Masculine Births

Milton, Women, and the Law

von Lynne Greenberg, Lynne Ann Greenberg

248 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Examining the legal lives of early modern women through Milton's literary works In his History of Britain, John Milton writes, "Laws are Masculin Births . . . nothing [is] more awry from the Law of God and Nature, then that a Woman should give Laws to Men." In this interdisciplinary study, Lynne Greenberg explores the normative and nonnormative legal lives of early modern women as depicted in Milton's works—unmarried and married women, mothers, heiresses, widows, and queens—providing cogent overviews of the laws of multiple jurisdictions to offer critical context for each case study. Greenberg explores a wide range of legal-juridical materials and previously unexplored archival and private family documents. As she demonstrates, while Milton's narratives are at times enmeshed in existing jural paradigms, they also offer resistant responses to marital, custodial, property, inheritance, and criminal laws and even imagine alternative jural paradigms for women. Through Masculine Births: Milton, Women and the Law, Greenberg deftly reveals that Milton both reproduces seventeenth-century legal constructs and gives birth to laws that move us toward greater equality for women.

• Reihe: Rethinking the Early Modern
• Themen: Gesellschaft und Sozialwissenschaften Gesellschaft und Kultur, allgemein Gesellschaftliche Gruppen, Gemeinschaften und Identitäten Gruppen Frauen und Mädchen
• ISBN: 9780810149847
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 16.03.2026
• Größe: 151 x 228 mm
• Verlag: Northwestern University Press