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The University of Southampton
Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture

Gender, agency and religious change in early modern England Seminar

Time:
18:00
Date:
28 November 2017
Venue:
Lecture Theatre A, Avenue Campus, SO17 1BF

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Mary Andrew at m.j.andrew@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Part of the CMRC Seminar Series. All welcome.

The paper explores issues of female agency in early modern England. It focuses on the actions of women who engaged in religiously-motivated disruptive behaviour and ‘choreographed’ symbolic violence in their parish churches in the years before the Civil War. Using court and testamentary evidence, it examines links between women’s actions and their accustomed roles within the parish church. Women could be extremely provocative, for example, presenting the rear of a child rather than the head to be baptised. Women's assertiveness is explored in the context of arguments about women's influence in their parishes after the Reformation, and the ways in which religious change impacted women’s status.

Speaker information

Amanda Flather , University of Essex. I always loved everyting to do wit history - at school, in films, books and on TV. I tried other careers but my fascination with the subject never dimmed and so I decided to go back to study history at University. I am really intrigued by the details of daily life. They give you a way in to understanding a different mental world as well as insights into larger questions about family, power and gender. I studied history at the University of Essex where I completed my doctorate in 2002. My first book, Gender and Space in Early Modern England, which was published in 2007, is an attempt to explore the influence of gender on the use and organisation of space amongst early modern English men and women below the level of the elite. I was awarded the John Nichols Prize in English Local History by the University of Leicester in 1998, and have published on the organisation of sacred space; the influence of gender on the organisation and use of the market place; gender and religious violence in early modern England; the sexual division of labour, and the experience and use of domestic space by male and female servants.

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