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In 1617, Rachel Speght caused a sensation when, at the age of nineteen, she published a polemic in defence of women under her own name. Daring to identify herself as a 'forward' woman, she repudiated the prevailing misogyny of her day. However, the power of her words died with her, and, for over 350 years, she was lost from view. Since the rediscovery of her works in the 1980s, Speght has become a familiar name in Renaissance literature. Nevertheless, almost fifty years after her re-emergence, the woman behind the works remains little known. This book explores Speght's life, from her formation in the turbulent world of Jacobean London to her last years as a displaced person within a Suffolk community torn apart by religious strife. Considering her as a writer and polemicist but also as a 'public housewife', the book reveals a courageous thinker and protagonist. One of the defining authors of what Christina Luckyj has described as the 'radical politics of the female voice' in early-Stuart England, and one of the few clergy wives to speak out in defence of her faith amid the chaos of the Civil War, Rachel Speght emerges as one of the most compelling female personalities of her age.
Jane Anger her Protection for Women A Mouzell for Melastomus Ester hath hang’d Haman The Worming of a mad Dogge Of the many tracts in defence of women published in early modern England only these four bear women’s names. All four were written in response to misogynist attacks. Of these writers, only Speght (1597-c.1630) is historically identifiable. Two or possibly three of the others use pseudonyms and indeed their gender has not yet been definitely established.
This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women between 1550 and 1700 and reveals an unprecedented view of the intellectual and literary lives of women in early modern England
An important study of the relationship between female agency and cheap print throughout the revolutionary decades 1640 to 1660, this book offers an analysis of the ways in which groups of non-aristocratic women circumvented a number of assumptions about f
Although women's anger is often dismissed as irrational in both eras, for instance, in the early modern era women were thought to become angry more often and more easily than men due to their inherent physiological, intellectual, and moral inferiority.".
From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant.An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers.For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl
When was feminism born - in the 1960s, or in the 1660s? For England, one might answer: the early decades of the seventeenth century. James I was King of England, and women were expected to be chaste, obedient, subordinate, and silent. Some, however, were not, and these are the women who interest Barbara Lewalski - those who, as queens and petitioners, patrons and historians and poets, took up the pen to challenge and subvert the repressive patriarchal ideology of Jacobean England. Setting out to show how these women wrote themselves into their culture, Lewalski rewrites Renaissance history to include some of its most compelling - and neglected - voices. As a culture dominated by a powerful Q...
This study illuminates the female voice as a means of signalling resistance to tyranny in early Stuart literature and discourse.
Are we unique as individuals, or are we replaceable? Seventeenth-century English literature pursues these questions through depictions of marriage. The writings studied in this book elevate a love between two individuals who deem each other to be unique to the point of being irreplaceable, and this vocabulary allows writers to put affective pressure on the meaning of marriage as Pauline theology defines it. Stubbornly individual, love threatens to short-circuit marriage's function in directing intimate feelings toward a communal experience of Christ's love. The literary project of testing the meaning of marriage proved to be urgent work throughout the seventeenth century. Monarchy itself was put on trial in this century, and so was the usefulness of marriage in linking Christian belief with the legitimacy of hereditary succession. Starting at the end of the sixteenth century with Edmund Spenser, and then exploring works by William Shakespeare, William Davenant, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn, Eric Song offers a new account of how notions of unique personhood became embedded in a literary way of thinking and feeling about marriage.