Early Modern Women Writers (Schedule)
Class 1 (Mar. 31) — Sixteenth Century Precedents: Elizabeth I, Isabella Whitney, and Mary Sidney Herbert
- Primary Readings
- Queen Elizabeth I (1553 - 1603), Attributed Poetry:
- Queen Elizabeth I, Speech:
- Isabella Whitney (1556/or 58 - 1624), from A Sweet Nosegay (1573):
- Mary Sidney Herbert:
- Critical Readings
- Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977); republished in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), pp. 19-50
- Recommended
- Paul Salzman, from Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford), Chap 1, 11-46
- Susan Frye, “The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1992): 95-114
- John King, “Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, No. 1 (Spring, 1990): 30-74
- Wendy Wall, “Whitney’s Fictional Will: Things Blazoned and Bequeathed,” from The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Cornell, 10993), 296-340
- Laurie Ellinghausen, “Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay,” The English Renaissance 45, No. 2 (Winter, 2005): 1-22
Class 2 (Apr. 7) — Closet Drama: Elizabeth Cary
- Primary Readings
- Elizabeth Cary (c. 1584 - 1639):
- The Tragedy of Mariam (1613)
- Critical Readings
- Margaret W. Ferguson, “Renaissance Concepts of the ‘Woman Writer,’” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge, 1996), Chap. 7, pp. 143-68 (PDF)
- Recommended
- Dympna Callaghan, “Re-Reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry,” in Women, ‘Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia A. Parker (Routledge, 1994)
- Naomi J. Miller, “Domestic Politics in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 37, No. 2, Tudor and Stuart Drama (Spring, 1997): 353-369
Class 3 (Apr. 14) — Renaissance Gender Debate: Cheap Print Pamphlets and Ballads
- Primary Readings
- From Half Humankind, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Illinois Press, 1985):
- Her Protection for Women, Jane Anger (1589) (PDF)
- The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward, and Unconstant Women, Joseph Swetnam (1615) (PDF)
- Ester Hath Hanged Haman, Esther Sowerman (1617) (PDF)
- Hic Mulier (1620) (PDF)
- Haec Vir (1620) (PDF)
- Selected ballads from English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu:
- Critical Readings
- Paxton Hehmeyer, “The Social Function of the Broadside Ballad,” in EBBA
- Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top”
- Julie Crawford, “Women (Authors) on Top," in Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Journal, No. 5, 2006 (retrieved from Wayback Machine)
- Recommended
- Sharon Achinstein, “Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution” (PDF)
- Lisa J. Schell, “Muzzling the Competition: Rachel Speght and the Economic of Print” (PDF)
- Naomi J. Miller, “hens should be served first’: Prioritizing Maternal Production in the Early Modern Pamphlet Debate” (PDF)
Class 4 (Apr. 21) — Defending Eve: Aemelia Lanyer
- Primary Readings
- Aemilia Lanyer (c. 1569 - 1645):
- Salve Deus Rex Judeorum, 1611
- “The Description of Cooke-ham”
- Ben Jonson (c. 1572 – 1637):
- Critical Readings
- John Rogers, “The Passion of a Female Literary Tradition: Aemelia Lanyer’s ‘Salve Deus Rex Judeorum,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 63, No. 4 (2000): 435-445 (PDF)
- Recommended
- Barbara Bowen, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Invention of White Womanhood,” In Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frey (Oxford, 1999), 143-248
- Naomi Miller, “(M)other Tongues: Maternity and Subjectivity,” In Aemelia Lanyer: Gender and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Kentucky, 1998), 143-66 (PDF)
- Mary Ellen Lamb, “Patronage and Class in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judeorum,” in Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary Burke, Jane Donaworth, Linda Dove, and Karen Nelson (Syracuse, 1998) (PDF)
Class 5 (Apr. 28) — Digitizing Women: Hester Pulter
- Primary Readings
- Hester Pulter (c. 1605 – 1678; fl. 1640s - 1650s)
- The Pulter Project:
- From Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah:
- From The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah:
- Selections from The Unfortunate Florinda
- A note for those of you who have never read a prose romance: it can help if you keep a log of character names and identities; this will help you disentangle multiplying characters later on. Florinda is relatively simple, compared especially to the Urania, but it is a good habit to cultivate.
- Content Warning: The sections we are reading from The Unfortunate Florinda contain an attempted rape and a completed rape. We will discuss why this is unusual in a romance, but please do be warned if that might be triggering for you.
- Critical Readings
- Sarah Ross, “Tears, Bezoars, and Blazing Comets,” Literature Compass (21 December 2005)
- Recommended
- Mark Robson, "Swansongs: Reading voice in the poetry of Lady Hester Pulter," English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, Vol. 9: Writings by Early Modern Women, ed. Peter Beal and Margaret J.M. Ezell (The British Library, 2000) (this is the article where Robson discusses discovering the sole extant Pulter manuscript in the library at Leeds in 1996)
- Margaret J.M. Ezell, “The Laughing Tortoise: Speculation on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History,” English Literary Renaissance, 38 (2008): 331-55
- Rachel Dunn Zhang, "Crafting Un-Fortune: Rape, Romance, and Resistance in Hester Pulter's The Unfortunate Florinda," Early Modern Women 12, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 76-98
- Liza Blakes’ blog on teaching editing women writers (link)
Class 6 (May 5) — Writing in Code: Lady Mary Wroth
- Primary Readings
- Selections from Lady Mary Wroth (1586/87 – 1651 or 1653):
- Urania, Selections from Book I & Book IV, 1621
- Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 1621 (PDF)
- Sonnet 1, “When nights black mantle” [P1]
- Sonnet 14, “Am I thus conquer’d?” [P16]
- Sonnet 22, “Like to the Indians” [P25]
- Sonnet 35, “Faulce hope which feeds but to destroy” [P40]
- Sonnet 48, “How like a fire doth love increase in mee” [P55]
- “A Crowne of Sonnets dedicated to Love,” introductory material and all 14 sonnets [P77-90]
- Sonnet 9, “My muse now hapy” [P103]
- Edward Denny:
- “To Pamphilia from the Father in Law of Seralius” and Wroth’s response, “Railing Rimes Returned Upon the Author” (PDF)
- Critical Readings
- Kim Hall, “’I rather would wish to be a black-moor’: Beauty, Race, and Rank in lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1994), 178-94 (PDF)
- Recommended
- Helen Hackett, “The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Kate Chedgdzoy et al. (eds), Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Keele, Staffs, 1996), 93-110 (PDF)
- Tiffany Jo Werth, “’Soundly Wash’d’ or Interpretively Redeemed? Labor and Reading in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” chap. 4 of The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England After the Reformation (John Hopkins, 2011) (PDF)
- Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 792-81(PDF
Class 7 (May 12) — Writing the Female Metaphysical: Katherine Philips & John Donne
Primary Readings
- Katherine Philips (1631/2 – 1664), selected Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda (1667):
- 1, 4, 17, 19, 22, 26, 28, 29, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 46, 59, 76, 79, 80, 88, 96, 97, 106, 107, 108, 109, 124, 127, 129, 130; notes to the individual poems are at the end of the selections
- John Donne (1572-1631), Selected Love and Religious Poetry:
Critical Readings
- Valerie Traub, “The (In)significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, pp. 150-169
- Recommended
- Sasha Roberts, “Feminist Criticism and the New Formalism: Early Modern Women and Literary Engagement,” chap 4. in The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: Palgrave, 2007) (PDF)
- Elizabeth H. Hageman, “Women’s Poetry in Early Modern Britain,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 9, pp. 190-208 (PDF)
- Elaine Hobby, “Orinda and Female Intimacy,” in Early Women Writers: 1600-1720 ed. Anita Pacheco (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 73-88 (PDF)
- Carol Barush, “Women’s Community and the Exiled King: Katherine Philips’s Society of Friendship,” in English Women’s Poetry, pp. 55-100 REPORT BY QIAOYU
Class 8 (May 19) — Writing New Worlds: Margaret Cavendish
- Primary Readings
- Margaret Cavendish (1623 – 1673)
- Critical Readings
- Kristy’s Dissertation Chapter on Cavendish
- Recommended
- Margaret Cavendish, selections from Liza Blake’s online edition of Poems and Fancies
- Rosemary Kegl, “‘The world I have made’: Margaret Cavendish, Feminism, and the Blazing-World” in The Impact of Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 5, pp. 119-141 (PDF)
- Lisa T. Sarasohn, “A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Huntington Library Quarterly 47, No. 4 (Autumn, 1984): 289-307 (PDF)
- Rachel Trubowitz, “The Reenchantment of Utopia and the Female Monarchical Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992): 229-245 - REPORT BY HENRY
Class 9 (May 26) — Writing Race: Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko"
- Primary Readings
- Aphra Behn (c. 1640 – 1689)
- Critical Readings
- Recommended
- Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Rutledge, 1994)
- Felicity Nussbaum, "Black Women: Why Imoinda Turns White," chapter 6 of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 151-88 (PDF).
- Charlotte Sussman, "The Other Problem with Women: Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," in Joanna Lipking’s edition of Oroonoko (Norton, 1997), pp. 246-64 - REPORT BY LEXXUS
- Laura Brown, "The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves," in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 41-61 (PDF)
Class 10 (June 6) — Writing (from) the East: Lady Mary Montagu
- Primary Readings
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1689-1762
- Critical Readings
- “Introduction” to The Turkish Embassy Letters: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Teresa Heffernan & Daniel O’Quinn (Bedford, 2013),11-34 (in the PDF linked above)
- Recommended
- Sukanye Banerjee, “Lady Mary Montagu and the ‘Boundaries’ of Europe,” in Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. Kristi Siegel (P. Lang, c. 2004), chap 2, 31-54 (PDF)
- Mary Jo Kietzman, “Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 38, No. 3 (Summer, 1998): 537-552 (PDF)
- Anne Secor, “Orientalism, Gender, and Class in Lady Mary Wortley Montau’s Turkish Embassy Letters: To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, Etc.,” Cultural Geographies 6, No. 4 (1999), 375-98 (PDF)
Paper Due (June 10)