Abstract
In A Godly Form of Household Government (1621) Robert Cleaver and John Dod underscore the virtues of maternal breast-feeding by comparing “naturall mothers” to trees: “As therefore every tree doth cherish and nourish that which it bringeth forth, so also it be-cometh naturall mothers to nourish their children with their own milke.”1 For Cleaver and Dod, and other guidebook writers, maternal breast-feeding provides a way to define “woman” as governed by natural law. This appeal to nature is notable for, among other things, its coincidence with what Stephen Orgel sees as the “new anxiety” about female cross-dressing registered by Hie Mulier,2 published one year before Cleaver and Dod’s text—an anxiety also articulated in King James’s admonition to the London clergy in 1620, that they “inveigh vehemently and bitterly in their sermons against the insolency of our women, and their wearing of broad-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn, and some of them stilettos or poniards.”3 For Orgel, the “new anxiety” about cross-dressed women has to do with both the sexual license suggested by the female transvestite’s blurring of gender boundaries and the commonplace association of female cross-dressing with prostitution.
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Notes
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119.
Angeline Goreau, The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 91.
Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England”, Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (1992), 185.
Richard Wilson, “Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays”, Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, eds. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 126
Stephen Greenblatt, “Mutilation and Meaning”, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hill-man and Carla azzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 230
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mother’s: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 29.
Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 3.
See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. 25
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
Thomas Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man, issue of 1548 as reissued by the Surgeons of St. Bartholomews in 1577, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and Percy Furnivall (London: Early English Texts Society, 1888), 55.
David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 72.
Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 143.
For commentary on early modern Anglo-Christian perceptions of Jews as a nation, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 173–80.
Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 5 vols., ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953–61).
Shapiro, 101. On the “blood-libel”, see Shapiro, 100–11, and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
C. H. Mcllwain, ed., The Political Works of’James I(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), 24.
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© 2002 Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki
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Trubowitz, R. (2002). Crossed-Dressed Women and Natural Mothers: “Boundary Panic” in Hic Mulier. In: Malcolmson, C., Suzuki, M. (eds) Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107540_10
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