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 430 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 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus written by Lady Mary Wroth and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Sidney Family Romance written by Gary Fredric Waller and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "William Herbert (1580-1630), third earl of Pembroke, and Lady Mary Wroth (1587?-1653?) were first cousins, the nephew and niece of Sir Philip Sidney, whose family was one of remarkable literary and political importance. Herbert was a poet, a voluminous letter writer, and one of the Jacobean court's richest and most powerful courtiers and politicians. Wroth was arguably the most important woman writer of the period; she authored the first Petrarchan poetic sequence, the first prose romance, and one of the first plays in English by a woman. In addition to their connections as cousins and as writers, they were lovers and the parents of two illegitimate children." "The Sidney Family Romance is both a "cultural biography" and a symptomatic reading of the sexual and textual relationships of Herbert and Wroth. Waller's analysis of their letters and literary works relies on a variety of critical apparatuses - social history, current political and social theories of the Jacobean period, and most notably (feminist) psychoanalytic theory. In both his biographical information and interpretive comments, Waller focuses on subject construction and gender construction of the early modern period, to find that Herbert's poems proceed from his life at court to engage in the gender politics of Petrarchan poetry, while Wroth's work proceeds from her disempowered position to project a desire for an autonomy which would lead to mutuality between the sexes." "Waller tries to find ways of analyzing the "inner lives" of his subjects, in the absence of direct evidence, and with a paucity of documentation. He examines historical documents, including the writings of the two cousins, and recent historical research, along with contemporary studies of family interactions and gender construction and detailed case histories drawn from nearly a century of clinical and therapeutic studies. The author concludes with a discussion of the crisis of gender in the seventeenth century as a contemporary crisis as well." "Family history has long been central to Renaissance studies. The Sidney Family Romance proceeds far beyond any previous works in bringing to bear the very rich and complicated network of ideas, observations, and literary images in the works of Herbert and Wroth."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Countess of Montgomery s Urania abridged written by Lady Mary Wroth and published by Medieval and Renaissance Texts. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first romance written by an Englishwoman, Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania is a literary tour de force in its own right. As the niece of Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth was ideally situated as an observer and reporter of the social, literary, and political milieu of her time. This abridged modern-spelling edition, with a useful introduction and index of characters, makes this work newly accessible to general readers, students, and scholars.
Download or read book Changing The Subject written by Naomi Miller and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1587-1653) wrote the first sonnet sequence in English by a woman, one of the first plays by a woman, and the first published work of fiction by an Englishwoman. Yet, despite her status as a member of the distinguished Sidney family, Wroth met with disgrace at court for her authorship of a prose romance, which was adjudged an inappropriate endeavor for a woman and was forcibly withdrawn from publication. Only recently has recognition of Wroth's historical and literary importance been signaled by the publication of the first modern edition of her romance, The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania. Naomi Miller offers an illuminating study of this significant early modern woman writer. Using multiple critical/theoretical perspectives, including French feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, she examines gender in Wroth's time. Moving beyond the emphasis on victimization that shaped many previous studies, she considers the range of strategies devised by women writers of the period to establish voices for themselves. Where previous critics have viewed Wroth primarily in relation to her male literary predecessors in the Sidney family, Miller explores Wroth's engagement with a variety of discourses, reading her in relation to a broad range of English and continental authors, both male and female, from Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare to Aemilia Lanier, Elizabeth Cary, and Marguerite de Navarre. She also contextualizes Wroth's writing in relation to a variety of nonliterary texts of the period, both political and domestic. Thanks to Miller's sensitive readings, Wroth's writings provide a lens through which to view gender relations in the early modern period.
Download or read book The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery s Urania written by Lady Mary Wroth and published by Iter Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 952 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lady Mary Wroth composed her prose romance "Urania" at the height of the Jacobean debates concerning the nature and status of women. Personal experiences, her own and those of her friends, had made Wroth very much aware of how little voice women had in determining htheirown destinies or even choosing their life partners.
Download or read book The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth written by Josephine A. Roberts and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1992-09-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although her poems are little know today, Lady Mary Wroth was one of the most accomplished women writers of the English Renaissance. Her poems were circulated among many of the leading authors of her time, including Ben Johnson, who praised her work for its profound understanding of the nature of romantic love. Lady Mary's sonnet cycle, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, was the first English sequence to be written from a women's perspective. The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania, her romance interspersed with poetry, was one of the first works of prose fiction to be composed by an Englishwoman. In this complete edition of Lady Mary Wroth's verse, Josephine Roberts has brought together and annotated all 192 of the surviving poems, many of which have never been published before. As the eldest daughter of Sir Robert Sidney and Lady Barbara Gamage, Lady Mary took great pride in the Sidney literary heritage. During the years of her marriage she assumed the roles of both poet and patron, an example set for her by her father and her more famous uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. She further followed the precedent of her uncle by choosing for her own work the artistic forms that he had favored -- the sonnet sequence, pastoral romance, and pastoral drama. As a young woman, Lady Mary belonged to Queen Anne's intimate circle, but in the years following her husband's death she suffered a precipitous decline in social status. She violated the social taboos of her age by becoming the mistress of her first cousin, William Herbert, earl of Pembroek, and bearing him two illegitimate children. Her artistic efforts aroused equal controversy when, after the publication of her prose romance, the Urania, several prominent noblemen attacked her for portraying their private lives under the guise of fiction. Despite these obstacles -- and the added burden of the unpaid debts that were the legacy of her disappointing marriage -- Lady Mary maintained an independent spirit and trusted in an ability to make her own decisions. In her prose works she lashed out at the hypocrisies of life at court; in her poetry she wrote of more personal concerns -- the treacherousness of emotion, the eternal elusiveness of love. Rising above well-worn Elizabethan conceits, the best of Lady Mary's poems reveal an ambivalence toward romance and a wise understanding of the vicissitudes of human emotion.
Download or read book Sweet Swan of Avon written by Robin Williams and published by Peachpit Press. This book was released on 2006-03-15 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is long overdue that someone took a closer look at the brilliant Mary Sidney. I have a suspicion that Mary Sidney’s life, and especially her dedication to the English language after her brother’s death, may throw important light on the mysterious authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems. —Mark Rylance Actor; Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, 1996–2006; Chairman of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust For more than two hundred years, a growing number of researchers have questioned whether the man named William Shakespeare actually wrote the works attributed to him. There is no paper trail for William Shakespeare—no record that he was ever paid for writing, nothing in his handwriting but a few signatures on legal documents, no evidence of his presence in the royal court except as an actor in his later years, no confirmation of his involvement in the literary circles of the time. With so little information about this man—and even less evidence connecting him to the plays and sonnets—what can and what can’t we assume about the author of the greatest works of the English language? For the first time, Robin P. Williams presents an in-depth inquiry into the possibility that Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, wrote the works attributed to the man named William Shakespeare. As well educated as Queen Elizabeth I, this woman was at the forefront of the literary movement in England, yet not allowed to write for the public stage. But that’s just the beginning . . . The first question I am asked by curious freshmen in my Shakespeare course is always, “Who wrote these plays anyway?” Now, because of Robin Williams’ rigorous scholarship and artful sleuthing, Mary Sidney Herbert will forever have to be mentioned as a possible author of the Shakespeare canon. Sweet Swan of Avon doesn’t pretend to put the matter to rest, but simply shows how completely reasonable the authorship controversy is, and how the idea of a female playwright surprisingly answers more Shakespearean conundrums than it creates... —Cynthia Lee Katona Professor of Shakespeare and Women’s Studies, Ohlone College; Author of Book Savvy
Download or read book The Countess of Pembroke s Arcadia written by Philip Sidney and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Alchemist written by Ben Jonson and published by . This book was released on 1609 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Things of Darkness written by Kim F. Hall and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"—allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness—through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged. How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.
Download or read book The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania written by Lady Mary Wroth and published by . This book was released on 1621 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mediatrix written by Julie Crawford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Mediatrix' examines the roles women played as patrons, dedicatees and readers, as well writers, in the English Renaissance. The author also looks at the relationship between these literary activities and religious and political activism.
Download or read book Poems written by Lady Mary Wroth and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first modernized edition of the poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Born circa 1587 and married in 1604, Lady Mary was part of the Queen's entourage at the court of King James I. The poems reproduced here are from Urania, a chivalric romance published in 1621, and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, a sonnet sequence.
Download or read book Gender Interpretation and Political Rule in Sidney s Arcadia written by Kathryn DeZur and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule in Sidney's Arcadia studies cultural ideologies regarding gender and monarchy in early modern England by examining transformations of a single text, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, in their historical contexts. It reveals changing tensions in the ideological struggles over queenship, especially with respect to cultural debates focused on anxieties about gendered reception and interpretation of persuasive rhetoric. The cultural shift between about 1550 and 1650 regarding gendered interpretation and political rule--a shift that was by no means complete or homogenous--reflects the changing position of women and their relationship to language within early modern domestic and political ideological discourses. The book begins by investigating primary cultural, political, and historical sources in order to provide a cultural scaffolding helpful to the interpretation of Sidney's enormously popular work. These sources include conduct manuals, gynecocratic debates, paintings, poems, diaries, pamphlets, and letters. Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule then considers the initial version of the Arcadia (the Old Arcadia) Sidney authored and argues that Sidney's involvement in the marriage debate regarding the Duke of Anjou's courtship of Elizabeth I in the late 1570s shaped his representations of female characters and their questionable ability to interpret persuasive rhetoric. Next, the book turns to Sidney's expanded and revised version (the New Arcadia), authorized and published by his sister the Countess of Pembroke Mary Sidney Herbert. The New Arcadia ultimately provides a more positive representation of women readers and rulers and reveals a shift in cultural understandings of women's relationship to the persuasive rhetoric that both describes and enacts political power and authority. The penultimate chapter examines paradigms of active reading and their political consequences in Lady Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania that demonstrate a need for well-balanced identification with characters. Finally, this book focuses on a little-studied seventeenth-century continuation of Sidney's work by a young woman, Anna Weamys, who asserts her authority as an interpreter of Sidney's Arcadia and in the process creates a political commentary about the legitimacy of female authority and influence just after the English Civil War.
Download or read book Women Writers in Renaissance England written by Randall Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon. This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time. Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.
Download or read book Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation written by Katharina M. Wilson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dawn of humanism in the Renaissance presented privileged women with great opportunities for personal and intellectual growth. Sexual and social roles still determined the extent to which a woman could pursue education and intellectual accomplishment, but it was possible through the composition of poetry or prose to temporarily offset hierarchies of gender, to become equal to men in the act of creation. Edited by Katharina M. Wilson, this anthology introduces the works of twenty-five women writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, among them Marie Dentière, a Swiss evangelical reformer whose writings were so successful they were banned during her lifetime; Gaspara Stampa, a cultivated courtesan of Venetian aristocratic circles who wrote lyric poetry that has earned her comparisons to Michelangelo and Tasso; Hélisenne de Crenne, a French aristocrat who embodied the true spirit of the Renaissance feminist, writing both as novelist and as champion of her sex; Helene Kottanner, Austrian chambermaid to Queen Elizabeth of Hungary whose memoirs recall her daring theft of the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen for her esteemed mistress; and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, the first Englishwoman known to write a full-length work of fiction and compose a significant body of secular poetry. Offering a seldom seen counterpoint to literature written by men, Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation presents prose and poetry that have never before appeared in English, as well as writings that have rarely been available to the nonspecialist. The women whose writings are included here are united by a keen awareness of the social limitations placed upon their creative potential, of the strained relationship between their gender and their work. This concern invests their writings with a distinctive voice--one that carries the echoes of a male aesthetic while boldly declaring battle against it.
