Dekker, Rudolf M. and Lotte C. van de Pol. The Tradition of Female Transvestitism in Early Modern Europe. St Martin’s Press: New York 1989.

Dekker and van de Pol, studies 119 cases of female transvestitism in Europe between the years of 1550-1839. Most of their case studies lived in the latter half of the time period and were found all over Europe but mainly in North Western Europe. They do, however admit that most of their information is someone tainted as they acquired most of the information from legal documents and court records. Regardless, they have some very interesting stories of women who, while cross dressing for years, marry another woman, serve in the military and even feign fathering a child. In addition, the authors delineate various motives for female cross dressing, the changes in women’s sexuality over the time span ,and the condemnation or raise of such actions.

Henderson, Katherine Usher and Barbara F. McManus. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the controversy about women in England, 1540-1640. University of Illinois Press: Chicago 1985.

In this book, the authors discuss female roles during the renaissance period in both a contextual perspective and a textual perspective. Although the authors do examine gender stereotypes and perspective roles of the females of the time, the most useful information for our purposes can be found in the copies of the texts offered in the second part of the book. It is here that we are given copies of the tracts Hic Mulier and Haec Vir. Both written in 1620, the first is a condemnation of women who cross dress and transgress against the insistence of demanded beauty and femininity, and the second is a response to this condemnation. The reference section is extensive and mostly consists of late 16^th and early 17^th century documents.

Howard, Jean E. Cross-dressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England. Shakespeare Quarterly. 418-440. (Helen has the rest of documentation. I left message for her to give it to one of us.)

This article is divided into three basic ideas that fall under the Renaissance notion that there are two genders, and one is subordinate to the other. The first section deals with how cross-dressed women were perceived, persecuted and prosecuted. By examining court records between 1565 and 1605, it was discovered that most cross-dressed women were perceived as prostitutes and tried as such. The author lists several examples of women who were punished for this transgression. The second section deals with some of the reasons women cross-dressed during this time. There were some justifiable times, but for the most part, it was unacceptable. The third section deals with some of the theatrical roles of cross-dressers. She argues that most of the plays such as Twelfth Night, Midsummer Nights Dream, and As You like it, and Epicoene merely serve to affirm masculine authority and point out the absurdity of cross-dressing. Howard indicates that one of the few Renaissance plays that actually depicts, comments on and debates about cross-dressing is The Roaring Girl.

Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Brighton: Sussex UP, 1983. 9-36

Jardine, Lisa. "Boy Actors, Female Roles, and Elizabethan Eroticism." In Staging the Renaissance ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. New York: Routledge, 1991. 57-67

McLuskie, Kathleen. "The Act, the Role, the Actor: Boy Actresses on the Elizabethan Stage." New Theatre Quarterly 13 (1987): 120-30.

Howard, Jean. "Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl" in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. ed. Susan Zimmerman. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Orgel, Stephen. "The Subtexts of _The Roaring Girl_" in _Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage_. ed. Susan Zimmerman. New York: Routledge, 1992.