Download or read book Incest and Agency in Elizabeth s England written by Maureen Quilligan and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maureen Quilligan explores the remarkable presence in the Renaissance of what she calls "incest schemes" in the books of a small number of influential women who claimed an active female authority by writing in high canonical genres and who, even more transgressively for the time, sought publication in print. It is no accident for Quilligan that the first printed work of Elizabeth I was a translation done at age eleven of a poem by Marguerite de Navarre, in which the notion of "holy" incest is the prevailing trope. Nor is it coincidental that Mary Wroth, author of the first sonnet cycle and prose romance by a woman printed in English, described in these an endogamous, if not legally incestuous, illegitimate relationship with her first cousin. Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, translated the psalms together, and after his death she finished his work by revising it for publication; the two were the subject of rumors of incest. Isabella Whitney cast one of her most important long poems as a fictive legacy to her brother, arguably because such a relationship resonated with the power of endogamous female agency. Elizabeth Carey's closet drama about Mariam, the wife of Herod, spends important energy on the tie between sister and brother. Quilligan also reads male-authored meditations on the relationship between incest and female agency and sees a far different Cordelia, Britomart, and Eve from what traditional scholarship has heretofore envisioned. Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England makes a signal contribution to the conversation about female agency in the early modern period. While contemporary anthropological theory deeply informs her understanding of why some Renaissance women writers wrote as they did, Quilligan offers an important corrective to modern theorizing that is grounded in the historical texts themselves.

Download or read book Renaissance Literature written by John C. Hunter and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-05-18 with total page 1136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensively revised anthology makes available the most important poetry and prose from the period between the accession of Henry VIII in 1509 and the English Revolution of 1640. Responding to the broadening of the canon in recent years, it balances the work of familiar Renaissance figures with important texts by women writers, supported by helpful introductions and annotations. A new edition of this popular anthology, which includes many writings from women and from lesser-known writers, alongside established Renaissance figures Includes work by prominent writers of the period, such as such as Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne, alongside important texts by women, including Queen Elizabeth I, Lady Mary Wroth, and Elizabeth Cary Brings together a variety of key works of the period, along with introductions and annotations to the texts, reflecting developments in critical and cultural theory and the latest Renaissance scholarship Extensively revised, corrected, and expanded to increase the level of annotation, and to make the volume more user-friendly Now includes a thematic table of contents and timeline, and a substantially expanded introduction to enable students to consider entries more easily in the social, cultural, and historical context of the period

Download or read book The Chastity Plot written by Lisabeth During and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-23 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Chastity Plot, Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated. Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom.

Download or read book Gender Sexuality and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse written by Pamela S. Hammons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important contribution to recent critical discussions about gender, sexuality, and material culture in Renaissance England, this study analyzes female- and male-authored lyrics to illuminate how gender and sexuality inflected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets' conceptualization of relations among people and things, human and non-human subjects and objects. Pamela S. Hammons examines lyrics from both manuscript and print collections”including the verse of authors ranging from Robert Herrick, John Donne, and Ben Jonson to Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aemilia Lanyer”and situates them in relation to legal theories, autobiographies, biographies, plays, and epics. Her approach fills a crucial gap in the conversation, which has focused upon drama and male-authored works, by foregrounding the significance of the lyric and women's writing. Hammons exposes the poetic strategies sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women used to assert themselves as subjects of property and economic agents”in relation to material items ranging from personal property to real estate”despite the dominant patriarchal ideology insisting they were ideally temporary, passive vehicles for men's wealth. The study details how women imagined their multiple, complex interactions with the material world:the author shows that how a woman poet represents herself in relation to material objects is a flexible fiction she can mobilize for diverse purposes. Because this book analyzes men's and women's poems together, it isolates important gendered differences in how the poets envision human subjects' use, control, possession, and ownership of things and the influences, effects, and power of things over humans. It also adds to the increasing evidence for the pervasiveness of patriarchal anxieties associated with female economic agency in a culture in which women were often treated as objects.

Download or read book Defending the Faith written by Angela Ranson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-03-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a diverse group of Reformation scholars to examine the life, work, and enduring significance of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury from 1560 to 1571. A theologian and scholar who worked with early reformers in England such as Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, and Thomas Cranmer, Jewel had a long-lasting influence over religious culture and identity. The essays included in this book shed light on often-neglected aspects of Jewel’s work, as well as his standing in Elizabethan culture not only as a priest but as a leader whose work as a polemicist and apologist played an important role in establishing the authority and legitimacy of the Elizabethan Church of England. The contributors also place Jewel in the wider context of gender studies, material culture, and social history. With its inclusion of a short biography of Jewel’s early life and a complete list of his works published between 1560 and 1640, Defending the Faith is a fresh and robust look at an important Reformation figure who was recognized as a champion of the English Church, both by his enemies and by his fellow reformers. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Andrew Atherstone, Ian Atherton, Paul Dominiak, Alice Ferron, Paul A. Hartog, Torrance Kirby, W. Bradford Littlejohn, Aislinn Muller, Joshua Rodda, and Lucy Wooding.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy written by Emma Josephine Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing the reader to important topics in English Renaissance tragedy, this Companion presents fresh readings of key texts.

Download or read book True Relations written by Frances E. Dolan and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining seventeenth-century crises of evidence and genres of evidence on which both literary critics and historians now depend, True Relations explores the notion that we apprehend truth through other people's relations of it and that those relations, and our own relation to them, are a function of social relationships in conflict.

Download or read book Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent written by Marie H. Loughlin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other genealogical concepts to talk about authorship, family, selfhood, and memory. In turn, both Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth also shaped their works in relation to the ways in which writers within their familial communities and literary coteries constructed them as Sidneys, heirs, descendants, and future ancestors, in genres ranging from the patronage dedication and pastoral eclogue to mythographic genealogia and georgic poetry. In the intersection of ancestry, death, sexuality, and reproduction, the book contends that Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth develop their authorship within the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of their world’s genealogical discourses.

Download or read book Mary Sidney Lady Wroth written by Margaret P. Hannay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite her fascinating life and her importance as a writer, until now Lady Mary Wroth has never been the subject of a full-length biography. Margaret Hannay's reliance on primary sources results in some corrections, as well as additions, to our knowledge of Wroth's life, including Hannay's discovery of the career of her son William, the marriages of her daughter Katherine, her grandchildren, her last years, the date of her death, and the subsequent history of her manuscripts. This biography situates Lady Mary Wroth in her family and court context, emphasizing the growth of the writer's mind in the sections on her childhood and youth, with particular attention to her learned aunt, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, as literary mentor, and to her Continental connections, notably Louise de Coligny, Princess of Orange, and her stepson Prince Maurice. Subsequent chapters of the biography treat her experience at the court of Queen Anne, her relationships with parents and siblings, her love for her cousin William Herbert, her marriage to Robert Wroth, the birth and early death of her only legitimate child, her finances and properties, her natural children, her grandchildren, and her last years in the midst of England's civil wars. Throughout the biography attention is paid to the complex connections between Wroth's life and work. The narrative is enhanced with a chronology; family trees for the Sidneys and Wroths; a map of Essex, showing where Wroth lived; a chart of family alliances; portraits; and illustrations from her manuscripts.

Download or read book Renaissance Romance written by Dr Nandini Das and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romance was criticized for its perceived immorality throughout the Renaissance, and even enthusiasts were often forced to acknowledge the shortcomings of its dated narrative conventions. Yet despite that general condemnation, the striking growth in English fiction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is marked by writers who persisted in using this much-maligned narrative form. In Renaissance Romance, Nandini Das examines why the fears and expectations surrounding the old genre of romance resonated with successive new generations at this particular historical juncture. Across a range of texts in which romance was adopted by the court, by popular print and by women, Das shows how the process of realignment and transformation through which the new prose fiction took shape was driven by a generational consciousness that was always inherent in romance. In the fiction produced by writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene and Lady Mary Wroth, the transformative interaction of romance with other emergent forms, from the court masque to cartography, was determined by specific configurations of social groups, drawn along the lines of generational difference. What emerged as a result of that interaction radically changed the possibilities of fiction in the period.

Download or read book The Subject of Elizabeth written by Louis Montrose and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-06-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a woman wielding public authority, Elizabeth I embodied a paradox at the very center of 16th century patriarchal English society. This text illuminates the ways in which the Queen and her subjects variously exploited or obfuscated this contradiction.

Download or read book When Women Ruled the World Making the Renaissance in Europe written by Maureen Quilligan and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this game-changing revisionist history, a leading scholar of the Renaissance shows how four powerful women redefined the culture of European monarchy in the glorious sixteenth century. The sixteenth century in Europe was a time of chronic destabilization in which institutions of traditional authority were challenged and religious wars seemed unending. Yet it also witnessed the remarkable flowering of a pacifist culture, cultivated by a cohort of extraordinary women rulers—most notably, Mary Tudor; Elizabeth I; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Catherine de’ Medici—whose lives were intertwined not only by blood and marriage, but by a shared recognition that their premier places in the world of just a few dozen European monarchs required them to bond together, as women, against the forces seeking to destroy them, if not the foundations of monarchy itself. Recasting the complex relationships among these four queens, Maureen Quilligan, a leading scholar of the Renaissance, rewrites centuries of historical analysis that sought to depict their governments as riven by personal jealousies and petty revenges. Instead, When Women Ruled the World shows how these regents carefully engendered a culture of mutual respect, focusing on the gift-giving by which they aimed to ensure ties of friendship and alliance. As Quilligan demonstrates, gifts were no mere signals of affection, but inalienable possessions, often handed down through generations, that served as agents in the creation of a steep social hierarchy that allowed women to assume political authority beyond the confines of their gender. “With brilliant panache” (Amanda Foreman), Quilligan reveals how eleven-year-old Elizabeth I’s gift of a handmade book to her stepmother, Katherine Parr, helped facilitate peace within the tumultuous Tudor dynasty, and how Catherine de’ Medici’s gift of the Valois tapestries to her granddaughter, the soon-to-be Grand Duchess of Tuscany, both solidified and enhanced the Medici family’s prestige. Quilligan even uncovers a book of poetry given to Elizabeth I by Catherine de’ Medici as a warning against the concerted attack launched by her closest counselor, William Cecil, on the divine right of kings—an attack that ultimately resulted in the execution of her sister, Mary, Queen of Scots. Beyond gifts, When Women Ruled the World delves into the connections the regents created among themselves, connections that historians have long considered beneath notice. “Like fellow soldiers in a sororal troop,” Quilligan writes, these women protected and aided each other. Aware of the leveling patriarchal power of the Reformation, they consolidated forces, governing as “sisters” within a royal family that exercised power by virtue of inherited right—the very right that Protestantism rejected as a basis for rule. Vibrantly chronicling the artistic creativity and political ingenuity that flourished in the pockets of peace created by these four queens, Quilligan’s lavishly illustrated work offers a new perspective on the glorious sixteenth century and, crucially, the women who helped create it.

Download or read book Enrico or Byzantium Conquered written by Lucrezia Marinella and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet. Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella’s other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.

Download or read book Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings written by Emilie Du Châtelet and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica that is still the standard edition of that work in French. Had she been a man, her reputation as a member of the eighteenth-century French intellectual elite would have been assured. In the 1970s, feminist historians of science began the slow work of recovering Du Châtelet’s writings and her contributions to history and philosophy. For this edition, Judith P. Zinsser has selected key sections from Du Châtelet’s published and unpublished works, as well as related correspondence, part of her little-known critique of the Old and New Testaments, and a treatise on happiness that is a refreshingly uncensored piece of autobiography—making all of them available for the first time in English. The resulting volume will recover Châtelet’s place in the pantheon of French letters and culture.

Download or read book Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England written by Karen Bamford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though recent scholarship has focused both on motherhood and on romance literature in early modern England, until now, no full length volume has addressed the notable intersections between the two topics. This collection contributes to the scholarly investigation of maternity in early modern England by scrutinizing romance narratives in various forms, considering motherhood not as it was actually lived, but as it was figured in the fantasy world of romance by authors ranging from Edmund Spenser to Margaret Cavendish. Contributors explore the traditional association between romance and women, both as readers of fiction and as tellers of ’old wives’ tales,’ as well as the tendency of romance plots, with their emphasis on the family and its reproduction, to foreground matters of maternity. Collectively, the essays in this volume invite reflection on the uses to which Renaissance culture put maternal stereotypes (the virgin mother, the cruel step-dame), as well as the powerful fears and desires that mothers evoke, assuage and sometimes express in the fantasy world of romance.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion written by Andrew Hiscock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering Handbook offers a comprehensive consideration of the dynamic relationship between English literature and religion in the early modern period. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the most turbulent times in the history of the British church and, perhaps as a result, produced some of the greatest devotional poetry, sermons, polemics, and epics of literature in English. The early-modern interaction of rhetoric and faith is addressed in thirty-nine chapters of original research, divided into five sections. The first analyses the changes within the church from the Reformation to the establishment of the Church of England, the phenomenon of puritanism and the rise of non-conformity. The second section discusses ten genres in which faith was explored, including poetry, prophecy, drama, sermons, satire, and autobiographical writings. The middle section focuses on selected individual authors, among them Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton. Since authors never write in isolation, the fourth section examines a range of communities in which writers interpreted their faith: lay and religious households, sectarian groups including the Quakers, clusters of religious exiles, Jewish and Islamic communities, and those who settled in the new world. Finally, the fifth section considers some key topics and debates in early modern religious literature, ranging from ideas of authority and the relationship of body and soul, to death, judgment, and eternity. The Handbook is framed by a succinct introduction, a chronology of religious and literary landmarks, a guide for new researchers in this field, and a full bibliography of primary and secondary texts relating to early modern English literature and religion.

Download or read book Shakespeare and Character written by P. Yachnin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and Character brings together leading scholars in theory, literary criticism, and performance studies in order to redress a serious gap in Shakespeare studies and to put character back at the centre of our understanding of Shakespeare's achievement as an artist and thinker.