptual aspects of time, such as the categories women and men use to define it, and the somatic, lived experiences of time ranging between an instant and the course of family life. Drawing on a wide array of textual and material primary sources, this book assesses the ways that gender and other categories of difference affect understandings of time.

This series provides a forum for studies that investigate women, gender, and/ or sexuality in the late medieval and early modern world.The editors invite proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including, but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural history, and visual and material culture.Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays.Chronologically, we welcome studies that look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on any part of the world, as well as comparative and global works.We invite proposals including, but not limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power; constructions of femininity and masculinity; gift-giving, diplomacy and the politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives; gender and architectural spaces (courts, salons, household); consumption and material culture; objects and gendered power; women's writing; gendered patronage and power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.

The oldest surviving complete examples of eyeglasses in the world, dating from the mid-fourteenth century, were discovered in 1953, hidden beneath the floorboards of the nuns’ choir at the Cistercian Kloster Wienhausen in the Lüneberg Heath in northern Germany, now in the state of Lower Saxony. Several pairs of wood-framed riveted spectacles with their lenses, and fragments of others, were unearthed there, along with prayer books, small pictures, relic bundles, devotional objects, and the materials used for making these items, such as scissors, beads, cloth, paper, and needles, most likely hidden in this sacred spot when Duke Ernst the Confessor, the area’s ruler, attempted to introduce Lutheran practice to the convent in the 1520s. I first heard about Wienhausen thirty years ago, by accident. I was spending several months at the Duke August Library in Wolfenbüttel, investigating why early modern women published their works, and planning to write a book on what I then termed “women’s defense of their public role,” a topic that reflected the strong interest in the public/private dichotomy in women’s history in the 1980s. I was therefore examining prefaces, forewords, addresses to the reader, afterwords, dedications, and anything else in books published by women before

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMarriage in Europe, 1400–1800. Edited by Silvana Seidel Menchi.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. xii+406. $80.00.Merry E. Wiesner-HanksMerry E. Wiesner-HanksUniversity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 90, Number 1March 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/695887 Views: 58Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Germans were active in constructing transcultural experiences on a global scale – for better or worse – from Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map on. Most of those who have been studied were men, but women traveled and migrated as well, and they supported those who did financially, institutionally, and emotionally. Their movements and actions have left fewer and more shadowy records than those of men, but a more gender-balanced account of global connections in the early modern period is emerging. This essay examines three ways in which German women’s actions shaped the early modern world in the realm of religion: women’s establishment of religious communities, women’s patronage of overseas missions, and women’s proselytizing, particularly that undertaken by Moravians. All of these built on networks and traditions established in Europe, but ones that already reached across political boundaries in the splintered world of the Holy Roman Empire, or beyond it to co-religionists in Prague, Paris, or Copenhagen.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewRethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality. Ed. Ania Loomba and Malissa E. Sanchez. London: Routledge, 2016. 275 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-1-4724-2176-0.Merry Wiesner-HanksMerry Wiesner-HanksUniversity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 48, Number 3Fall 2017 The journal of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/SCJ4803173 © 2017 The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.