Women’s Executions in Early Modern England: A Cultural Examination
About the event
Speaker Bio: Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey is an Assistant Professor of English at Montana State University Billings where she teaches a broad range of literature and writing classes including Shakespeare and Transatlantic Literature. Raised in Missoula, Montana, she received master’s degrees in English and History from the University of Montana before earning a doctorate in English from Washington State University in 2017. She taught at WSU Tri-Cities for three years and then worked as an Assistant Professor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State University before returning to her home state.
Dr. Lodine-Chaffey’s scholarship focuses on early modern cultural understandings of death, public execution, gender, and animals. Her work on these topics has appeared in The Journal of Marlowe Studies, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, the Ben Jonson Journal, Parergon, Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, and several edited collections. Her most recent publication “Teaching Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko as Execution Narrative” can be found in Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide (Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023). Her first book, A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England was published in 2022 as part of the Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture series (University of Alabama Press). When she is not teaching, researching, and writing, Lodine-Chaffey enjoys yoga, hiking, and discovering new music.
Title: Women’s Executions in Early Modern England: A Cultural Examination
Description: A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle provides a new perspective on the representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. A significant part of the execution spectacle—one used to assess the victim’s proper acceptance of death and godly repentance—was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure that their words on the scaffold held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women’s bodies. Drawing on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, this study explores not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance. The reception of women’s speeches, Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of acceptable female behaviors and words as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society.