Women as Sites of Culture : Women's Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century

This collection of essays examines the roles women have played in interrogating, forming, informing and reforming political discourse, cultural tradition and ceremony, social mores and the patronage and definition of art since the Renaissance.

Exploring the ways in which women have formed and defined expressions of culture in a range of geographical, political, and historical settings, this collection of essays examines women''s figurative and literal roles as "sites" of culture from the 16th century to the present day. The diversity of chronological, geographical and cultural subjects investigated by the contributors-from the 16th century to the 20th, from Renaissance Italy to Puritan Boston to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to post-war Japan, from parliamentary politics to the politics of representation-provides a range of historical outlooks. The collection brings an unusual variety of methodological approaches to the project of discovering intersections among women''s studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history, and art history, and expands beyond the Anglo- and Eurocentric focus often found in other works in the field. The volume presents an in-depth, investigative study of a tightly-constructed set of crucial themes, including that of the female body as a governing trope in political and cultural discourses; the roles played by women and notions of womanhood in redefining traditions of ceremony, theatricality and spectacle; women''s iconographies and personal spaces as resources that have shaped cultural transactions and evolutions; and finally, women''s voices-speaking and writing, both-as authors of cultural record and destiny. Throughout the volume the themes are refracted chronologically, geographically, and disciplinarily as a means to deeper understanding of their content and contexts. Women as Sites of Culture represents a productive collaboration of historians from various disciplines in coherently addressing issues revolving around the roles of gender, text, and image in a range of cultures and periods.