Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England

In early modern England, beautiful women occupied a central cultural place. As subjects of poetry and painting by men, Sidney's Stella, Spenser's Elizabeth, and Shakespeare's Dark Lady are well known. We know much less about how early modern women regarded beauty culture. Divided into three sections, on cosmetics, clothes, and hairstyling, individual chapters focus on fiction by Aphra Behn, Mary Wroth, and Margaret Cavendish, advice by Elizabeth Jocelin, Queen Henrietta's Maria's masques and a printed volume of recipes, and manuscript writing--domestic recipe collections, account books, letters, and historical chronicles-by Margaret Spencer, Brilliana Harley, Anne Clifford, and others. Through beauty practices, women developed their knowledge of medicine and employed their understanding of the body's cultural meanings. Skin, clothes, and hair could be used to represent racial, class, and gender identities, to convey political, religious, and philosophical ideals, and to question how literature commonly represented women as objects of desire.

ISBN 0230282857   Pages 240 ISBN13 9780230282858 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 476 Publisher Palgrave Macmillan   Published in Basingstoke Imprint Palgrave Macmillan   Height (mm) 222 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 141 Publication date 08 Mar 2011   Spine width (mm) 20 DEWEY 820.9928709031   Academic level Postgraduate DEWEY edition DC22

Introduction PART ONE: COSMETICS 'The Beautifying Part of Physic': Women's Cosmetic Practices in Early Modern England 'Soveraigne Receipts,' Fair Beauty, and Race in Stuart England PART TWO: CLOTHES The Greatness in Good Clothes: Fashioning Subjectivity in Mary Wroth's Urania and Margaret Spencer's Account Book What Not to Wear: Children's Clothes and the Maternal Advice of Elizabeth Jocelin and Brilliana, Lady Harley PART THREE: HAIR The Culture of the Head: Hair in Mary Wroth's Urania and Margaret Cavendish's 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity' An 'absolute mistress of her self': Anne Clifford and the Luxury of Hair Conclusion Index

'A masterful, eloquent, and convincing interpretation of the early modern culture of beauty which has vast implications for myriad areas of critical and historical interest beyond this topic alone.' - Patricia Phillippy, Kingston University, UK

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