Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Unaccountably neglected by scholars until very recently, the corpus of woodcut and engraved broadside prints issued in England during our period has much to offer the student of English Renaissance culture. If for convenience we divide these sheets into secular and religious, the number of the former may surprise us. The overall tone of so many prints is satirical, whether at the expense of women, social types, or – in this era in particular – the Roman Catholic clergy. From the 1620s come a number of prints of traditional misogynist type: especially the popular and striking European monsters, known in their English manifestation as Bulchin and Thingut (engraved version), or Fill Gut and Pinch belly (woodcut version), the latter with verses by John Taylor and the explanatory subtitle, One being Fat with eating good Men, the other Lean for want of good Women ( Hind 1952–64 : II, 210–13; O'Connell 1998, 1999b ), The Several Places Where You May Hear News issued at much the same time is the title given to a late sixteenth-century composition, which also enjoyed Europe-wide popularity. In a series of unified scenes, A New Year's Gift for Shrews (Figure 12) depicts the traditional nagging wife eventually beaten by her husband and ultimately chased off by the Devil, and is accompanied by the following traditional rhyme: Who marrieth a wife upon a Monday. If she will not be ... log in or subscribe to read full text