Download or read book Performing Maternity in Early Modern England written by Kathryn R. McPherson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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modern texts depict fertility, conception, delivery and gendered constructions of maternity by analyzing a wealth of historical documents and images in conjunction with dramatic and non-dramatic literary texts.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.