Weep not for me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "Weep not for me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (en Inglés)"
This important and engaging book blends social, economic, literary, and cultural history into a penetrating and sympathetic portrait of the dangers of love and courtship in the lives of marginal working women engulfed by the flood of historical change. Beautifully written, Symonds' narrative draws readers into a long-gone world, inviting them to recognize the lives and imaginations of eighteenth-century Scottish women as intrinsically interesting and strangely similar to the lives of many women today. --Elizabeth Fox-Genovese"This is an authentically fresh work. It offers important new understanding of the meaning of female crime, especially infanticide, which remains poorly understood today. Brilliantly researched and beautifully written, it challenges historians of other places and periods to ask how the practice of infanticide has changed in response to social and economic dislocation--on the American frontier, for example."-Linda K. Kerber, University of IowaBallad singing has long been one of the most powerful expressions of Scottish culture. For hundreds of years, women in Scotland have sung of heroines who are strong, arrogant, canny--the very opposite of the bourgeois stereotype of the good, maternal woman. In Weep Not for Me, Deborah Symonds explores the social world that gave rise to both the popular ballad heroine and her maternal counterpart.The setting is the Scottish countryside in the eighteenth century--a crucial period in Scotland's history, for it witnessed the country's union with England, the Enlightenment, and the flowering of letters. But there were also great economic changes as late-feudal Scotland hurried into capitalist agriculture and textile production. Ballad singing reflected many of these developments. In the ballads, marriage is rare and lovers murder each other, haunted by premarital pregnancy, incest, and infanticide, while relatives argue over dowries. These problems were not fiction. The women in this study lived and died in a per
