Review: Ina Habermann: Staging Slander and Gender in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: "I consider defamation principally as a mode of social exchange which operates on the basis of the spoken word - hence my overall focus on oral defamation, or slander." (1) Recent tabloid, i.e. paper, battles over celebrity love affairs would thus clearly seem to be beyond the scope of Ina Habermann's book - and not only for historical reasons. However, what makes her concisely argued and well-written study fascinating also for anyone interested in the contemporary politics of gendered defamation is the way in which it traces the topic in a period no less obsessed than our own with individuality, reputation and social as well as erotic prowess. Early modern England differed in many respects from present-day Britain but the problems of self-fashioning and of the husbandry of one's own economic and social position that Habermann examines are not only similar to today's culture of self-realisation but can also be read as an archaeology of contemporary forms of subjectivity.