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‘We have to produce something that doesn’t yet exist and of which we can have no idea of what it will be’.

In London between 1918 and 1924, the social, economic, and – crucially – sexual freedoms of six young women became the conceptual battleground on which the outcomes of a series of high-profile criminal and civil trials for libel, murder, drug-taking, and divorce were determined.

The Name of a Queen: William Fleetwood’s Itinerarium ad Windsor is a valuable piece of research, as it publishes a very intriguing and little-studied source written in 1575. In analysing this source which is considered as both a ‘document and [a] fiction’ (pp.

Both the problematic discourses of ‘professional/amateur’ and ‘public/private spheres’, and also the multifaceted hierarchies between the fine and the applied arts, have received substantial academic enquiry in the last thirty years. This is particularly true for the art historians researching the cultural activities of middle-class women in 19th-century Britain.

Lady Grisell Baillie (1665–1746) graces the front cover of this volume, her poise and thoughtful, questioning expression a fitting overture for a book that is peppered with images of 18th-century Scottish women, literally making them more visible.

In the latest of our occasional Reviews in History podcast series, Jordan Landes talks to Amanda Herbert about her new book, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain.
Amanda Herbert is assistant professor of history at Christopher Newport University.

Elizabeth I (1533–1603) has been the subject of many fictional representations, some as early as the 1680s, speculating about her private life. Theatre plays, novels and later also films explored the allegations made against her during her life-time, such as suggestions that the Queen was infertile, that she was malformed, or in fact, a man or a hermaphrodite (p. 355).

Over years of supervising student dissertations I have been petitioned by many with a wish to undertake a study of gender (or more particularly women) and the Scottish Enlightenment. I usually caution against this. Gender relative to the Enlightenment is so very difficult to pin down. The Enlightenment, after all, wasn’t something that anyone knew they were doing or experiencing.

Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London is Tim Reinke-Williams’ first monograph, drawn from elements of his PhD thesis ‘The negotiation and fashioning of female honour in early modern London’.(1) Crucially, it is also the first work dedicated solely to the exploration of how women from the ‘middling sort’ and labouring poor constructed iden

W. B. Yeats’s famous poem, ‘Easter 1916’, is an ambivalent celebration of the new pantheon of heroes created when, through the means of a failed nationalist rebellion in Dublin, ‘a terrible beauty is born’.