HIST 354: Amazons and Viragos: Gender and Power in Early Modern Europe (HC)

Featuring eight articles on emotions and love in early modern Europe first presented as papers at a workshop hosted at the European University Institute in March 2013.

In the 17th century, a new imperative of heterosociality opened a space for the cultivation of cross-gender friendships, while the spiritual friendships of the Catholic Reformation modeled relationships that transcended the gendered dynamics of galanterie. This book argues that the imaginative experimentation in friendships between men and women was a distinctive feature of early modern French culture. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices.

Between the waning of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment, many fundamental aspects of human behaviour - from expressions of gender to the experience of time - underwent radical changes. While some of these transformations were recorded in words, others have survived in non-verbal cultural media, notably the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how artists made use of these various cultural forms to grapple with human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the 1600s.