This volume offers an integrated set of local studies exploring the gendering of political activities across a variety of sites ranging from print culture, courts, government and philanthropic bodies and public spaces, outlining how a particular activity was constituted as political and exploring how this contributed to a gendered concept of citizenship. The comparative and transnational perspectives revealed through combining such work contributes to establishing new knowledge about the relationship between gender, citizenship and the development of the modern town in Northern Europe....

Almost exactly thirty years ago, Joan W. Scott, in a widely cited article, advocated the use of gender as a tool of historical analysis. Since then, many studies have used gender to consider the past. However, rather than developing new theories of gender that describe early modern contexts, historians often either avoid theory entirely or use gender theories which derive from particularly modern, political contexts. This book revisits the concept of gender within European History, 1400-1800. In the interest of cross-fertilization between gender and history, a selection of chapters...