Download or read book Women and Literature in Britain 1500 1700 written by Helen Wilcox and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-13 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First comprehensive introduction to women's role in, and access to, literary culture in early modern Britain.
Download or read book Women and Literature in Britain 1700 1800 written by Vivien Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-09 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2000, is an authoritative volume of new essays on women's writing and reading in the eighteenth century.
Download or read book Women and Literature in Britain 1150 1500 written by Carol M. Meale and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-04-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays focuses on the questions of women's access to a written culture in medieval Britain and their representation within it. It explores women's engagement with Anglo-Norman, English and Welsh as well as Latin, and addresses issues including orality and literacy and women's exclusion from a written tradition. It considers the question of the levels of literacy attained by women, and contemporary attitudes to their acquisition of such skills, as well as the historical evidence for women's activity as writers, patrons and readers. It also examines the representation of women within different literary genres, both secular and religious - their possession or lack of power, and their roles as lovers, mothers and saints. This is the first such volume to focus on these issues within the specific framework of late medieval Britain, and as such constitutes a unique contribution to the study of women and medieval literary history.
Download or read book Early Modern Women s Writing An Anthology 1560 1700 written by Paul Salzman and published by Oxford University Press, UK. This book was released on 2000-03-16 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a famous passage in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf asked 'why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age'. She went on to speculate about an imaginary Judith Shakespeare who might have been destined for a career as illustrious as that of her brother William, except that she had none of his chances. The truth is that many women wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and this collection will serve to introduce modern readers to the full variety of women's writing in this period - from poems, prose and fiction to prophecies, letters, tracts and philosophy. Here are examples of the work of twelve women writers, from aristocrats such as Mary Wroth, Anne Clifford and Margaret Cavendish to women of obscure background caught up in the religious ferment of the mid seventeenth century like Hester Biddle, Pricscilla Cotton and Mary Cole. The collection includes three plays, and a generous selection of poetry, letters, diary, prose fiction, religious polemic, prophecy and science. - ;In a famous passage in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf asked 'why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age'. She went on to speculate about an imaginary Judith Shakespeare who might have been destined for a career as illustrious as that of her brother William, except that she had none of his chances. The truth is that many women wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and this collection will serve to introduce modern readers to the full variety of women's writing in this period from poems, prose and fiction to prophecies, letters, tracts and philosophy. The collection begins with the poetry of Isabella Whitney, who worked in a gentlewoman's household in London in the late 1560s, and ends with Aphra Behn who was employed as a spy in Amsterdam by Charles II. Here are examples of the work of twelve women writers, allowing the reader to sample the diverse and lively output of all classes and opinions, from artistcrats such as Mary Wroth, Anne Clifford and Margaret Cavendish to women of obscure background caught up in the religious ferment of the mid seventeenth century like Hester Biddle, Pricscilla Cotton and Mary Cole. The collection includes three plays, and a generous selection of poetry, letters, diary, prose fiction, religious polemic, prohecy and scienticficic speculation, offering the reader the possibilility of tracing patterns through the works collected and some sense of historical shifts and changes. All the extracts are edited afresh from original sources and the anthology includes comprehensive notes, both explanatory and textual. -
Download or read book Women s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain written by Leah Knight and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women’s reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women’s Bookscapesin Early Modern Britain brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women’s figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women’s readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women’s libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume’s three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence—lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example—as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship. Interdisciplinary, timely, cohesive, and concise, this collection’s fresh, revisionary approaches represent substantial contributions to scholarship in early modern material culture; book history and print culture; women’s literary and cultural history; library studies; and reading and collecting practices more generally.
Download or read book Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England 1550 1700 written by Elaine V. Beilin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes leading scholarship on five writers active in the first half of the sixteenth century: Margaret More Roper, Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon. The essays represent a range of theoretical approaches and provide valuable insights into the religious, social, economic and political contexts essential for understanding these writers' texts. Scholars examine the significance of Margaret More Roper's translations and letters in the contexts of humanism, family relationships and changing cultural forces; the contributions of Katherine Parr and Anne Askew to Reformation discourses and debates; and the material presence of Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon in the intellectual, religious and political life of their time. The introduction surveys the development of the field as an interdisciplinary project involving literature, history, classics, religion and cultural studies.
Download or read book Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England 1550 1700 written by Margaret P. Hannay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was renowned in her own time for her metrical translation of biblical Psalms, several original poems, translations from French and Italian, and her literary patronage. William Shakespeare used her Antonius as a source, Edmund Spenser celebrated her original poems, John Donne praised her Psalmes, and Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer depicted her as an exemplary poet. Arguably the first Englishwoman to be celebrated as a literary figure, she has also attracted considerable modern attention, including more than two hundred critical studies. This volume offers a brief introduction to her life and an extensive overview of the critical reception of her works, reprints some of the most essential and least accessible essays about her life and writings, and includes a full bibliography.
Download or read book Women and Politics in Early Modern England 1450 1700 written by James Daybell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines women's involvement in politics in early modern England, as writers, as members of kinship and patronage networks, and as petitioners, intermediaries and patrons. It challenges conventional conceptualizations of female power and influence, defining 'politics' broadly in order to incorporate women excluded from formal, male-dominated state institutions. The chapters embrace a range of interdisciplinary approaches: historical, literary, palaeographic, linguistic and gender based. They deal with a variety of issues related to female intervention within political spheres, including women's rhetorical, persuasive and communicative skills; the production by women of a range of texts that can be termed 'political'; the politicization of marital, family and kinship networks; and female involvement in patronage and court politics. Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450-700 also looks at ways in which images of female power and authority were represented within canonical texts, such as Shakespeare's plays and Milton's epic poetry. The volume extends the range of areas and texts for the study of women, gender and politics, and locates women's political, social and cultural activities within the contexts of the family, locality and wider national stage. It argues for a blurring of the boundaries between the traditional categories of the 'public' and the 'private,' the 'domestic' and the 'political'; and enhances our understanding of the ways in which women exerted political force through informal, intimate and personal, as well as more official, and formal channels of power. As a whole the book makes an important contribution to the reassessment of early modern politics from the perspective of women.
Download or read book Women Writing and Religion in England and Beyond 650 1100 written by Diane Watt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women's literary histories usually start in the later Middle Ages, but recent scholarship has shown that actually women were at the heart of the emergence of the English literary tradition. Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 focuses on the period before the so-called 'Barking Renaissance' of women's writing in the 12th century. By examining the surviving evidence of women's authorship, as well as the evidence of women's engagement with literary culture more widely, Diane Watt argues that early women's writing was often lost, suppressed, or deliberately destroyed. In particular she considers the different forms of male 'overwriting', to which she ascribes the multiple connotations of 'destruction', 'preservation', 'control' and 'suppression'. She uses the term to describe the complex relationship between male authors and their female subjects to capture the ways in which texts can attempt to control and circumscribe female autonomy. Written by one of the leading experts in medieval women's writing, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 examines women's literary engagement in monasteries such as Ely, Whitby, Barking and Wilton Abbey, as well as letters and hagiographies from the 8th and 9th centuries. Diane Watt provides a much-needed look at women's writing in the early medieval period that is crucial to understanding women's literary history more broadly.
Download or read book The History of British Women s Writing 700 1500 written by Liz Herbert McAvoy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500. It brings to the fore a wide range of women's literary activity undertaken in Latin, Welsh and Anglo-Norman alongside that of the English vernacular, demanding a rethinking of the traditions of literary history, and ultimately the concept of 'writing' itself.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women s Writing written by Laura Lunger Knoppers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-08 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideal for courses, this Companion examines the range, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain, 1500-1700.
Download or read book Women and the Bible in Early Modern England written by Femke Molekamp and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of English women's religious reading and writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Download or read book Women Reading and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England written by Edith Snook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history. It looks at depictions of reading in women's printed devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, and fiction, as well as manuscripts, for evidence of ways in which women conceived of reading in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Among the authors and texts considered are Katherine Parr, Lamentation of a Sinner; Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew; Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing; Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives; Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; and Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Attentive to contiguities between representations of reading in print and reading practices found in manuscript culture, this book also examines a commonplace book belonging to Anne Cornwallis (Folger Folger MS V.a.89) and a Passion poem presented by Elizabeth Middleton to Sarah Edmondes (Bod. MS Don. e.17). Edith Snook here makes an original contribution to the ongoing scholarly project of historicizing reading by foregrounding female writers of the early modern period. She explores how women's representations of reading negotiate the dynamic relationship between the public and private spheres and investigates how women might have been affected by changing ideas about literacy, as well as how they sought to effect change in devotional and literary reading practices. Finally, because the activity of reading is a site of cultural conflict - over gender, social and educational status, and the religious or national affiliation of readers - Snook brings to light how these women, when they write about reading, are engaged in structuring the cultural politics of early modern England.
Download or read book Genre and Women s Life Writing in Early Modern England written by Michelle M. Dowd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.
Download or read book Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England 1558 1625 written by Victoria Brownlee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and bible-reading shaped the period's drama, poetry, and life-writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This volume provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England. It maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing and argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period's dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ's mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible's narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. In showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.
Download or read book Doubtful Readers written by Erin A. McCarthy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When poetry was printed, poets and their publishers could no longer take for granted that readers would have the necessary knowledge and skill to read it well. By making poems available to anyone who either had the means to a buy a book or knew someone who did, print publication radically expanded the early modern reading public. These new readers, publishers feared, might not buy or like the books. Worse, their misreadings could put the authors, the publishers, or the readers themselves at risk. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers' efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers' strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers' interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.
Download or read book Learning and Literacy in Female Hands 1520 1698 written by Elizabeth Mazzola and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the unusual learning and schooling of women in early modern England, this study explores how and why women wrote, the myriad forms their alphabets could assume, and the shape which vernacular literacy acquired in their hands. Elizabeth Mazzola argues that early modern women's writings often challenged the lessons of their male teachers, since they were designed to conceal rather than reveal women's learning and schooling. Employed by early modern women with great learning and much art, such difficult or ’resistant’ literacy organized households and administrative offices alike, and transformed the broader history of literacy in the West. Chapters treat writers like Jane Sharp, Anne Southwell, Jane Seager, Martha Moulsworth, Elizabeth Tudor, and Katherine Parr alongside images of women writers presented by Shakespeare and Sidney. Managing women's literacy also concerned early modern statesmen and secretaries, writing masters and grammarians, and Mazzola analyzes how both the emerging vernacular and a developing bureaucratic state were informed by these contests over women's hands.
