Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women: Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith

Offering a broad and eclectic approach to the experience and activities of early modern women, Challenging Orthodoxies presents new research from a group of leading voices in their respective fields. Each essay confronts some received wisdom, ’truth’ or orthodoxy in social and cultural, scientific and intellectual, and political and legal traditions, to demonstrate how women from a range of social classes could challenge the conventional thinking of their time as well as the ways in which they have been traditionally portrayed by scholars. Subjects include women's relationship to guns and gunpowder, the law and legal discourse, religion, public finances, and the new science in early modern Europe, as well as women and indentured servitude in the New World. A testament to the pioneering work of Hilda L. Smith, this collection makes a valuable contribution to scholarship in women’s studies, political science, history, religion and literature.

About the Author

Sigrun Haude is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of In the Shadow of Savage Wolves: Anabaptist Münster and the German Reformation during the 1530s (2000) and of several chapters and articles on the Thirty Years’ War, Anabaptism, and gender, including Gender Roles and Perspectives Among Anabaptist and Spiritualist Groups, in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700 (2007). She is currently working on her monograph, The Thirty Years’ War: Experience and Management of a Disaster. Melinda S. Zook is Professor of History at Purdue University. She is the author of Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (1999; 2009) and Protestantism, Politics and Women in Britain, 1660-1714 (2013); and the co-editor of Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (2004). She has also published numerous articles and essays on politics, cultural memory, and women in Stuart England.