This issue will examine theories and practices of emancipation in early modern England, as well as the parallels and transpositions that can be made with our experience in the 21st century in the domestic, educational, socio-economic, political, and religious spheres.

Argument

This issue will examine theories and practices of emancipation in early modern England, as well as the parallels and transpositions that can be made with our experience in the 21st century in the domestic, educational, socio-economic, political, and religious spheres. We will therefore ask the following questions: emancipation from what or from whom, why, and how? Several areas of focus may be addressed, including:

Political and Religious Emancipation

• The 1534 Schism
• The rise of Anglicanism
• The broader question of emancipation: atheism and the School of Night
• The theatre as a site of contestation of monarchical power (King Lear, Richard II)
• Breaking free from censorship: political allegories and coded messages

Emancipation from Patriarchal Structures

• Prominent female political figures: Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary Stuart (attempts, achievements, and failures of political emancipation)
• Female authors such as Lady Mary Wroth (literary emancipation)
• Representations of female emancipation on stage: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (reasserting patriarchal control?); Webster’s heroines; Moll Cutpurse in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl

Gender and Sexual Emancipation

• The power of seduction (Measure for Measure, Othello)
• Disruptions of female sexuality within dynastic strategies
• Non-normative models on stage (homoerotic tensions, cross-dressing)
• The cross-dressed bodies of boy actors (and anti-theatrical discourses)
• Social and sexual transgressions (interclass or forbidden unions)

Social Emancipation and Self-Fashioning

• The rise of the bourgeoisie and the city comedies
• The “upstart crow” controversy
• Staging the tensions between individual and society

Economic Emancipation and the Discovery of the New World

• The question of monopolies
• Detachment from feudal structures
• The role of the guilds
• The diversification and emancipation of the economy
• Economic emancipation and the rise of maritime capitalism (East India Company)
• John Cabot, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the role of piracy

Emancipation vs. Subjugation / Emancipation vs. Colonisation

• The master–slave dialectic under strain
• The Tempest: the relationship between Prospero and Caliban
• Emancipation versus imperialism (travel narratives, letters)

Artistic Emancipation

• Contemporary theatrical and film adaptations: emancipating the Shakespearean canon

Imaginary Emancipation

• Utopias (Thomas More)

Submission guidelines

Deadline for papers (5000-7000 words, written in English or French): 30 June 2026

Abstracts (in both French and English) should not exceed 200 words.

Please include a short biographical note (max. 100 words) and 5 or 6 keywords.

Please follow the stylesheet

Papers should be sent to: Louis André (louis.andre01@univ-poitiers.fr), John Delsinne (johndelsinne75@gmail.com),

before 30 June 2026.

Anonymised proposals will be subject to double-blind peer review.

Publication : December 2026

Co-editors

• Louis André (Université de Poitiers)
• John Delsinne (Paris Sorbonne Université)