Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany

Abstract

This work examines the lowest levels of early modern popular street literature (ballads, broadsides, song pamphlets, and chapbooks) to shed light on differences between German and English attitudes toward women and on the ways in which those attitudes intertwined with wider social and cultural conceptions. Joy Wiltenburg's study, based on analysis of over 900 popular texts dealing with women, focuses on two separate but related historical issues. First is the issue of male dominance. Wiltenburg looks at depictions of disorderly women (those who stepped ouside the normal bounds of social prescription) in popular literature of early modern England and Germany to consider such key questions about the politics of gender as: Were women really resistant to domination? If so, how was their resistance contained? Were the images of disorder used to exorcise male fears? To warn women against their own potential disorder? To offer women imaginary power while depriving them of the real thing? The second issue addressed is that of recovering the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people - those below the level of the elite - in a world three or four centuries removed from our own.

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