Course · HIST 150 · AY 2001

Gender and Sexuality in the Early-Modern West.

Reading-and-discussion module from the AY 2001 section of the Western Civilization survey at George Mason University.

Module description

This module sits in the late-fall portion of the HIST 150 Western Civilization survey, after the Reformation unit and before the Enlightenment unit. It addresses gender and sexuality in early-modern European and Atlantic society as a substantive historical topic in its own right — not as a parenthesis to political and religious history, but as a field with its own chronology, sources, and arguments.

Reading list (selection)

  • Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard, 1983) — sex, marriage, and identity in sixteenth-century rural France.
  • Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Johns Hopkins, 1980) — the gendered dimensions of Friulian heresy and the inquisition.
  • Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis", American Historical Review (December 1986).
  • Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 1994).
  • Selected primary documents from witchcraft trial records, spiritual autobiographies, and conduct literature.

Discussion prompts

  1. Davis is reconstructing a sixteenth-century life from sparse and contested archival material. What does her method tell us about the limits of what we can know about the gendered lives of early-modern people who did not leave their own records?
  2. How does Scott's 1986 essay reframe the field? What kind of history does "gender as a category of analysis" make possible that earlier women's history did not?
  3. Roper argues that the witch persecutions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries cannot be understood without taking seriously the sexual content of both the accusations and the confessions. What is the evidence for this argument? How would you contest it?
  4. What do the conduct manuals — books on how women and men should behave in marriage, in the household, in church — tell us about the gap between prescribed and lived gender roles in this period?

Written assignment

A 1,500-word paper drawing on at least two of the assigned texts and one primary document, addressing one of the discussion prompts above or a closely-related question developed in consultation with the instructor.