Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown. Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640: Turning the World Upside Down.

Abstract

This volume is in part the culmination of David E. Underdown’s many prolific years of research into early modern social history and especially early modern popular culture. After Underdown’s very sad death from cancer, Susan D. Amussen decided to revise and complete the manuscript he had left, taking it in new and exciting directions that engage fully with recent work in early modern gender studies. The results could have been a cacophony; instead, Amussen’s efforts work to bring Underdown’s ideas into full and fruitful dialogue with recent gender studies. Much of the material covered in Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640, will be familiar to those who remember Underdown’s contested and significant intervention in gender debates in the 1980s. Underdown claimed that the mid-seventeenth century was the site of a gender crisis signified by rough ridings, images of the world turned upside down, pamphlets and plays on the woman debate, stage misogyny, the rise of the punishment for scolds, and the presence of unruly women at court (Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 [1985]). It is salutary to look back at the material that underpinned the thesis, though arguably this volume falls short in addressing the many attempts to refute it; rather than seeking to rebut the claims of, say, Martin Ingram, who argued strenuously against the idea of a mid-century gender crisis, this volume simply restates Revel’s original position. At times, this can feel frustrating, even disappointing. It seems particularly regrettable that the sophisticated theorization of the very idea of inversion, carried out mostly by literary critics such as Patricia Parker and Jonathan Dollimore, is entirely ignored. These critics argue that all order relies on the practice of its inversion in order to maintain itself as visible. If this is correct, then the existence of misogynist invective and rites of inversion are proof that patriarchy was in good shape in the mid-seventeenth century rather than the reverse.