Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe [Hardcover]

The sixteenth century was an age of politically powerful women. Queens, acting in their own right, and female regents, acting on behalf of their male relatives, governed much of Western Europe. Yet even as women ruled - and ruled effectively - their right to do so was hotly contested. Men s voices have long dominated this debate, but the recovery of texts by women now allows their voices, long silenced, to be heard once again. Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe is a study of texts and textual production in the construction of gender, society, and politics in the early modern period. Jansen explores the gynecocracy debate and the larger humanist response to the challenge posed by female sovereignty.An Age of Queens * Queens and Controversy: John Knox and The Monstrous Regiment of Women * The Gynecocracy Debate * The Gynecocracy Debate in Context: Humanism and History * The Gynecocracy Debate: Women's Voices * Queens and Controversy in Early Modern Europe: The End of an Era

An important and interesting contribution to the history of women. Jansen has woven together an amazing number of sources and offers a concise discussion of the controversy surrounding female rule in the sixteenth century. - Shawndra L. Holderby, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania

Sharon L. Jansen is the author of Anne of France: Lessons for My Daughter (2004), The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and Dangerous Talk and Strange Behavior: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms to Henry VIII (St. Martin's Press, 1996).