Performing Maternity in Early Modern England

Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity's cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540-1690. The essays interrogate how early modern texts depict fertility, conception, delivery, and gendered constructions of maternity by analyzing a wealth of historical documents and images in conjunction with dramatic and non-dramatic literary texts. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated, and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production of gender identity during the early modern period.Moncrief, Kathryn is the author of 'Performing Maternity in Early Modern England', published 2007 under ISBN 9780754661177 and ISBN 0754661172.