Dr Sally Fisher
Research Associate
Gender and Women’s History Research Centre
Areas of expertise:
women and gender; queenship and royal studies; diplomacy; material culture studies; dress and textiles; early modern ecologies; late medieval and early modern studies.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8931-4270
Email:
Sally.Fisher@acu.edu.au
Location:
ACU Melbourne Campus
Sally Fisher is a Research Associate in the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a gender and cultural historian of the late-medieval and early modern period whose publications span Shakespeare’s portrayals of queenship and motherhood, poetic depictions of elite households, female letter-writing and ambition, medieval chronicle accounts of exile and imprisonment, and representations of women and space in manorial court rolls.
Currently, Sally is exploring how gender influenced representations of early modern English and European queens and their relationship with the natural environment.
Select publications
Books
- Performing Early Modern Diplomacy: Royal Women and the Field of Cloth of Gold, 1520 (ARC-Humanities Press, Gender and Power in the Premodern World, under contract).
Book Chapters
- “... to beare the name of a queene.” Shakespeare’s Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester and Lady Macbeth: Queenship and Motherhood,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, pp. 107-26, edited by Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte (Palgrave, 2018).
Jointly awarded Royal Studies Journal Biennial Book Prize, 2020.
- “‘All my frendys fro me thei flee;’ The Disgraced and Unstable Household of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester,” in More than Just a Castle: Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, pp. 142-68, edited by Theresa Earenfight, Explorations in Medieval Culture (Brill, 2018).
- ‘“Margaret R’: Lady Margaret Beaufort’s self-fashioning and female ambition,” inVirtuous or Villainess? The Image of the Royal Mother from the Early Medieval to the Early Modern Eras, pp. 151-72, edited by Elena Woodacre and Carey Fleiner, Queenship and Power Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Journal Articles
- "Queens Consort, Gender and Diplomacy: Catherine of Aragon, Claude of France and the Field of Cloth of Gold." Gender & History (2022). DOI: 10.1111/1468-0424.12610.
- ‘Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester: Chronicles and Ideas of Exile and Imprisonment in Fifteenth-Century England,’ in Lisa Di Crescenzo and Sally Fisher (eds.), Exile and Imprisonment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Special issue of Parergon, (2017): 73-97.
- ‘Exile and Imprisonment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,’ in Lisa Di Crescenzo and Sally Fisher (eds.), Exile and Imprisonment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Special issue of Parergon, (2017): 1-23. Co-authored with Lisa Di Crescenzo.
- ‘Landholding, Inheritance, and the Seasons: Reading Women and Space in Fourteenth-Century Manorial Court Rolls,’ in Megan Cassidy-Welch (ed.), Medieval Practices of Space and Place. Special issue of Parergon, 27.2 (2010): 133-56.
Exhibition Reviews
- ‘A World Turned Upside-Down,’ History Australia, 10 (2013): 243-45.
Projects
- ARC Discovery Project, “A History of Early Modern Natural Resource Management,” led by Susan Broomhall. Sally’s research in this project explores women’s activities surrounding environmental management and agricultural practices in the early modern period, with a focus on the role of gender in uses of forests and waterways. Her work examines comparisons in environmental management between England and France. Her particular interest lies in the intersections between the language of legal records and other historical and literary sources, such as chronicles, plays, poems and letters.
