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ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO WOMEN,
SEX, AND GENDER IN THE EARLY BRITISH
COLONIAL WORLD
All of the essays in this volume capture the body in a particular attitude: in distress, vulnerability,
pain, pleasure, labor, health, reproduction, or preparation for death. They attend to how the
body’s transformations affect the social and political arrangements that surround it. And they
show how apprehension of the body – in social and political terms – gives it shape.
Kimberly Anne Coles is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is
the author of Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008)
and recently co-edited The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900 (Palgrave, 2015), a collection
of essays on race, embodiment, and humoral theory. She has published articles on the topics
of women’s writing, gender, medical theory, and religion and race (and their intersection).
Her current book project deals with the medical and philosophical context that makes moral
constitution a heritable feature of the blood. She is co-editing the Bloomsbury Cultural History
of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350–1550), and finishing a book project
tentatively titled, “Bad Humour: Race, Religion, and the Constitution of Wrong Belief in Early
Modern England.”
Eve Keller is Professor of English at Fordham University. She is the author of Generating
Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early-Modern England (University of
Washington Press, 2007) and co-author of Two Rings (PublicAffairs, 2012), which has been
published in seven languages. Past president of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts,
she is currently President of the Fordham University Faculty Senate and Director of the Honors
Program at Fordham College at Rose Hill.
ROUTLEDGE COMPANION
TO WOMEN, SEX, AND
GENDER IN THE EARLY
BRITISH COLONIAL WORLD
Edited by Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller

First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve
Keller; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and as the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-4724-7994-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-61377-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For our children
For future conversations
CONTENTS
List of illustrations x
List of contributors xii
Introduction: sex education 1

Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller
PART I
Debates and directions 13
1 Ain’t I a Ladie?: race, sexuality, and early modern women writers 15

Melissa E. Sanchez
2 Early modern bodies that matter 33

Mario DiGangi
3 Regendering the sublime and the beautiful: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra

and feminist formalism 46
Katherine B. Attié
PART II
Authorship and patronage 59
4 Women and literary production 61

Stephen Guy-Bray
5 Ambiguities of female authorship and the accessible archive 73

Marcy L. North
vii
Contents
6 Patterns of print: women’s textual patronage in the “early” early

modern period 88
Patricia Pender
7 Picturing the agency of widows: female patronage among the gentry

and the middling sort of Elizabethan England 104
Tarnya Cooper
8 Women’s labor and the Little Gidding harmonies 120

Whitney Trettien
PART III
The matter of reform 137
9 “A witch! Who is not?”: demonic contagion, gender, and class in

The Witch of Edmonton139
Mary Floyd-Wilson
10 “A Womans Logicke”: Puritan women writers and the rejection

of education 154
Christina Luckyj
11 Prosopopoeia, gender, and religion: the poetry of Mary Stuart,

Queen of Scots 170
Rosalind Smith
12 Dying offstage: gender and martyrdom in 1 Henry VI189

Elizabeth Williamson
PART IV
Bodies of knowledge 205
13 Flesh-eaters: gender, bodies, and labor in early modern art and literature 207
Karen Raber
14 “Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron”: ingredients, instructions, and the

early modern recipe book 224
Gitanjali Shahani and Emily S. Farris
15 “From a drudge, to . . . a cook”: hidden and ostentatious labor in the

early modern household 239
Mary Trull and Rebecca Laroche
viii
Contents
16 “[T]he monkey duchess all undressed”: simians, satire, and women

in seventeenth-century England 254
Holly Dugan
17 Gender, knowledge, and the medical marketplace: the case of

Margaret Cavendish 270
Laura L. Knoppers
PART V
The place of production 287
18 Counter-narratives of survival: Amerindian and African women

in early Caribbean literatures 289
Julie Chun Kim
19 Constructing white privilege: transatlantic slavery, reproduction, and

the segregation of the marriage plot in the late seventeenth century 304
Valerie Forman
Index 322
ix
ILLUSTRATIONS
7.1 Hans Eworth, Portrait of Mary Neville, Lady Dacre and Gregory Fiennes,
10th Baron Dacre, dated 1559, oil on panel, National Portrait Gallery,
London, NPG 6855 106
7.2 Unknown English artist, Portrait of Joyce Frankland née Trappes, dated 1586,
oil on panel, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge 108
7.3 Unknown English artist, Portrait of Joyce Frankland, née Trappes, dated 1586,
oil on panel, Brasenose College, Oxford 109
7.4 Unknown English artist, Portrait of Margaret Craythorne, c.1580–1590, oil on
panel, Cutlers Company, London 113
7.5 Unknown English artist, Portrait of Dorothy Wadham, née Petre, dated 1595,
oil on panel, Wadham College, University of Oxford 114
7.6 Statues of founders Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham, 1613, in the front
quadrangle of Wadham College, University of Oxford 115
8.1 A binding by the Little Gidding Community, c.1641, on a copy of George
Herbert’s The Temple (Cambridge: Printed by Roger Daniel, printer to
the University of Cambridge, 1641). Citron goatskin over pasteboards.
Folger Shakespeare Library, H1516. Used by permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0
International License. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/g43fv2 124
8.2 Title page, The Arminian Nunnery (London, 1641). Folger Shakespeare
Library, 151–306q. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 International
License. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/4p1b5i 126
10.1 Anna Walker, A Sweete Savor for Woman (c.1606), F 71r © British Library
Board, MS Egerton 1043 157
13.1 Pieter Aertsen, The Cook, 1559, oil on board, Musee d’Art Ancien. Photo:
Foto Marburg/Art Resource 214
13.2 Joachim Bueckelaer, Cook With Chicken, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo:
Erich Lessing/Art Resource 215
13.3 Joachim Wtewael, Kitchen Scene with Parable of the Great Supper, 1605, oil on
canvas, Gemaeldegaleries. Photo: Jorg P. Anders 216
x
Illustrations
13.4 Joachim Wtewael, Kitchen Scene, c.1620, oil on canvas,

Metropolitan Museum of Art 216
16.1 Anne Monck (née Clarges), Duchess of Albemarle, sold by Richard
Gammon Engraving, c.1660s, © National Portrait Gallery, London 256
16.2 “Prince Roberts malignant She-Monkey” (Anon., 1643),
© British Library Board 260
19.1 Image from Union Square Park, NYC, July 7, 2016 304
xi
CONTRIBUTORS
Katherine B. Attié is Assistant Professor of English at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland.

She specializes in Shakespeare, early modern poetry and poetics, and seventeenth-century political
and intellectual history. Her publications include articles in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare
Quarterly, Modern Philology, the John Donne Journal, and ELH. In 2012, she received an NEH/Folger
Shakespeare Library Long-Term Fellowship for her book in progress, Shakespeare’s Everyday Aesthetic.
Kimberly Anne Coles is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is
the author of Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008)
and recently co-edited The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900 (Palgrave, 2015), a collection
of essays on race, embodiment, and humoral theory. She has published articles on the topics of
women’s writing, gender, medical theory, and religion and race (and their intersection). Her
current book project deals with the medical and philosophical context that makes moral consti-
tution a heritable feature of the blood.
Tarnya Cooper is Chief Curator at the National Portrait Gallery and an expert on sixteenth-
century British painting. Her widely illustrated book on Citizen Portrait: Portrait painting and the
urban elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales (Yale University Press) was published in 2012.
She has previously curated the exhibitions Elizabeth I and Her People (National Portrait Gallery
2013) and Searching for Shakespeare (NPG 2006) and co-curated Elizabeth I (National Maritime
Museum 2003).
Mario DiGangi, Professor of English at The Graduate Center and Lehman College, CUNY,
is the author of The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 1997) and Sexual Types:
Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (Pennsylvania, 2011). He has
contributed to several collections, including Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater and The
Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment. He has edited Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Barnes & Noble and The Winter’s Tale for the Bedford
Shakespeare:Texts and Contexts series.With Amanda Bailey, he has edited Affect Theory and Early
Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, Form (Palgrave, 2017). His current book project explores affec-
tive politics in the early modern history play. In 2016, he served as President of the Shakespeare
Association of America.
xii
Contributors
Holly Dugan is Associate Professor of English at the George Washington University in Wash-
ington, DC. She is an expert on the history of perfume in the Renaissance and the role of
smell in early modern culture. Her research and teaching explore relationships between history,
literature, and material culture. Her scholarship focuses on questions of gender, sexuality, the
boundaries of the body, and the role of the senses in late medieval and early modern England.
She is currently working on a book that examines staged moments of perception in Shake-
speare’s works.
Emily S. Farris is a graduate student in the English Department at San Francisco State Univer-
sity. She is currently completing a project titled “Those Mouthèd Wounds”: The Medicalized Body
as Storyteller in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy.This master’s thesis interrogates the multiple regimes
of the constructed body in late-Elizabethan vernacular medical literature and Shakespeare’s most
popular English history plays.
Mary Floyd-Wilson is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of
English and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is
the author of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (2003) and Occult Knowledge, Science,
and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (2013). She has co-edited Reading the Early Modern Passions:
A Cultural History of Emotion (2004) (with Gail Kern Paster and Katherine Rowe) and Environ-
ment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (2007) (with Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.). She is currently
writing a book entitled The Tempter or the Tempted: Demonic Causality in Shakespeare’s Theater.
Valerie Forman is Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Affiliated
Faculty in the Departments of Social and Cultural Analysis and English, New York University. Her
first book, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008), explores the relationship between innovations in the theater and new eco-
nomic practices to show how concepts fundamental to capitalism, such as free trade and investment,
develop within a global context. Her second book project, Developing New Worlds: Property, Freedom,
and the Economics of Representation in the Early Modern Caribbean, focuses on the rise of the Transatlantic
slave trade in the seventeenth century. She teaches courses on theater and politics, labor and global
markets, the rise of globalization in the early modern period, and Cuban cinema.
Stephen Guy-Bray is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He special-

izes in Renaissance poetry and queer theory. He has written three monographs and numerous
articles and book chapters, as well as co-edited two essay collections. His monograph Shake-
speare and Queer Representation is forthcoming from Routledge.
Eve Keller is Professor of English at Fordham University. She is the author of Generating Bodies
and Gendered Selves:The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early-Modern England (University of Washing-
ton Press, 2007) and co-author of Two Rings (PublicAffairs, 2012), which has been published in
seven languages. Past president of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, she is cur-
rently president of the Fordham University Faculty Senate and director of the Honors Program
at Fordham College at Rose Hill.
Julie Chun Kim is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. She has published
articles and essays on Afro-Caribbean medicine, indigenous land rights and resistance, natural
history, and early Caribbean food and economy. She is currently working on a book about gar-
dens and colonial science in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
xiii
Contributors
Laura L. Knoppers is Professor of English at Notre Dame. She works on seventeenth-century

British literature and cultural history, especially John Milton, the English Revolution, early women
writers, and gender in history. She is the author of Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to
Milton’s Eve (Cambridge, 2011), Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661
(Cambridge, 2000), and Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Uni-
versity of Georgia, 1994). Her scholarly edition of Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
(Oxford, 2008) won the John Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America. Knoppers
has edited or co-edited five essay collections, including most recently The Cambridge Companion
to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge, 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the
English Revolution (Oxford, 2012). Since 2010, she has served as editor of Milton Studies.
Rebecca Laroche, Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, has
published books and articles on Renaissance lyric, early modern women’s writing, Shakespeare,
medical history, recipe work, and ecofeminist criticism. With Jennifer Munroe, she has recently
written Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory as part of the Arden Shakespeare and Theory series.
Christina Luckyj is Professor of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia,

Canada. She is the author of “A Moving Rhetoricke”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England
(Manchester UP 2002), editor of The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide (Arden, 2011), and co-
editor (with Niamh J. O’Leary) of The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (U of
Nebraska P, 2017). She has published a range of essays on early modern drama and women’s
writing and is completing a monograph entitled “Reasonable Libertie”: The Politics of the Female
Voice 1603–1636.
Marcy L. North is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the
author of The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago,
2013) and numerous articles on early print, manuscript culture, and early modern women. She
is currently finishing a book that explores the intersection of labor and taste in the production
of post-print literary manuscripts.
Patricia Pender is a Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at the University of Newcastle,
Australia. She is the author of Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Palgrave
2012) and co-editor, with Rosalind Smith, of Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing
(Palgrave 2014). She is currently working on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project
on Early Modern Women and the Institutions of Authorship (2014–2017), from which a new
edited collection, Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration, was published in
2017.
Karen Raber is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi; she has published on early
modern gender, women writers, animals, and the environment. Her recent work includes Animal
Bodies, Renaissance Culture (2013) and Performing Animals: History,Theater, Agency (2017), coedited
with Monica Mattfeld. She edits Routledge’s series Perspectives on the Non-Human in Litera-
ture and Culture and is completing a monograph on the materiality of meat in early modernity.
Melissa E. Sanchez is Associate Professor of English and Core Faculty of Gender, Sexual-
ity, and Women’s Studies, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Erotic Subjects: The
Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (2011) and the editor of three volumes
xiv
Contributors
of essays: Spenser and “the Human,” a special volume of Spenser Studies (co-edited with Ayesha
Ramachandran, 2015); Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, Sexuality (co-
edited with Ania Loomba, 2016); and Desiring History and Historicizing Desire, a special issue of
the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (co-edited with Ari Friedlander and Will Stockton,
2016). Currently, she is completing two books: one on sex, subjectivity, and faith in early mod-
ern love poetry and another on Shakespeare and Queer Theory.
Gitanjali Shahani is Professor of English at San Francisco State University, where she teaches
courses on Shakespeare studies, postcolonial studies, and food studies. Her book, Tasting Differ-
ence: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature, is forthcoming from Cornell
University Press. She has edited two collections, Food and Literature (Cambridge University Press,
2018) and Emissaries in Early Modern Literature & Culture (Ashgate 2009, with Brinda Charry).
Her articles on race and colonialism in early modern literature have been published in numer-
ous collections and journals, including Shakespeare, Shakespeare Studies, and The Journal of Early
Modern Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a project in global Shakespeare studies
focused on Shakespearean adaptations in Hindi literature and cinema.
Rosalind Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Newcastle, Australia,

and works on gender, genre, politics and history in early modern women’s writing. She is the
author of Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence (Palgrave,
2005) and editor (with Patricia Pender) of Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writ-
ing (Palgrave, 2014) as well as the author of numerous articles and chapters on early modern
women’s writing. She led a large nationally funded project on the Material Cultures of Early
Modern Women’s Writing (2012–2015) and has recently received Australian Research Coun-
cil and Marsden Trust funding for a new, three-year project on early modern women and the
poetry of complaint.
Whitney Trettien is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of

Pennsylvania. She has published on Isabella Whitney, seventeenth-century botany, and print-
on-demand editions of John Milton’s Areopagitica, among other topics in book history and early
modern literature. She is currently completing a hybrid print/digital monograph on the after-
lives of the Little Gidding harmonies.
Mary Trull is Professor of English at St. Olaf College. Her monograph, Performing Privacy and
Gender in Early Modern Literature, was published by Palgrave McMillan in 2013. She has been a
fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and has published articles in ELR: English
Literary Renaissance, Religion and Literature and elsewhere on authors including Shakespeare; Aphra
Behn; Anne Lock; Mary Sidney-Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; and Mary Wroth. Her book
manuscript in progress, Lucretian Transformations: English Women Writers, 1640–1690, explores the
impact of Lucretius and Epicurean physics on women writers of the seventeenth century.
Elizabeth Williamson is the author of The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama
(Ashgate, 2009), and co-editor (with Jane Hwang Degenhardt) of Religion and Drama in Early
Modern England (Ashgate, 2011). Her essays have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Studies
in English Literature, Borrowers and Lenders, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Medieval and
Renaissance Drama in England. Her current book project deals with Shakespeare and the politics
of martyrdom. She teaches at The Evergreen State College.
xv
INTRODUCTION
Sex education
In the wake of the 2016 presidential elections, we have heard from the right and left of the
political spectrum that identity is no longer a useful term of political engagement – that the
politics of identity are constrained, and that a recommitment to political issues more broadly
based than those grounded in identity is requisite for any political future. That it is easy enough
to perceive the default identity that girds such claims – the white, male, heteronormative subject
projected as a universal – in itself signals both that politics cannot be untethered from identity
and that politics cannot (or should not) be considered separate from its manifestation in the
material world. The assertion thus is useful because it forces a reengagement with the debate,
now decades old, of the material terms of identity itself. Identity is politics, and politics are
always material. How the body is represented in political space; the means by which it is clothed,
fed, and protected; how the social and political state enacts upon it: these are the concrete issues
that animate identity and structure its imbrication in public terms (which are its only terms,
since identity is never privately engaged). But embodied identity must be understood in its time:
if deconstruction taught us to see identity as contingent and indeterminate, we should also now
understand the extent to which the body too, with its vulnerabilities and transformations, is
malleable, unfixed, not a priori in its terms in relation to political formations.
Over the past three decades, women’s and gender studies have evolved into fields of inquiry
that have energized – and transformed – the study of the early modern period. But they are
not engaged in the same inquiry. As a field, feminism begins with the assumption that the sexed
body changes the interaction of the subject in political space, regardless of other considerations
of subject position. How other social categories inflect the position of woman as a social actor
and political subject does in many ways define the discipline of feminist inquiry, but the sex
of the body, irrespective of gender identification, has always informed feminist analysis, which
concerns primarily the political uses to which the body is put: in its labor, its social position, its
religious identity, and its cultural participation. Gender studies, by contrast, typically elides bio-
logical sex, inquiring into how gender identity and identification crucially alter social and politi-
cal engagement and how gender is imbricated in the social, political and even epistemological
arrangements and assumptions of culture. Now, however, we occupy a historical moment when
this critical divide has begun to collapse: when the sex of the body can be altered to adhere
more closely to the gender identity of the subject, when calls have been made to appropriate the
long-shunned science of biology for feminist analysis, when the political moment – in terms of
1
both policy and rhetoric – has intensified focus upon the organs that determine our sex. Our
political moment alters our scholarly and theoretical practice, and our thinking about the sexed
subject in political space must inevitably change.
A companion volume that newly surveys current work in the evolving fields of women’s and
gender studies is therefore very much in order. Our own understandings of “woman” as both
political category and corporeal subject are shifting in our current moment, and as the ground
shifts beneath us, so too does our point of departure and point of view. An older feminism typi-
cally eschewed the biological, dismissing it as untheorizable and detrimental to feminist agendas:
a biologically determined category of “woman” permitted an appeal to “nature” that could be
(and historically, of course, was) used to justify both categories and hierarchies of gender.1 But
there is no reason to suppose that biology pre-exists constructions of gender, that the “facts” of
nature are prior to and separate from the constructions of culture. Biological sex is the ground
of political engagement, as it is the ground of identity, but the relations among them are co-
constitutive, rather than sequential or causal. As the work of Elizabeth Wilson, for example, has
shown in arresting detail, biology can (and should) be politically useful for feminism because
biological data are always already implicated in the arenas of feminist debate.2
At the start of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes,
For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity,
understood through the category women, who not only initiates feminist interests
and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representa-
tion is pursued. But politics and representation are controversial terms. On the one hand,
representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to extend
visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects; on the other hand, representa-
tion is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort
what is assumed to be true about the category of women.3
Indeed, there is little agreement on what constitutes the category of women at all. But as But-
ler’s articulation here implies, there is strategic value in producing the category, and legitimation
on both sides of political systems of power in occupying it. There is no pre-existent biological
substratum accessible to humanist – or scientific, for that matter – analysis that can be either
appealed to or relied upon as a natural justification of social and political arrangements. As Fou-
cault has observed,“systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent.”4
But if “woman” is a political subject that is produced in order to be excluded – since juridical
power is legitimated by such regulation practices – the category of “woman,” with its approved
status within heteronormative structures, is also itself legitimating. Various theoretical move-
ments (Poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer, trans, disability) have shown the social, cultural,
and political value that attaches to the category of “woman” and the strategic uses to which the
category can be put, even as they also expose its instrumental role in negotiating the relation-
ships of privilege and power.
The opposition between sign and corporeal subject is itself illusory. Butler’s language suggests
as much in asserting that “representation serves as the operative term within a political process
that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects.” We are created as
subjects, not just political subjects, through representation.5 As we evolve from a collection of
cells to a fetus, name, sex, and other identities attach to our developing form; we do not simply
grow as a corporeal being, but, through a progressive process of representation, are created as
putative subjects even before we are separated from the body of our mothers. But if the subject
emerges and accrues value through representation, merging matter with meaning solely through
2
Sex education
force of the imagination, why would gender be any more flexible as a political term than sex?
Both are created through a system of signification, and therefore neither has greater claim to the
real. As Robyn Wiegman has observed, “gender’s refashioning as politically progressive precisely
where women is not” is premised upon assumptions of its representational inclusivity.6 But the
assumption relies upon “believing the story that the progress of gender imparts: not simply that
women is an analytically singular, insular category of analysis, but that its exclusivity can be cor-
rected by addition or substitution, such that gender will be capable of giving us everything that
women does not.”7
Whatever promise poststructuralism held to avoid the exclusions of embodiment – its seg-
regations, erasures, and rejections – signs always and unavoidably ramify materially in the world.
Since language systems replicate ( just as they help to create) the hierarchies of the dominant
social order, representation cannot escape the insinuation of power relations. We cannot evade
the political discipline of the body by resorting to signs because of the material consequences
of those signs. There are certainly differences between the material and the message, distinctions
between sex as materiality and sex as representation. But our current political moment allows
us to reassess the gap between embodiment and representation because the distance between
sign and signified is now repeatedly breeched in political discourse. One need only reflect upon
the manifestation of a pink vagina as a political sign to consider representation as embodiment.
There are numerous examples in our current public and political discourse of language as cor-
poral behavior: whether it is “Black Lives Matter” focusing attention on the vulnerability of
black bodies, the threats of rape on social media that attend women perceived to be out of place
(whether in gaming or politics), or the color of emojis and the debates concerning their use,
representation and real life are moving ever closer.
We are not making any claim for an essentially sexed body – we are reevaluating the domi-
nant political attachment to an essentially sexed body and its shaping force upon identity. In
evaluating the “zero-sum” equation of some critical arguments concerning “identity versus
nonidentity,” Valerie Traub claims that such studies would benefit from the realization of the
“material, social, and psychic conditions” that produce identity: “this is a matter of recognizing
not only the import of social emplacements and embodied desires . . . but also the give and take
of psychic processes.”8 If we accept Foucault’s formulation that both subject and subjective cat-
egory are discursive formations produced by the juridical systems of power that control them,
we also agree with Traub that while “[i]dentities may be fictions . . . they are weighty ones and
still do important work.”9 In the tight yoke of identity to embodied experience that we argue
for here, we are not contending that the category of “woman” conforms to the sexed subject.We
are not claiming that identity is stable.We are arguing for the contingent terms of the body itself.
We are claiming that its operation in political space is determinate in identity formation. And we
are further contending that the attachment of political gravity to biological sex fundamentally
alters how a woman, cis- or transgendered, operates in public space.
It is precisely because neither subjectivity nor identity exists prior to other political forma-
tions that a collected volume of essays that foregrounds embodied experience is tuned to a
political moment when representation and embodiment are coming in closer proximity. But it is
also true that the value of a historical perspective in thinking through the category of “woman”
lies in how it is constructed in relation to other political and social arrangements. If identity
is a discursive formation that responds to systems of power and shifting facts of embodiment,
emplacement, and need, then its production in relation to historically different politics and
social pressures throws into relief the strategies by which, against which, and in the service of
which it is formed. This is not to conceive of the category of “woman” as distinct but as one
in constant transaction with other social categories that engage, inflect, and alter it. It is also
3
to understand that the dynamics of political power are enacted upon a physical subject that is
contingent in its terms, constantly changing form with the force of age, sexuality, reproduction,
custom, diet, injury, disability, surgery, and death. The essays of Women, Sex and Gender in the
Early British Colonial World focus on the range of forms that gender and sex took in different
domestic ecologies, aspects of textual production (from authorship to patronage to collection),
global economies, religious and spiritual arrangements, and aesthetic and philosophical specu-
lations. As a controlling concept of the volume, we asked our contributors to focus on how
political power falls on the sexed body, irrespective of gender, and how this affects labor, politics,
economics, social relations, religion, nation, rank, and sexuality. The essays produced in response
to that question reveal that early modern literature and culture offer us a rich archive for engag-
ing with some of the fundamental questions of feminism concerning the uses and limits of the
category of “woman.”
It is the assumed project of the companion volume generally to survey the state of a field. But
the title of this companion reveals the mutually inflecting fields of study – what Wiegman has
dubbed “academic field formations” – that engage the project of feminist criticism and political
critique. Indeed, the field of feminist criticism, for reasons both internal and external to it (some
of which we have rehearsed), is currently in a state of intense fluidity, fluctuation, and intel-
lectual foment. As Traub has observed, “the friction between sex as materiality and sex as repre-
sentation” has been consistently bypassed as an issue by recurrent “recourse to analytically hazy
concepts such as the body, desire, and cultural or textual mediation.”10 Part of the analytical haze
that obscures these concepts, we have been insisting, resides in the fact that sex as materiality
achieves its meaning through a persistent and ongoing process of social and political representa-
tion. The body is contingent – plastic in terms of both its physical being and its engagements
in political space. If our present historical moment highlights the operation of identity not as
a stable category of being but as one of social and political association and exclusion, then this
volume highlights the function of the sexed body – in material and ideational ways – in the
construction of identity.11
The essays of Women, Sex and Gender in the Early British Colonial World emphasize material
experience in political space. Our companion examines women’s lives, their practical and cul-
tural work, the ideologies of gender that underwrite cultural production, and the divide between
ideology and lived experience. It would be fair to expect such a commitment to produce a mul-
tiplication of analytic categories: in the investigation of embodiment and how representation
assigns meaning to matter, the encounter with the proliferation of meanings that attach to the
corporeal subject would seem inevitable (particularly across age, reproduction, acquisition or
loss of wealth). But while gender, sexuality, and rank are all extensively surveyed in this volume,
the category of race remains underexplored here, except in instances of colonial or transatlantic
dislocation. Yet race in the early modern period is a concept shot through with concerns of
lineage, religion, sexuality, custom, and nation. These social categories – rank, religion, sexuality,
nation – engage, inflect, and fundamentally alter how the category of “woman” is understood. In
spite of this, race still appears marginalized in feminist inquiry – as a topic invoked by geographi-
cal context or specific racial content within a cultural artifact – rather than used as an analytic
category that helps us to better understand the social and political formations requisite to our
task. Obviously, there are projects that have consistently and successfully married sex, gender,
and race; our point is only that race is invoked as a framing device of these collections.12 Race,
therefore, still seems perceived in limited terms as a tool of analysis for feminist inquiry, rather
than as one put in consistent and contested conversation with gender and sexuality.
The emphasis upon embodiment for this collection forces an extended consideration of
bodily practices, transformations, and vulnerabilities: far from being essential or stable, these
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Sex education
essays expose the amorphous borders of bodies in a state of constant physical and political muta-
bility. They focus upon social status, work and labor habits, bodily/bestial representation, eating,
drinking, sickness, health, medicine, sex, pregnancy, birth, and death.The work of this volume is
also alert to the embodied experience of writing. It responds to calls within feminist criticism
for counter-archives and draws materials largely from women’s work: miscellanies, books of
instruction, receipt collections, patronage activities, and literary and cultural production. Traffic
in these archives answers the criticism of early modern feminist studies as increasingly reliant
upon the work of men – particularly Shakespeare – for its objects of analysis.13 Rather than
focus upon how women are represented by the cultural production of men, our companion
emphasizes how women are created by social and political systems of representation, including
their own.
The framing chapters of the volume, essays concerning “Debates and Directions,” together
confront the historical limitations of feminist criticism and the charges leveled against it as being
cordoned off from questions of race and ethnicity, of desire divorced from identity, of the aes-
thetics of literary form. Attentive to these claims, the essays in this section are at once forthright
about the debates in which feminist criticism is currently embroiled and confident in charting
new territory, urging an expanded view of what feminist criticism is capable of once we move
beyond the categories in which it was first conceived and practiced. In the section’s first essay,
Melissa Sanchez takes on the chorus of scholarly praise for Aemilia Lanyer; by seeking to claim
her as a proto-feminist forebear, this tradition, Sanchez shows, has occluded attention to the
fairly explicit racism, anti-Semitism, and sexual conservatism of her work. But rather than offer
a simple counter to this fairly familiar view, Sanchez enlists this feminist myopia as a mode of
self-critique: her essay offers not only an analysis of Lanyer and previous generations of feminist
readings of her work, but, perhaps more important, a model that by its example urges us to see
and assess our own affiliations and priorities as scholars. Sanchez’s essay opens the volume with
an invitation to self-reflection on our choices – and biases – as readers and scholars of early
modern literature.
Mario DiGangi turns to Madhavi Menon’s influential reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in order both to challenge the claim of disembodied desire in the play and to urge instead the
possibility of a confluence of feminist and queer analyses of desire that enfold the materiality
of bodies into their assessments.14 Rejecting as artificial the common, current divide between
queer theory’s privileging of desire untethered to the material body and feminism’s commit-
ment to embodiment, DiGangi asks after the historical, social, and political situatedness of
desire in the play, fashioning an empirical account of sexuality in order “to do justice” to the
ways desire is materially experienced “in particular cultural circumstances” (35), both real and
imagined.
Katherine Attié’s contribution, the last essay in this section, considers the gendered implica-
tions of form and aesthetic theory, focusing on Anthony and Cleopatra to recuperate a feminine
sublime – the superior quality of boundless excess that is associated in Shakespeare’s play with
water, Egypt, and especially with Cleopatra. Cleopatra’s unrepresentable illimitability is, for Attié,
the source of the character’s power, transcending the masculine beauty associated with Anthony
and Rome. Attié’s recuperation of a feminine sublime offers an “expansive view of feminine
power, one that transcends the female body” (49) and at the same time demonstrates a mode of
feminist-directed formalism grounded in a close reading of the particularities of text.
In exploring race, sexuality, and gender in aesthetics, these essays examine the history of these
constructions and the engagement of them in both early modern and modern epistemologies.
Thinking more precisely about gender, race, and sexuality in cultural forms reminds us of their
similar situation in relation to power, relates how that position is constantly negotiated, and
5
prompts us to review our own representations as part of the political work that is done. Apart
from its framing chapters, the volume includes 16 chapters distributed across four additional
sections that deal broadly with different aspects of women’s experiences: cultural production,
knowledge production, religion and spirituality, exploration, and economy. The five chapters in
section II examine women’s cultural participation as both authors and agents. The four chap-
ters in section III investigate how religion shaped women’s attitudes to education and cultural
practice and how social and political attitudes toward women were in turn shaped by religion.
The five chapters in section IV explore how household knowledge informs women’s interac-
tion with social hierarchy and labor practices, food procurement and preparation, and medical
theory. The two chapters in section V discover how colonial expansion, and an emergent colo-
nial economy, impacted the lives and cultural participation of women.
The second section of the volume turns to modes and models of women’s “Authorship and
Patronage,” each in its way pressing for an expanded understanding of what the categories them-
selves comprise. Stephen Guy-Bray begins the section with an examination of four different
accounts of women’s relation to textual production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries –
two by men in the sixteenth century, in which women work collectively, and two by women in
seventeenth century, who represent their own labor as a solitary practice – one that aligns them
with the cultural representations of male writers. In the negotiation of gender in women’s texts
and the ways that female writers often try to behave as men in print and manuscript, we again
are reminded of how much the high rhetoric of poetry and its production is always an index
of social power.
In the absence of a clear methodology for determining how to assess works of disputed
female authorship, Marcy North studies the example of four sets of sixteenth-century poems
for which authorship is unresolved in order to tease out the changed ways scholars now read
texts of this kind. North shows how, in an age of ready access to primary texts through online
archives and searchable databases, scholars are treating authorship differently – frequently con-
tent “to leave the authorship question open” and allowing readers to decide for themselves if
a given text is authored by a particular woman. North’s essay and those by Rosalind Smith
and Gitanjali Shahani and Emily Farris provide examples of the kind of work that becomes
possible when texts of “problematic authorship” are admitted – and of the different responses
to these problems, then and now. Smith, Shahani, and Farris demonstrate the extent to which
women are both embodied authors and discursive entities in their own text: in these essays,
“Mary Stuart” and “Hannah Wooley” are both historical subjects and textual constructs (asso-
ciated with texts possibly penned by others). But this once again reveals gender as a key term
in cultural negotiation in the early modern period: men feminize the texts of women writers
(real and imagined), but women employ masculine terms, as Guy-Bray’s essay suggests, to rep-
resent themselves. By contrast, North’s survey shows how our current practice allows gender
to remain an open question.
Patricia Pender looks at Margaret Beaufort’s patronage of textual production as a model
for royal patronage in the early modern period, demonstrating how Henry VIII’s grandmother
provided an imitable model for the patronage projects of both Catherine of Aragon and Kath-
erine Parr in the sixteenth century. Shifting attention back to an earlier period when women’s
patronage was not unusual, Pender counters the tendency to see women’s patronage as in name
only or simply as a vehicle of masculinist intention or commercial advancement. Pender’s recu-
perative account joins the efforts of Julie Crawford and Helen Smith to develop a more capa-
cious understanding of what patronage might mean in the early modern period and the power
relationships that it describes.15
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In Tarnya Cooper’s essay, we see how several Elizabethan widows of the middling sort and
of gentry used gifts of patronage and portraiture to rework their traditional, gender-defined
roles and exert political, social, religious and personal influence. Cooper argues that portraiture
generally allowed people to promulgate images of themselves of their own devising; for women,
and in this case, for widows, portraiture afforded the ability to display personal (female) virtue
beyond the home. Cooper provides case studies of several women who commissioned their own
portraits “situate themselves within institutions of patriarchal authority” (104), not as art objects,
but as evidence of their public roles.
The section concludes with Whitney Trettien’s study of the Harmonies of Little Gidding –
“authored with scissors” (120) by Anna and Mary Collett – and only recently recognized as the
product of these women’s conceptual as well as physical labor. Though previously considered
to have been “authored” by Nicolas Ferrar, with the women simply executing his design, the
Harmonies have recently been reclaimed for the women, but, Trettien argues, beyond their
authorship, what matters is their invention of a “new kind of printing,” (121) which interweaves
gendered skill sets (women’s needlework and male printing) to “carv[e] out a unique space for
both women’s published authorship and Little Gidding’s inclusively syncretic devotional reading
habits” (Ibid.). Authoring the Harmonies becomes a kind of “collaborative textile production” –
a fully agential act that exemplifies the radical, interventionist possibilities of communal textile/
textual authorship that Guy-Bray describes, which relegate women to a subordinated cultural
position in scenes produced by men.
The essays in “The Matter of Reform” reflect the predominant turn to religion of recent
years, often serving as correctives or counters to previous feminist engagements of their topics.
In her essay on The Witch of Edmonton, for example, Mary Floyd-Wilson argues for the need to
look beyond witchcraft discourse to understand properly the evil doings of the play. Rather than
focusing on marginalized women as victims and perpetrators of witchcraft, Floyd-Wilson traces
the workings of the Protestant devil, who is able to influence both men and women at all social
levels; the play thus works as a warning to heed the devilish acts of people across ranks, which
spread the contagion of sin more widely than any individual witch could do. While “[p]oor,
unmarried, marginalized women were characterized as exceedingly susceptible to temptation”
(142) in the early modern period, the play describes the “scapegoating, uncharitable practices”
(143) in which witches are produced and the social conditions in which they thrived – which is
to say that The Witch of Edmonton represents witchcraft as a communal practice. By working from
an analytic perspective that refuses a primary focus on the bodies of women as either sources or
vehicles for witchcraft, Floyd-Wilson is able to chart the more pervasive scope to Edmonton’s
devil across gender and rank.
Christina Luckyj also offers a revisionist reading of her topic, in this case the rejection by
educated women of humanist learning in favor of an exclusive focus on devotion and piety. For
Luckyj, this pattern is best understood not as an aspect of women’s gendered oppression – a
manifestation of the pervasive requirement to be “silent, chaste, and obedient” (161) – but rather
as a strategic choice with political implications. The women she studies didn’t “retreat into
piety”; rather, she shows, they displayed their learning in order to repudiate it (154), orchestrating
a kind of willful self-limiting that creates the space for a politically and religiously radical form
of godliness. Luckyj shows, once again, how the gender of a female author is negotiated within
a text; in her examples, however, assumptions about the lack of female education are exploited
in order to represent women as absent any authority but the Word of God.
Like Luckyj, Rosiland Smith wants to join the push back against readings of early modern
women’s religious texts as “depressingly acquiescent” (170). Focusing on Mary Stuart as a “focal
7
point for Protestant and Catholic constructions of gender, and [the] instigator of a program of
textual activity inseparable from the preservation and promotion of the Catholic faith,” (Ibid.)
Smith urges us to see Mary’s corpus as thoroughly hybrid – both public and private, sacred and
secular, elite and popular, political and religious – through a focus on “collective and collabora-
tive networks of authorship” (171). Smith thereby exemplifies (with Trettein) North’s claims
about the availability of new readings that attend an expanded sense of author attribution. In
this rendering and considering the range of texts associated with her – texts both authenticated
and circulated under her signature – Mary Stuart as “author” becomes “a kind of cumulatively
inscribed palimpsest” (175), both corporeal subject and political category, a focal point of tex-
tual agency mobilizing “larger discursive constructions of women, sovereignty, Catholicism and
authorship to individual and communal ends” (176).
Closing the section, Elizabeth Williamson focuses on the withheld scene of Joan’s martyr-
dom in 1 Henry VI, which in part completes the play’s attack on her character but also removes
her from the contest among witnesses normative to post-Reformation martyrdom scenes who
testify to a putative martyr’s saintly or heretical status. Because Joan’s death does not happen
onstage, it “never enters the realm of martyrological interpretation,” (192) so her body cannot
testify whether she is a witch or a saint. Ultimately, Williamson reads the withheld death scene
and the absence of a unified, stable sense of subjecthood as an opening to a radical possibility;
drawing from the insights of inter-theatrical performance theory, Williamson finally suggests
that we read Joan not in relation to her precedents (historical and narrative) but forward, look-
ing to “what the performance of this role might produce” (198) – namely a sense of unfixed, and
unfixable, identity.
The essays of the fourth section, “Bodies of Knowledge,” treat sexed and sexualized bodies
and the bodies of knowledge – domestic and professional – that either contain and manage
them or, alternately, give them ground for action. Karen Raber considers the discomforting
category collapse between food preparation and childbirth – both kinds of female labor that
produce flesh – in a series of Continental paintings and English plays. Tracing the discursive and
visual linkages between sex, childbirth, and meat-eating, between the birthing room and the
kitchen, Raber hearkens to the anxieties that attend the laboring female body, suggesting the
associations in the period that connect sexuality with cannibalism, humanity with the animal,
and gender with violence.
Gitanjali Shahani and Emily Farris study Hannah Woolley’s receipt collections, which “strad-
dle the realm of the culinary, the cosmetic, and the curative” as an example of women’s “textual
practices and material labors” in early modern England (225). Offering another instance of a
textual collaborative, Wooley’s recipe collections are “a repository of shared female knowledge”
that interconnects women in “communities of exchange” (226). Shahani and Farris show how
recipes share bodies of knowledge: the kitchen, in their reading, is “a kind of laboratory of trial
and error in which ingredients continually took new forms and were put to new uses” (Ibid.).
Female control over the care and feeding of the body became an alarming specter to English
doctors as their spices and ingredients drew less from their own gardens and more from markets
and ships. Woolly’s receipt collections serve to smooth that anxiety, Shahani and Farris argue, by
imagining an English body that is not (humorally) altered by foreign provisions but is able to put
them to domestic use.The collections offer a window onto a world of knowledge in the making,
with its Old and New World ingredients, its quotidian and exotic imperatives, and its reliance on
the expectation of experimentation, personal experience, and witness.
Staying in the world of household labor, Rebecca Laroche and Mary Trull consider how, in
a range of domestic advice tracts and instructional manuals, the dirty labor of lower-status female
servants is routinely erased or “hidden” in favor of what they call the “ostentatious labor” –
8
Sex education
clean and ceremonial – performed by higher-status, and typically male, workers. Laroche and
Trull propose this divide – between ostentatious and hidden labor – as a better heuristic than
the more-familiar dichotomy between intellectual and manual labor because, they argue, it bet-
ter exposes “the mechanisms of social difference at play” in these texts (240). Like Shahani and
Farris, Laroche and Trull show the class divisions within these texts (as recipes, for example, vari-
ously call for native or exotic ingredients). But Laroche and Trull also attend to what the texts do
not include – namely, the lower-status work on which households rely but do not mention (like
stoking a fire or breaking down a cut of meat), that is typically performed by women. Laroche
and Trull show how, by creating and enforcing this divide, these domestic texts work to further
the gendered and social differentiation of labor in the period.
While the first two essays of this section underscore the transformations of the body – repro-
ductive and humoral – through kitchen work and the anxieties that attend unstable corporeal
borders, the last two essays look at spectacular transformations of another kind. Both turn to the
work of single authors and the transformative powers of representation. Holly Dugan explores
the associations of Marvell’s snide sobriquet of Anne Monck, the “Monkey Duchess,” in his
Third Advice to a Painter. As both “failed aristocrat and an animal other,” Anne appears in the
poem only briefly, atop a ladder to hang a tapestry and bawdily exposed, but in Dugan’s reading,
she becomes the vehicle of Marvell’s trenchant critique – her unruly ridiculousness, her simian
unnaturalness, an embodiment of the outrageousness of the state-sponsored lies celebrating an
English victory in the Second Anglo-Dutch War (254). Dugan shows how monkeys were asso-
ciated in the period first with women and luxury, then with raunchy sexuality, and particularly
with Prince Rupert, General Monck’s ally in the war. These associations set the context for
Marvell’s portrait of Anne as the inappropriate monkey duchess, who rose, against the norms
of the natural order, from “a laborer, shopkeeper, and laundress to the aristocracy” and was rec-
ognized – despite widespread disparagement – as “motivating her husband to work towards a
political restoration of the King” (258).Though easily written off as a throwaway disparagement,
a moment of misogynistic meanness, Marvell’s mocking nickname satirizes not just Anne but
the war effort itself and the bombastic propaganda offered on its behalf.
In the final essay, Laura Knoppers studies Margaret Cavendish’s engagement with both medi-
cine and medical discourse, in her own life and in her writing, to show Cavendish both as part
of the “robust medical debates” of her time and as one who fashions a medical body that uses
her own as a model. Examining first an as-yet unexamined archive of materials in the Caven-
dish family that relate to Cavendish’s medical care and show her to be, like others of her class,
her own doctor, Knoppers then looks to the expository prose to see how Cavendish consist-
ently rewrites medical advice in discourse of her own claimed household expertise. These then
provide the context in which Knoppers reads Cavendish’s spoof of her own doctor in her life
and of Galenism in her fiction, and particularly in Blazing World, which is characterized by the
persistent good counsel – always followed – of the Empress and her ally, the Duchess.
The last section of the volume, “The Place of Production,” pursues some of these forays into
foreign worlds offshore. While essays of the previous section show that England’s colonial expan-
sion deeply affected how the English body was and could be imagined, these essays examine the
specifically transatlantic context of England’s global reach. Julie Kim studies portrayals of non-
European women in several early modern works about the Caribbean, arguing that they often
suggest unwitting, often fragmentary, counter-narratives that cumulatively question the inevitabil-
ity of colonial success – even in texts published to promote colonial endeavors.Yarico, an Amer-
indian woman described in Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, has
been studied as an instance of colonial fantasy and fetishization, a native woman befriended and
then betrayed by the colonists. But Kim reads her for traces of her expertise: she has knowledge,
9
especially about plants and their medicinal uses, that helps colonists survive. But that knowledge
can also be weaponized: cassava, for example, is poisonous, unless rightly prepared, and Ligon
knows that Yarico knows this. The exposition of knowledge necessary to the colonists is laced
with a specter of (female) danger. Kim shows how Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko plays out this pattern
explicitly: an Amerindian woman sucks out the poison from the governor’s wound and thus helps
the colonial project, but Imoinda, whose pregnancy spurs the rebellion, is willing to sacrifice her
progeny, thus gesturing both toward native knowledge of aboritfacients and the expertise that
native women could deploy “to thwart the easy progress of colonization” (299).
Finally, Valerie Forman studies how “wild” spaces in the new world become productive
plantations through the “racialization and gendering of laboring bodies, especially female
bodies” (304). Her focus is Southerne’s Oroonoko, which shows this racialization in its treatment of
inheritance – of both money and bodies – and in its transformation of generic conventions.
Southerne’s play complicates the conventional marriage plot of city comedy by being trans-
ported to the West Indies: in city comedy, desire is typically directed toward a marriage that
will properly transfer inheritance to the next generation; in Southerne’s play, that desire gets
interwoven into the inheritance concerns of a plantation economy: what’s at stake is a lucra-
tive plantation and the inheritable property – the laboring bodies – that make it function.
Forman shows how Southerne’s play participates in the production of a racialized divide
between Christian and African laborers (both indentured servant and slave), and how the
category of whiteness is constructed in the play by distinguishing between the ways different
female bodies are treated.
All of the essays in this volume capture the body in a particular attitude: in distress, vulner-
ability, pain, pleasure, labor, health, reproduction, or preparation for death. They attend to how
the body’s transformations affect the social and political arrangements that surround it. And
they show how apprehension of the body – in social and political terms – gives it shape. Rep-
resentation creates a corporeal subject upon which juridical power can be exercised: the body
is created as a political subject and our interactions with state power are premised upon these
creations. When we imagine a person rather than flesh, a sex rather than a body, a race rather
than a human without alliance, allegiance, or nation, we create meaning from matter and affix
identity. If we can say that material things – bodies in political space – occupy real dimensions,
we cannot say that there is anything inevitable about how those bodies are understood in politi-
cal space.We can only notice the mechanisms by which acts of apprehension and representation
are performed. The essays here throw into relief how social and political commitments to an
essential body help to create social categories of sex, gender, and race. They also make clear that
if the task of feminist criticism is not to study the essentially sexed body, its project is to study
how women are made.
Notes
1 See, in particular, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “sex” (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993), 5. At the start of the book, Butler “raise[es] the question of whether recourse
to matter and to the materiality of sex is necessary in order to establish that irreducible specificity
that is said to ground feminist practice.” The question is not whether to use the term of “wom[a]n” –
problematic in its construction, and always insinuated in arrangements of power – for, as Butler points
out, “the category of wom[a]n does not become useless through deconstruction.” Rather, the question
becomes how the term can be used tactically “even as one is . . . used and positioned by it, and also to
subject the term to a critique which interrogates the exclusionary operations and differential power-
relations that construct and delimit feminist invocations of ‘wom[a]n’” (our emphasis). Indeed, in such
interrogations we should not lose sight of the fact that “the exclusionary operations and differential
power-relations” are never unidirectional in relation to the category or its construction.
10
Sex education
2 Elizabeth A. Wilson, Gut Feminism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015).
3 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge,
1999), 3–4.
4 Ibid., 4. Butler’s formulation of Michel Foucault draws from the “Right of Death and Power over Life,”
in The History of Sexuality,Volume I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:Vintage, 1980).
5 Eduardo Kohn observes in How Forests Think that in camps in South America where jaguars can enter
and roam, one is told to sleep face up: if a jaguar encounters you face-down, he will assume that you
are meat; but if “a jaguar sees you as a being capable of looking back – a self like himself, a you – he’ll
leave you alone” (1). Such encounters remove representation from the (human) political context, for
here the animal is engaging in representation at the moment of encounter – perceiving a you, a subject,
rather than dead meat. Kohn’s work is a useful reminder that representation is not exclusive to human
actors. See How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The
University of California Press, 2013).
6 Object Lessons (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 40.
7 Ibid., 42.
8 “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128 (2013): 33.
9 Ibid., 33–34.
10 Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 131.
11 In this assertion, we are aligned with Melissa Sanchez and Ania Loomba, who, when surveying “Femi-
nism and the Burdens of History,” argue that “not only [is] gender . . . central to sexuality, but also . . .
attentiveness to the particularity of the historical moments in which gender (along with racial and sex-
ual identifications and categories) is constructed allows us to think more precisely about how identity
operates – not as a description of some essential truth of a person, but as a social and political point of
identification, mobilization, and limitation” (Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race,
and Sexuality [Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016], 22).
12 A number of collections published in the 1990s stressed the diversity of meanings in early modern race, as
well as its intersection with understandings of region, nationality, religion, and gender. Perhaps the limitation
(in terms of embodiment) lies in the fact that these collections emphasized race as a cultural understand-
ing rather than an embodied term. See Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo
Hendricks and Patricia Parker (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1994); Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the
Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1997); The William and
Mary Quarterly, 54: 1 (Winter 1997), special edition,“Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early
Modern World.”The most recent collection of essays to focus on gender, sexuality and race – and the most
successful in exploring these as both ideational and material categories of analysis – is the recent edition
of Sanchez and Loomba, Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality. I am not
ignoring the work of scholars such as Dympna Callaghan, Margaret Ferguson, Kim Hall, Ania Loomba, or
Valerie Traub – only focusing upon edited collections rather than single-authored works.
13 See, for example, Mario DiGangi’s review of Rethinking Feminism in Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017).
DiGangi’s criticism is not limited to that collection but delivered to the field: “In 2016, then, is ‘femi-
nist early modern studies’ just a more capacious sounding name for feminist Shakespeare studies? Is it
simply the case that the institutional pressures and rewards of our profession . . . constrain most early
modern literary scholars to be Shakespeareans? If so, what does this mean for the future of early modern
feminist studies?” (285).
14 See Madhavi Menon, “Desire,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2013), 327–345.
15 See Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014); and Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things:Women and Book Production in
Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘sex’. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
———. Gender Trouble: cbFeminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Crawford, Julie. Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality,Volume I, an Introduction. Translated by. Robert Hurley. New York:
Vintage, 1980.
11
Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker.
Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think:Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley and Los Angeles:The
University of California Press, 2013.
Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. Edited by Joyce Green MacDonald. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson Press, 1997.
The William and Mary Quarterly, 54: 1 (Winter 1997), special edition. Edited by Michael McGiffert, “Con-
structing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World.”
Menon, Madhavi. “Desire” in Early Modern Theatricality. Edited by Henry S. Turner, 327–345. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality. Edited by Melissa Sanchez and Ania
Loomba. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016.
Smith, Helen. Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
Traub,Valerie. “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies.” PMLA 128 (2013): 21–39.
———. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012.
Wilson, Elizabeth A. Gut Feminism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.
12
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Fig. 96.—Cybister roeseli (= laterimarginalis De G.) Europe. A, Larva
(after Schiödte); B, ♂ imago.
Fam. 9. Dytiscidae (Water-beetles).—Antennae bare; hind legs

formed for swimming, not capable of ordinary walking: metasternum
without a transverse line across it; behind closely united with the
extremely large coxae. Outer lobe of maxilla forming a two-jointed
palpus. The Dytiscidae, or true water-beetles, are of interest
because—unlike the aquatic Neuroptera—they exist in water in both
the larval and imaginal instars; nevertheless there is reason for
supposing that they are modified terrestrial Insects: these reasons
are (1) that in their general organisation they are similar to the
Carabidae, and they drown more quickly than the majority of land
beetles do; (2) though the larvae are very different from the larvae of
terrestrial beetles, yet the imaginal instars are much less profoundly
changed, and are capable of existing perfectly well on land, and of
taking prolonged flights through the air; (3) the pupa is, so far as
known, always terrestrial. The larvae and imagos are perfectly at
home in the water, except that they must come to the surface to get
air. Some of them are capable, however, when quiescent, of living for
hours together beneath the water, but there appears to be great
diversity in this respect.[92] The hind pair of legs is the chief means
of locomotion. These swimming-legs (Fig. 97) are deserving of
admiration on account of their mechanical perfection; this, however,
is exhibited in various degrees, the legs in the genera Dytiscus and
Hydroporus being but slender, while those of Cybister are so broad
and powerful, that a single stroke propels the Insect for a
considerable distance.
Fig. 97—Hind- or swimming-leg of Cybister tripunctatus. A, The whole
leg detached; B, the movable parts in the striking position. a,
Coxa; b, trochanter; c, femur; d, tibia; e, last joint of tarsus.
The wing-cases fit perfectly to the body, except at the tip, so as to

form an air-tight space between themselves and the back of the
Insect; this space is utilised as a reservoir for air. When the Dytiscus
feels the necessity for air it rises to the surface and exposes the tip
of the body exactly at the level of the water, separating at the same
time the abdomen from the wing-cases so as to open a broad chink
at the spot where the parts were, during the Insect's submersion, so
well held together as to be air- and water-tight. The terminal two
pairs of spiracles are much enlarged, and by curving the abdomen
the beetle brings them into contact with the atmosphere; respiration
is effected by this means as well as by the store of air carried about
under the wing cases. The air that enters the space between the
elytra and body is shut in there when the Insect closes the chink and
again dives beneath the water. The enlargement of the terminal
stigmata in Dytiscus is exceptional, and in forms more highly
organised in other respects, such as Cybister, these spiracles
remain minute; the presumption being that in this case respiration is
carried on almost entirely by means of the supply the Insect carries
in the space between the elytra and the base of the abdomen.[93]
The structure of the front foot of the male Dytiscus, and of many
other water-beetles, is highly remarkable, the foot being dilated to
form a palette or saucer, covered beneath by sucker-like structures
of great delicacy and beauty; by the aid of these the male is enabled
to retain a position on the female for many hours, or even days,
together. Lowne has shown that the suckers communicate with a sac
in the interior of the foot containing fluid, which exudes under
pressure. As the portions of the skeleton of the female on which
these suckers are brought to bear is frequently covered with pores,
or minute pits, it is probable that some correlation between the two
organisms is brought about by these structures. The females in
many groups of Dytiscidae bear on the upper surface of the body a
peculiar sculpture of various kinds, the exact use of which is
unknown; in many species there are two forms of the female, one
possessing this peculiar sculpture, the other nearly, or quite, without
it. The larvae of Dytiscidae differ from those of Carabidae chiefly by
the structure of the mouth and of the abdomen. They are excessively
rapacious, and are indeed almost constantly engaged in sucking the
juices of soft and small aquatic animals, by no means excluding their
own kind. The mode of suction is not thoroughly known, but so far as
the details have been ascertained they are correctly described, in the
work on aquatic Insects, by Professor Miall, we have previously
referred to; the mandibles are hollow, with a hole near the tip and
another at the base, and being sharp at the tips are thrust into the
body of a victim, and then by their closure the other parts of the
mouth, which are very beautifully constructed for the purpose, are
brought into fitting mechanical positions for completing the work of
emptying the victim. Nagel states that the larva of Dytiscus injects a
digestive fluid into the body of its victim, and that this fluid rapidly
dissolves all the more solid parts of the prey, so that the rapacious
larva can easily absorb all its victim except the insoluble outer skin.
The abdomen consists of only eight segments, and a pair of terminal
processes; the stigmata are all more or less completely obsolete—
according to species—with the exception of the pair on the eighth
segment at the tip of the body; the terminal segments are frequently
fringed with hairs, that serve not only as means of locomotion, but
also to float the pair of active stigmata at the surface when the
creature rises to get air. Although the larvae of Dytiscidae are but
little known, yet considerable diversity has already been found.
Those of Hyphydrus and some species of Hydroporus have the front
of the head produced into a horn, which is touched by the tips of the
mandibles.
Dytiscidae are peculiar inasmuch as they appear to flourish best in

the cooler waters of the earth. Lapland is one of the parts of Europe
richest in Dytiscidae, and the profusion of species in the tropics
compared with those of Europe is not nearly so great as it is in the
case of most of the other families of Coleoptera. About 1800 species
are at present known, and we have rather more than 100 species in
Britain.[94]
Series III. Polymorpha.
Antennae frequently either thicker at the tip (clavicorn) or serrate

along their inner edge (serricorn); but these characters, as well
as the number of joints in the feet and other points, are very
variable.
Upwards of fifty families are placed in this series; many of these

families are of very small extent, consisting of only a few species;
other families of the series are much larger, so that altogether about
40,000 species—speaking broadly, about one-fourth of the
Coleoptera—are included in the series. We have already (p. 189)
alluded to the fact that it is formed by certain conventional series,
Clavicornia, Serricornia, etc. united, because it has hitherto proved
impossible to define them.
Fam. 10. Paussidae.—Antennae of extraordinary form, usually two-

jointed, sometimes six- or ten-jointed. Elytra elongate, but truncate
behind, leaving the pygidium exposed. Tarsi five-jointed. The
Paussidae have always been recognised as amongst the most
remarkable of beetles, although they are of small size, the largest
attaining scarcely half an inch in length. They are found only in two
ways; either in ants' nests, or on the wing at night. They apparently
live exclusively in ants' nests, but migrate much. Paussidae usually
live in the nests of terrestrial ants, but they have been found in nests
of Cremastogaster in the spines of Acacia fistulosa. They have the
power of discharging, in an explosive manner, a volatile caustic fluid
from the anus, which is said by Loman to contain free iodine. Their
relations to the ants are at present unexplained, though much
attention has been given to the subject. When observed in the nests
they frequently appear as if asleep, and the ants do not take much
notice of them.
Fig. 98.—Paussus cephalotes ♂. El Hedjaz. (After Raffray.)
On other occasions the ants endeavour to drag them into the interior
of the nest, as if desirous of retaining their company: the Paussus
then makes no resistance to its hosts; if, however, it be touched,
even very slightly, by an observer, it immediately bombards: the ants,
as may be imagined, do not approve of this, and run away. Nothing
has ever been observed that would lead to the belief that the ants
derive any benefit from the presence of the Paussi, except that these
guests bear on some part of the body—frequently the great
impressions on the pronotum—patches of the peculiar kind of
pubescence that exists in many other kinds of ants'-nest beetles,
and is known in some of them to secrete a substance the ants are
fond of, and that the ants have been seen to lick the beetles. On the
other hand, the Paussi have been observed to eat the eggs and
larvae of the ants. The larva of Paussus is not known,[95] and
Raffray doubts whether it lives in the ants' nests. There are about
200 species of Paussidae known, Africa, Asia and Australia being
their chief countries; one species, P. favieri, is not uncommon in the
Iberian peninsula and South France, and a single species was
formerly found in Brazil. The position the family should occupy has
been much discussed; the only forms to which they make any real
approximation are Carabidae, of the group Ozaenides, a group of
ground beetles that also crepitate. Burmeister and others have
therefore placed the Paussidae in the series Adephaga, but we
follow Raffray's view (he being the most recent authority on the
family),[96] who concludes that this is an anomalous group not
intimately connected with any other family of Coleoptera, though
having more affinity to Carabidae than to anything else. The recently
discovered genus Protopaussus has eleven joints to the antennae,
and is said to come nearer to Carabidae than the previously known
forms did, and we may anticipate that a more extensive knowledge
will show that the family may find a natural place in the Adephaga.
The description of the abdomen given by Raffray is erroneous; in a
specimen of the genus Arthropterus the writer has dissected, he
finds that there are five ventral segments visible along the middle, six
at the sides, as in the families of Adephaga generally. There is said
to be a great difference in the nervous systems of Carabidae and
Paussidae, but so little is known on this point that we cannot judge
whether it is really of importance.
Fig. 99.—A, Larva of Gyrinus (after Schiödte); B, under side of Gyrinus

sp. (after Ganglbauer). 1, Prosternum; 2, anterior coxal cavity; 3.
mesothoracic episternum; 4, mesoepimeron; 5, mesosternum; 6,
metathoracic episternum; 7, middle coxal cavity; 8, metasternum;
9, hind coxa; 10, ventral segments. [N.B.—The first ventral
segment really consists, at each side, of two segments united; this
may be distinctly seen in many Gyrinidae.]
Fam. 11. Gyrinidae (Whirligig beetles).—Antennae very short; four

eyes; middle and hind legs forming short broad paddles; abdomen
with six segments visible along the middle, seven along each side.
These Insects are known to all from their habit of floating lightly on
the surface of water, and performing graceful complex curves round
one another without colliding; sometimes they may be met with in
great congregations. They are admirably constructed for this mode
of life, which is comparatively rare in the Insect world; the
Hydrometridae amongst the bugs, and a small number of different
kinds of Diptera, being the only other Insects that are devoted to a
life on the surface of the waters. Of all these, Gyrinidae are in their
construction the most adapted for such a career. They are able to
dive to escape danger, and they then carry with them a small supply
of air, but do not stay long beneath the surface. Their two hind pairs
of legs are beautifully constructed as paddles, expanding
mechanically when moved in the backward direction, and collapsing
into an extremely small space directly the resistance they meet with
is in the other direction. The front legs of these Insects are
articulated to the thorax in a peculiar direction so that their soles do
not look downwards but towards one another; hence the sensitive
adhesive surface used during coupling is placed on the side of the
foot, forming thus a false sole: a remarkable modification otherwise
unknown in Insects. They breathe chiefly by means of the very large
metathoracic spiracles.
The larvae (Fig. 99, A) are purely aquatic, and are highly modified for
this life, being elongate creatures, with sharp, mandibles and nine
abdominal segments, each segment bearing on each side a trachea
branchia; these gills assist to some extent in locomotion. The
stigmata are quite obsolete, but the terminal segment bears four
processes, one pair of which may be looked on as cerci, the other as
a pair of gills corresponding with the pair on each of the preceding
segments. The mandibles are not suctorial, but, according to
Meinert, possess an orifice for the discharge of the secretion of a
mandibular gland. Gyrinidae are chiefly carnivorous in both the larval
and imaginal instars. Fully 300 species are known; they are
generally distributed, though wanting in most of the islands of the
world except those of large size. The finest forms are the Brazilian
Enhydrus and the Porrorhynchus of tropical Asia.[97] In Britain we
have nine species, eight of Gyrinus, one of Orectochilus; the latter
form is rarely seen, as it hides during the day, and performs its rapid
gyrations at night.
The Gyrinidae are one of the most distinct of all the families of
Coleoptera: by some they are associated in the Adephagous series;
but they have little or no affinity with the other members thereof.
Without them the Adephaga form a natural series of evidently allied
families, and we consider it a mistake to force the Gyrinidae therein
because an objection is felt by many taxonomists to the maintenance
of isolated families. Surely if there are in nature some families allied
and others isolated, it is better for us to recognise the fact, though it
makes our classifications look less neat and precise, and increases
the difficulty of constructing "tables."
Fam. 12. Hydrophilidae.—Tarsi five-jointed, the first joint in many

cases so small as to be scarcely evident: antennae short, of less
than eleven joints, not filiform, but consisting of three parts, a basal
part of one or two elongate joints, an intermediate part of two or
more small joints, and an apical part of larger (or at any rate broader)
joints, which are pubescent, the others being bare. Outer lobe of
maxillae usually complex, but not at all palpiform, maxillary palpi
often very long; the parts of the labium much concealed behind the
mentum, the labial palpi very widely separated. Hind coxae
extending the width of the body, short, the lamina interior small in
comparison with the lamina exterior. Abdomen of five visible
segments. The Hydrophilidae are an extensive family of beetles,
unattractive in colours and appearance, and much neglected by
collectors. A large part of the family live in water, though most of
them have only feeble powers of aquatic locomotion, and the beetles
appear chiefly to devote their attention to economising the stock of
air each individual carries about. The best known forms of the family
are the species of Hydrophilus. They are, however, very exceptional
in many respects, and are far more active and predaceous than most
of the other forms. Much has been written about Hydrophilus piceus,
one of the largest of British beetles. This Insect breathes in a most
peculiar manner: the spiracles are placed near bands of delicate
pubescence, forming tracts that extend the whole length of the body,
and in this particular species cover most of the under surface of the
body; these velvety tracts retain a coating of air even when the
Insect is submerged and moves quickly through the water. It would
appear rather difficult to invent a mechanism to supply these tracts
with fresh air without the Insect leaving the water; but nevertheless
such a mechanism is provided by the antennae of the beetle, the
terminal joints of which form a pubescent scoop, made by some
longer hairs into a funnel sufficiently large to convey a bubble of air.
The Insect therefore rises to the surface, and by means of the
antennae, which it exposes to the air, obtains a supply with which it
surrounds a large part of its body; for, according to Miall, it carries a
supply on its back, under the elytra, as well as on its ventral surface.
From the writer's own observations, made many years ago, he
inclines to the opinion that the way in which the Hydrophilus uses the
antennae to obtain air varies somewhat according to circumstances.
Many of the members of the sub-family Hydrophilides construct egg-

cocoons. In the case of Hydrophilus piceus, the boat-like structure is
provided with a little mast, which is supposed by some to be for the
purpose of securing air for the eggs. Helochares and Spercheus
(Fig. 100) carry the cocoon of eggs attached to their own bodies.
Philydrus constructs, one after the other, a number of these egg-
bags, each containing about fifteen eggs, and fixes each bag to the
leaf of some aquatic plant; the larvae as a rule hatch speedily, so
that the advantage of the bag is somewhat problematic.
Fig. 100.—Spercheus emarginatus ♀. Britain. A, Upper surface of

beetle; B, under surface of abdomen, with the egg-sac ruptured
and some of the eggs escaping.
The larvae of the aquatic division of the family have been to a certain
extent studied by Schiödte and others; those of the Sphaeridiides—
the terrestrial group of the family—are but little known. All the larvae
seem to be predaceous and carnivorous, even when the imago is of
vegetable-feeding habits; and Duméril states that in Hydrous
caraboides the alimentary canal undergoes a great change at the
period of metamorphosis, becoming very elongate in the adult,
though in the larva it was short. The legs are never so well
developed as they are in the Adephaga, the tarsi being merely claw-
like or altogether wanting; the mandibles are never suctorial. The
respiratory arrangements show much diversity. In most of the
Hydrophilides the process is carried on by a pair of terminal spiracles
on the eighth abdominal segment, as in Dytiscidae, and these are
either exposed or placed in a respiratory chamber. In Berosus the
terminal stigmata are obsolete, and the sides of the body bear long
branchial filaments. Cussac says that in Spercheus (Fig. 101) there
are seven pairs of abdominal spiracles, and that the larva breathes
by presenting these to the air;[98] but Schiödte states that in this form
there are neither thoracic nor abdominal spiracles, except a pair
placed in a respiratory chamber on the eighth segment of the
abdomen, after the manner described by Miall as existing in
Hydrobius. No doubt Cussac was wrong in supposing the peculiar
lateral abdominal processes to be stigmatiferous. In Berosus there
are patches of aëriferous, minute pubescence on the body. The
pupae of Hydrophilides repose on the dorsal surface, which is
protected by spinous processes on the pronotum, and on the sides
of the abdomen.
We have already remarked that this is one of the most neglected of

the families of Coleoptera, and its classification is not satisfactory. It
is usually divided into Hydrophilides and Sphaeridiides. The
Sphaeridiides are in large part terrestrial, but their separation from
the purely aquatic Hydrophilides cannot be maintained on any
grounds yet pointed out. Altogether about 1000 species of
Hydrophilidae are known, but this probably is not a tenth part of
those existing. In Britain we have nearly ninety species. Some
taxonomists treat the family as a series with the name Palpicornia.
The series Philhydrida of older authors included these Insects and
the Parnidae and Heteroceridae.
Fig. 101—Larva of Spercheus emarginatus. (After Schiödte).
Fam. 13. Platypsyllidae.—This consists of a single species. It will

be readily recognised from Fig. 102, attention being given to the
peculiar antennae, and to the fact that the mentum is trilobed behind.
This curious species has been found only on the beaver. It was first
found by Ritsema on American beavers (Castor canadensis) in the
Zoological Gardens at Amsterdam, but it has since been found on
wild beavers in the Rhone in France; in America it appears to be
commonly distributed on these animals from Alaska to Texas. It is
very remarkable that a wingless parasite of this kind should be found
in both hemispheres. The Insect was considered by Westwood to be
a separate Order called Achreioptera, but there can be no doubt that
it is a beetle. It is also admitted that it shows some points of
resemblance with Mallophaga, the habits of which are similar. Its
Coleopterous nature is confirmed by the larva, which has been
described by both Horn and Riley.[99] Little is known as to the food
and life-history. Horn states that the eggs are placed on the skin of
the beaver amongst the densest hair; the larvae move with a sinuous
motion, like those of Staphylinidae. It has been suggested that the
Insect feeds on an Acarid, Schizocarpus mingaudi; others have
supposed that it eats scales of epithelium or hairs of the beaver.
Fig. 102—Platypsyllus castoris. A, Upper side; B, lower side, with legs
of one side removed; C, antenna. (After Westwood.)
Fig. 103—Leptinus testaceus. Britain.
Fam. 14. Leptinidae.—Antennae rather long, eleven-jointed, without

club, but a little thicker at the extremity. Eyes absent or imperfect.
Tarsi five-jointed. Elytra quite covering abdomen. Mentum with the
posterior angles spinously prolonged. A family of only two genera
and two species. Their natural history is obscure, but is apparently of
an anomalous nature; the inference that may be drawn from the little
that is known being that they are parasitic on mammals. There is
little or nothing in their structure to indicate this, except the condition
of blindness; and until recently the Insects were classified amongst
Silphidae. Leptinus testaceus (Fig. 103) is a British Insect, and
besides occurring in Europe is well known in North America. In
Europe it has been found in curious places, including the nests of
mice and bumble-bees. In America it has been found on the mice
themselves by Dr. Ryder, and by Riley in the nests of a common
field-mouse, together with its larva, which, however, has not been
described. The allied genus Leptinillus is said by Riley to live on the
beaver, in company with Platypsyllus.[100] It has been suggested that
the natural home of the Leptinus is the bee's nest, and that perhaps
the beetle merely makes use of the mouse as a means of getting
from one nest of a bumble-bee to another.
Fam. 15. Silphidae.—The mentum is usually a transverse plate,

having in front a membranous hypoglottis, which bears the exposed
labial palpi, and immediately behind them the so-called bilobed
ligula. The anterior coxae are conical and contiguous: prothoracic
epimera and episterna not distinct. Visible abdominal segments
usually five, but sometimes only four, or as many as seven. Tarsi
frequently five-jointed, but often with one joint less. Elytra usually
covering the body and free at the tips, but occasionally shorter than
the body, and even truncate behind so as to expose from one to four
of the dorsal plates; but there are at least three dorsal plates in a
membranous condition at the base of the abdomen. These beetles
are extremely diverse in size and form, some being very minute,
others upwards of an inch long, and there is also considerable range
of structure. In this family are included the burying-beetles
(Necrophorus), so well known from their habit of making excavations
under the corpses of small Vertebrates, so as to bury them. Besides
these and Silpha, the roving carrion-beetles, the family includes
many other very different forms, amongst them being the larger part
of the cave-beetles of Europe and North America. These belong
mostly to the genera Bathyscia in Europe, and Adelops in North
America; but of late years quite a crowd of these eyeless cave-
beetles of the group Leptoderini have been discovered, so that the
European catalogue now includes about 20 genera and 150 species.
The species of the genus Catopomorphus are found in the nests of
ants of the genus Aphaenogaster in the Mediterranean region.
Scarcely anything is known as to the lives of either the cave-
Silphidae or the myrmecophilous forms.
The larvae of several of the larger forms of Silphidae are well known,
but very little has been ascertained as to the smaller forms. Those of
the burying-beetles have spiny plates on the back of the body, and
do not resemble the other known forms of the family. The rule is that
the three thoracic segments are well developed, and that ten
abdominal segments are also distinct; the ninth abdominal segment
bears a pair of cerci, which are sometimes elongate. Often the dorsal
plates are harder and better developed than is usual in Coleopterous
larvae. This is especially the case with some that are endowed with
great powers of locomotion, such as S. obscura (Fig. 104). The food
of the larvae is as a rule decomposing animal or vegetable matter,
but some are predaceous, and attack living objects. The larger
Silpha larvae live, like the Necrophorus, on decomposing animal
matter, but run about to seek it; hence many specimens of some of
these large larvae may sometimes be found amongst the bones of a
very small dead bird. We have found the larva and imago of S.
thoracica in birds' nests containing dead nestlings. S. atrata and S.
laevigata make war on snails. S. lapponica enters the houses in
Lapland and ravages the stores of animal provisions. S. opaca
departs in a very decided manner from the habits of its congeners,
as it attacks beetroot and other similar crops in the growing state; it
is sometimes the cause of serious loss to the growers of beet. The
larvae of the group Anisotomides are believed to be chiefly
subterranean in habits; that of A. cinnamomea feeds on the truffle,
and the beetle is known as the truffle-beetle.
Fig. 104—A, Larva of Silpha obscura. Europe. (After Schiödte). B,

Ptomaphila lacrymosa, Australia.
The number of species of Silphidae known must be at present

nearer 900 than 800. Of these an unusually large proportion belong
to the European and North American regions; Silphidae being
apparently far from numerous in the tropics. Rather more than 100
species are natives of Britain. The family reappears in considerable
force in New Zealand, and is probably well represented in South
Australia and Tasmania. The most remarkable form known is
perhaps the Australian genus Ptomaphila (Fig. 104, B). The
classification of the family is due to Dr. Horn.[101] The only change of
importance that has since been suggested is the removal of
Sphaerites from this family to Synteliidae. Anisotomidae and
Clambidae have been considered distinct families, but are now
included in Silphidae.
Fam. 16. Scydmaenidae.—Minute Insects allied to Silphidae, but
with the hind coxae separated, and the facets of the eyes coarser;
the tarsi are five-jointed; the number of visible abdominal segments
is six. These small beetles are widely spread over the earth's
surface, and about 700 species are now known, of which we have
about a score in Britain; many live in ants' nests, but probably
usually rather as intruders than as guests that have friendly relations
with their hosts. Nothing is known as to their life-histories, but the
food of the imago, so far as is known, consists of Acari. Mastigus is a
very aberrant form, found in moss and dead leaves in Southern
Europe. By means of Brathinus the family is brought very near to
Silphidae; Casey, however, considers Brathinus to belong to
Staphylinidae rather than to Scydmaenidae. The South European
Leptomastax is remarkable on account of the slender, long, sickle-
shaped mandibles. The Oriental genus Clidicus is the largest and
most remarkable form of the family; it has a very slender neck to its
broad head, and is more than a quarter of an inch long.
Fam. 17. Gnostidae.—Minute Insects with three-jointed antennae,

five-jointed tarsi, and three apparent ventral segments, the first of
which, however, is elongate, and consists of three united plates.
Elytra entirely covering the after-body. The family consists of two
species which have been found in the nests of ants, of the genus
Cremastogaster, in Brazil.[102]
Fam. 18. Pselaphidae.—Very small Insects; the elytra much

abbreviated, usually leaving as much as half the abdomen
uncovered; the maxillary palpi usually greatly developed, and of a
variety of remarkable forms; the segments of the abdomen not more
than seven in number, with little or no power of movement. Tarsi with
not more than three joints. These small Coleoptera mostly live in the
nests of ants, and present a great diversity of extraordinary shapes,
and very peculiar structures of the antennae and maxillary palpi.
Owing to the consolidation of some of its segments, the abdomen
frequently appears to have less than the usual number. In the
curious sub-family Clavigerides, the antennae may have the joints
reduced to two or even, to all appearance, to one; the tarsi suffer a
similar reduction. There are about 2500 species of Pselaphidae
known; many of them have never been found outside the ants' nests;
very little, however, is known as to their natural history. It is certain
that some of them excrete, from little tufts of peculiar pubescence, a
substance that the ants are fond of. The secretory patches are found
on very different parts of the body and appendages. Claviger
testaceus is fed by the ants in the same way as these social Insects
feed one another; the Claviger has also been seen to eat the larvae
of the ants. They ride about on the backs of the ants when so
inclined. The family is allied to Staphylinidae, but is easily
distinguished by the rigid abdomen. Only one larva—that of
Chennium bituberculatum—is known. It appears to be very similar to
the larvae of Staphylinidae. The best account of classification and
structure is that given by M. Achille Raffray,[103] who has himself
discovered and described a large part of the known species.
Fam. 19. Staphylinidae.—Elytra very short, leaving always some of

the abdominal segments exposed, and covering usually only two of
the segments. Abdomen usually elongate, with ten dorsal, and seven
or eight ventral segments; of the latter six or seven are usually
exposed; the dorsal plates as hard as the ventral, except sometimes
in the case of the first two segments; the segments very mobile, so
that the abdomen can be curled upwards. The number of tarsal joints
very variable, often five, but frequently as few as three, and not
always the same on all the feet. Staphylinidae (formerly called
Brachelytra or Microptera) is one of the most extensive of even the
great families of Coleoptera; notwithstanding their diversity, they may
in nearly all cases be recognised by the more than usually mobile
and uncovered abdomen, combined with the fact that the parts of the
mouth are of the kind we have mentioned in Silphidae. The present
state of the classification of this family has been recently discussed
by Ganglbauer.[104]
Fig. 105—Staphylinidae. A, Larva of Philonthus nitidus. Britain. (After
Schiödte.) B, Ocypus olens, Britain; C, tip of abdomen, of O.
olens with stink-vessels.
At present about 9000 species are known, some of which are

minute, while scarcely any attain a size of more than an inch in
length, our common British black cock-tail, or "devil's coach-horse
beetle," Ocypus olens, being amongst the largest. Though the elytra
are short, the wings in many forms are as large as those of the
majority of beetles; indeed many Staphylinidae are more apt at
taking flight than is usual with Coleoptera; the wings when not in use
are packed away under the short elytra, being transversely folded,
and otherwise crumpled, in a complicated but orderly manner. It is
thought that the power of curling up the abdomen is connected with
the packing away of the wings after flight; but this is not the case: for
though the Insect sometimes experiences a difficulty in folding the
wings under the elytra after they have been expanded, yet it
overcomes this difficulty by slight movements of the base of the
abdomen, rather than by touching the wings with the tip. What the
value of this exceptional condition of short elytra and corneous
dorsal abdominal segments to the Insect may be is at present quite
mysterious. The habits of the members of the family are very varied;
many run with great activity; the food is very often small Insects,
living or dead; a great many are found in fungi of various kinds, and
perhaps eat them. It is in this family that we meet with some of the
most remarkable cases of symbiosis, i.e. lives of two kinds of
creatures mutually accommodated with good will. The relations
between the Staphylinidae of the genera Atemeles and Lomechusa,
and certain ants, in the habitations of which they dwell, are very
interesting. The beetles are never found out of the ants' nests, or at
any rate not very far from them. The most friendly relations exist
between them and the ants: they have patches of yellow hairs, and
these apparently secrete some substance with a flavour agreeable to
the ants, which lick the beetles from time to time. On the other hand,
the ants feed the beetles; this they do by regurgitating food, at the
request of the beetle, on to their lower lip, from which it is then taken
by the beetle (Fig. 82). The beetles in many of their movements
exactly resemble the ants, and their mode of requesting food, by
stroking the ants in certain ways, is quite ant-like. So reciprocal is the
friendship that if an ant is in want of food, the Lomechusa will in its
turn disgorge for the benefit of its host. The young of the beetles are
reared in the nests by the ants, who attend to them as carefully as
they do to their own young. The beetles have a great fondness for
the ants, and prefer to sit amongst a crowd thereof; they are fond of
the ants' larvae as food, and indeed eat them to a very large extent,
even when their own young are receiving food from the ants. The
larva of Lomechusa, as described by Wasmann (to whom we are
indebted for most of our knowledge of this subject),[105] when not
fully grown, is very similar to the larvae of the ants; although it
possesses legs it scarcely uses them: its development takes place
with extraordinary rapidity, two days, at most, being occupied in the
egg, and the larva completing its growth in fourteen days. Wasmann
seems to be of opinion that the ants scarcely distinguish between the
beetle-larvae and their own young; one unfortunate result for the
beetle follows from this, viz. that in the pupal state the treatment that
is suitable for the ant-larvae does not agree with the beetle-larvae:
the ants are in the habit of digging up their own kind and lifting them
out and cleaning them during their metamorphosis; they also do this
with the beetle-larvae, with fatal results; so that only those that have
the good fortune to be forgotten by the ants complete their
development. Thus from thirty Lomechusa larvae Wasmann obtained
a single imago, and from fifty Atemeles larvae not even one.
Many other Staphylinidae are exclusively attached to ants' nests, but

most of them are either robbers, at warfare with the ants—as is the
case with many species of Myrmedonia that lurk about the outskirts
of the nests—or are merely tolerated by the ants, not receiving any
direct support from them. The most remarkable Staphylinidae yet
discovered are some viviparous species, forming the genera
Corotoca and Spirachtha, that have very swollen abdomens, and live
in the nests of Termites in Brazil:[106] very little is, however, known
about them. A very large and powerful Staphylinid, Velleius dilatatus,
lives only in the nests of hornets and wasps. It has been supposed to
be a defender of the Hymenoptera, but the recent observations of
Janet and Wasmann make it clear that this is not the case: the
Velleius has the power of making itself disagreeable to the hornets
by some odour, and they do not seriously attack it. The Velleius finds
its nutriment in larvae or pupae of the wasps that have fallen from
their cells, or in other organic refuse.
The larvae of Staphylinidae are very similar to those of Carabidae,

but their legs are less perfect, and are terminated only by a single
claw; there is no distinct labrum. The pupae of some are obtected,
i.e. covered by a secondary exudation that glues all the appendages
together, and forms a hard coat, as in Lepidoptera. We have about
800 species of Staphylinidae in Britain, and it is probable that the
family will prove one of the most extensive of the Order. It is
probable that one hundred thousand species or even more are at
present in existence.
Fam. 20. Sphaeriidae.—Very minute. Antennae eleven-jointed,

clubbed. Tarsi three-jointed. Abdomen with only three visible ventral
segments. This family includes only three or four species of Insects
about 1⁄50 of an inch long. They are very convex, and be found
walking on mud. S. acaroides occurs in our fens. Mr. Matthews
considers that they are most nearly allied to Hydrophilidae.[107]
Fig. 106—Trichopteryx fascicularis. Britain. A, Outline of perfect Insect;
B, part of upper surface; C, larva from side; D, from above; E,
pupa; F, wing; G, natural size of imago.
Fam. 21. Trichopterygidae.—Extremely minute: antennae clavicorn

(basal and apical joints thicker than middle joints); tarsi three-jointed;
elytra sometimes covering abdomen, in other cases leaving a
variable number of segments exposed; wings fringed. This family
comprises the smallest Insects; Nanosella fungi being only 1⁄100 of
an inch long, while the largest Trichopterygid is only 1⁄12 of an inch.
The small size is not accompanied by any degeneration of structure,
the minute, almost invisible forms, having as much anatomical
complexity as the largest Insects. Very little is known as to the
natural history. Probably these Insects exist in all parts of the world,
for we have about eighty species in England, and Trichopterygidae
are apparently numerous in the tropics.[108]
Fam. 22. Hydroscaphidae.—Extremely minute aquatic Insects, with

elongate abdomen. Antennae eight-jointed. The other characters are
much the same as those we have mentioned for Trichopterygidae.
The family is not likely to come before the student, as only three or
four species from Southern Europe and North America are known.
[109]

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Routledge Companion to Women Sex

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Edited by Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller

ISBN: 978-1-4724-7994-5 (hbk)

Introduction: sex education 1

1 Ain’t I a Ladie?: race, sexuality, and early modern women writers 15

2 Early modern bodies that matter 33

3 Regendering the sublime and the beautiful: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra

4 Women and literary production 61

5 Ambiguities of female authorship and the accessible archive 73

6 Patterns of print: women’s textual patronage in the “early” early

7 Picturing the agency of widows: female patronage among the gentry

8 Women’s labor and the Little Gidding harmonies 120

9 “A witch! Who is not?”: demonic contagion, gender, and class in

10 “A Womans Logicke”: Puritan women writers and the rejection

11 Prosopopoeia, gender, and religion: the poetry of Mary Stuart,

12 Dying offstage: gender and martyrdom in 1 Henry VI189

14 “Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron”: ingredients, instructions, and the

15 “From a drudge, to . . . a cook”: hidden and ostentatious labor in the

16 “[T]he monkey duchess all undressed”: simians, satire, and women

17 Gender, knowledge, and the medical marketplace: the case of

18 Counter-narratives of survival: Amerindian and African women

19 Constructing white privilege: transatlantic slavery, reproduction, and

13.4 Joachim Wtewael, Kitchen Scene, c.1620, oil on canvas,

Katherine B. Attié is Assistant Professor of English at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Stephen Guy-Bray is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He special-

Laura L. Knoppers is Professor of English at Notre Dame. She works on seventeenth-century

Christina Luckyj is Professor of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia,

Rosalind Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Newcastle, Australia,

Whitney Trettien is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of

Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller

Fam. 9. Dytiscidae (Water-beetles).—Antennae bare; hind legs

The wing-cases fit perfectly to the body, except at the tip, so as to

Dytiscidae are peculiar inasmuch as they appear to flourish best in

Series III. Polymorpha.

Antennae frequently either thicker at the tip (clavicorn) or serrate

Upwards of fifty families are placed in this series; many of these

Fam. 10. Paussidae.—Antennae of extraordinary form, usually two-

Fig. 98.—Paussus cephalotes ♂. El Hedjaz. (After Raffray.)

Fig. 99.—A, Larva of Gyrinus (after Schiödte); B, under side of Gyrinus

Fam. 11. Gyrinidae (Whirligig beetles).—Antennae very short; four

Fam. 12. Hydrophilidae.—Tarsi five-jointed, the first joint in many

Many of the members of the sub-family Hydrophilides construct egg-

Fig. 100.—Spercheus emarginatus ♀. Britain. A, Upper surface of

We have already remarked that this is one of the most neglected of

Fam. 13. Platypsyllidae.—This consists of a single species. It will

Fig. 103—Leptinus testaceus. Britain.

Fam. 14. Leptinidae.—Antennae rather long, eleven-jointed, without

Fam. 15. Silphidae.—The mentum is usually a transverse plate,

Fig. 104—A, Larva of Silpha obscura. Europe. (After Schiödte). B,

The number of species of Silphidae known must be at present

Fam. 17. Gnostidae.—Minute Insects with three-jointed antennae,

Fam. 18. Pselaphidae.—Very small Insects; the elytra much

Fam. 19. Staphylinidae.—Elytra very short, leaving always some of

At present about 9000 species are known, some of which are

Introduction: sex education 1

1 Ain’t I a Ladie?: race, sexuality, and early modern women writers 15

2 Early modern bodies that matter 33

4 Women and literary production 61

5 Ambiguities of female authorship and the accessible archive 73

8 Women’s labor and the Little Gidding harmonies 120

12 Dying offstage: gender and martyrdom in 1 Henry VI189