Download or read book The Allegory of Female Authority written by Maureen Quilligan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first professional female writer, Christine de Pizan (1363-1431) was widowed at age twenty-five and supported herself and her family by enlisting powerful patrons for her poetry. Her Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) is the earliest European work on women's history by a woman. An allegorical poem that revises masculine traditions, it asserts and defends the authority of women in general and of its author in particular. In this generously illustrated book, Maureen Quilligan provides a persuasive and penetrating interpretation of the Cité.
Download or read book Thinking Allegory Otherwise written by Brenda Machosky and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thinking Allegory Otherwise is a unique collection of essays by allegory specialists and other scholars who engage allegory in exciting new ways." "Not limited to an examination of literary texts and works of art, the essays focus on a wide range of topics, including architecture, philosophy, theater, science, and law. Indeed, all language is allegorical. This collection proves the truth of this statement, but more importantly, it shows the consequences of it. To think allegory otherwise is to think otherwise-forcing us to rethink not only the idea of allegory itself, but also the law and its execution, the literality offigurative abstraction, and the figurations upon which even hard science depends." --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Showing Like a Queen written by Katherine Eggert and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority. In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm. Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epic Paradise Lost upon the formulae of queenship.
Download or read book Christine de Pizan Texts intertexts contexts written by Marilynn Desmond and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christine de Pizan, an Italian-born writer in French in the early 15th century, composed lyric poetry, debate poetry, political biography, and allegory. Her texts constantly negotiate the hierarchical and repressive discourses of late medieval court culture. How they do so is the focus of this volume, which places Christine's work in the context of larger discussions about medieval authorship, identity, and categories of difference.
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 Allegorical Bodies written by Daisy Delogu and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegorical Bodies begins with the paradoxical observation that at the same time as the royal administrators of late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century France excluded women from the royal succession through the codification of Salic law, writers of the period adopted the female form as the allegorical personification of France itself. Considering the role of female allegorical figures in the works of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and Alain Chartier, as well as in the sermons of Jean Gerson, Daisy Delogu reveals how female allegories of the Kingdom of France and the University of Paris were used to conceptualize, construct, and preserve structures of power during the tumultuous reign of the mad king Charles VI (1380–1422). An impressive examination of the intersection between gender, allegory, and political thought, Delogu’s book highlights the importance of gender to the functioning of allegory and to the construction of late medieval French identity.
Download or read book The Language of Allegory written by Maureen Quilligan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and innovative work treats a body of literature not previously regarded as a unified genre. Offering comparative readings of a number of texts that are traditionally called allegories and that cover a wide time span, Maureen Quilligan formulates a vocabulary for talking about the distinctive generic elements they share. The texts she considers range from the twelfth-century De planctu naturae to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and include such works as Le Roman de la Rose, Langland's Piers Plowman, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Melville's Confidence Man, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Whether or not readers agree with this book, they will enjoy and profit from it.
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 The Language of Allegory written by Maureen Quilligan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Language of Allegory examines a body of literature not often treated as a unified genre. Reading a number of texts that are traditionally characterized as allegories and that cover a wide time span, Maureen Quilligan identifies the distinctive generic elements they share. Originally published in 1979, this highly regarded work by a well-known feminist critic and theorist is now available in paperback."--Back book cover
Download or read book Woman at Point Zero written by Nawāl Saʻdāwī and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1983 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So begins Firdaus' story, leading to her grimy Cairo prison cell, where she welcomes her death sentence as a relief from her pain and suffering. Born to a peasant family in the Egyptian countryside, Firdaus suffers a childhood of cruelty and neglect. Her passion for education is ignored by her family, and on leaving school she is forced to marry a much older man. Following her escapes from violent relationships, she finally meets Sharifa who tells her that 'A man does not know a woman's value ... the higher you price yourself the more he will realise what you are really worth' and leads her into a life of prostitution. Desperate and alone, she takes drastic action. -- Publisher description.
Download or read book Monuments Maidens written by Marina Warner and published by Picador. This book was released on 1987 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book English Printing Verse Translation and the Battle of the Sexes 1476 1557 written by Anne E. B. Coldiron and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing to light new material about early print, early modern gender discourses, and cultural contact between France and England in the period, this book focuses on a dozen or so of the many early Renaissance verse translations about women, marriage, sex, and gender relations. A series of appendices presents the author's transcriptions of the texts that are otherwise inaccessible.
Download or read book Dido s Daughters written by Margaret W. Ferguson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.
Download or read book The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies written by Susan Groag Bell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-11-29 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like a particularly good detective story, this richly textured book follows tantalizing clues in its hunt for a group of missing artistic masterpieces. Susan Bell recounts both her long search for a series of sixteenth-century tapestries that celebrated women and her efforts to understand their meaning for Queen Elizabeth I of England and the other powerful women who owned them. Opening a new window on the lives of noblewomen in the Renaissance, the brilliantly colored tapestries that were the ultimate artistic luxury of the day, and the popular and influential fourteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, Bell pursues a compelling tale that moves from centuries past to today. The tapestries around which this story revolves are linked to Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies (1405), orginally published six hundred years ago in 1405. The book is a tribute to women that honors two hundred female warriors, scientists, queens, philosophers, and builders of cities. Though twenty-five manuscripts of the City of Ladies still exist, references to tapestries based on the book are elusive. Bell takes us along as she tracks down records of six sets of tapestries whose owners included Elizabeth I of England; Margaret of Austria; and Anne of Brittany, Queen of France. Bell examines the intriguing details of these women's lives—their arranged marriages, their power, their affairs of state—asking what interest they had in owning these particular tapestries. Could the tapestries have represented their thinking? As she reveals the historical, linguistic, and cultural aspects of this unique story, Bell also gives a fascinating account of medieval and early-Renaissance tapestry production and of Christine de Pizan's remarkable life and legacy.
Download or read book Painful pleasures written by Christopher Vaccaro and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely volume ventures into the subject of sadomasochism in varied aspects of medieval life. Saint’s Lives and mystical treatises provide evidence of failed sadism and empowering masochism. Literary culture in the form of epics and courtly tales preserve stories of eroticised power. These exciting chapters join together to form a picture of medieval culture that is kinky in its practice and deeply psychological at its core.
Download or read book Mademoiselle de Montpensier written by Sophie Maríñez and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Châteaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France examines questions of self-construction in the works of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier (1627-1693), the wealthiest unmarried woman in Europe at the time, a pro-women advocate, author of memoirs, letters and novels, and the commissioner of four châteaux and other buildings throughout France, including Saint-Fargeau, Champigny-sur-Veude, Eu, and Choisy-le-roi. An NEH-funded project, this study explores the interplay between writing and the symbolic import of châteaux to examine Montpensier’s strategies to establish herself as a woman with autonomy and power in early modern France.
Download or read book Writing Places written by Kendall B. Tarte and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2007 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the literary and cultural production of the provincial capital of Poitiers from the late 1560s through the early 1580s. This study considers influences on the salon and the city such as contemporary codes of conduct, the court sessions, and the religious wars.
