Score

The Weaker Vessel is excellent - but I am under the impression it is about the 1600s?

SHAKESPEARE STUDIES, ed. J. Leeds Barroll, yearly volumes of historical scholarship.

{BTW, A. L. Rowse is a quack--the Gilderoy Lockhart of Sh. Studies.

Thom - you would be a good counter to someone on my Tudor History Lovers group who promotes Rowse as the best thing since sliced bread.

Susanna wrote: "Thom - you would be a good counter to someone on my Tudor History Lovers group who promotes Rowse as the best thing since sliced bread."

s/he may be forgiven for thinking so: He was a shameless self-promoter and, according to J. Leeds Barroll, my teacher at U. Cinti. (Go Bearcats !) author of an "almost paranoid book" on Shakespeare wherein he claimed to have "solved the riddle of the sonnets".
BTW, a bearcat is actually a binturong.

Susanna wrote: "The Weaker Vessel is excellent - but I am under the impression it is about the 1600s?"

In principle yes, but Fraser deals fairly extensively with the limited place women were given in society prior to the changes slowly beginning in the 1600s, practically ever since the Middle Ages (or even before then) -- to detail the status quo ante, to explain how things subtly (and sometimes not entirely subtly) began to change in the 1600s, and to show how far a path women still had to walk even at the end of the 1600s ... when their general perception as "The Weaker Vessel" essentially had not yet changed in the least.

The Daughter of Time? Is this list for novels?

Susanna wrote: "The Daughter of Time? Is this list for novels?"

A dissertation masquerading as a novel.....An imaginary garden with real toads in it.....and the toads in this case are Tudor propagandists.

The handful of books on this list about the Tudors - primarily Elizabeth and Henry VIII - are Reformation-era, NOT Renaissance!