English 231: Early Modern Women Writers, 1550-1800, Spring 2020

Instructors: Patricia Fumerton and Kristy McCants Forbes

Class Meetings: Tuesdays 3:00 - 5:50 pm, Early Modern Center, South Hall 2510

Office Hours for Prof. Fumerton: T 2:00-3:00, South Hall 2506

Office Hours for Dr. Kristy McCants Forbes: 

This course fills English Department Field Requirements 1 and 2.

Co-taught by Patricia Fumerton and Kristy McCants Forbes, this course offers both an extensive and intensive understanding of women writers in England, c. 1550-1800,  whose work will be at all times viewed within a historical, social, biographical, theoretical, and critical context. The course aims to go beyond, while riding upon, earlier waves of women's studies: the initial feminist activism of the 1960s and ’70s that sought a voice for women scholars as well as authors, which led to the establishment of heavily theoretical women's studies programs in the 1980s; the concomitant “recovery” of unknown women authors (most notably through the Brown Women's Writers Project, founded at Brown University in 1986, and dedicated to making available hand-typed transcriptions of women's works published in their own time but not available in any modern edition); the merging of women's studies with gender studies in the 1990s  (in an effort to include men as well as women and multiple sexual orientations); the gradual "mainstreaming" of feminist research and theory across the humanities, accompanied by a call for more critical (vs theoretical or biographical) analysis of their work; and the new modes of "recovery" of women writers through both manuscript studies and digital technologies that remake the marginal into the global. As a result of all these movements, early modern women writers are no longer non-existent (a claim made to Professor Fumerton by her Renaissance colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1980s). But some will be far more familiar to the specialist of the earlier periods than others. 

Drawing on both old and new discoveries and formats, Fumerton and McCants Forbes seek to open your eyes to a blazing new world of women writers 1550-1800 that is much populated with both familiar and new faces and much open to cutting-edge criticism both written and awaiting writing. Join us on the adventure.

Assignments

Requirements for the course include:

• Reading. All assignments are to be read (carefully!) by the date on the syllabus. 
• Regular and punctual attendance and b 
• Two class presentations:
  1.  A written and verbal presentation on the Hester Pulter Digital Project and Pulter’s other selected work (below). The written document should be 1-2 pages in length maximum. Your findings will be collected and presented by Kristy and me at the conference on the teaching Pulter at Northwestern University in April 2020. The abstract for the conference reads:

     Breaking New Ground: Hester Pulter and Digital Methodologies in the Graduate Classroom

      

     As collaborators embarking in March 2020 on a quarter of teaching early modern women writers to a new generation of graduate students steeped in the digital, we plan to integrate the new, innovative digital work of The Pulter Project into the classroom and report back on our findings.

               First, we will engage in an experiment of our own: early in the spring quarter, we will unleash our class on the Pulter website. Though composed of varied literary disciplines, many of the students will have been trained in the digital work of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA). They will be instructed to embark on seeking answers to three questions: first, how does Pulter’s work advance the field of study of women’s writing? Second, how can the digital affordances of The Pulter Project enrich the ways we engage with, understand, and teach early texts? Third, where did students get stalled, misdirected, or entangled by the digital pathways of the website? We propose to amalgamate our graduate students’ answers to these questions and present their findings in our contribution to the symposium.

               The second part of our presentation—in many ways, we hope, inextricable from the first—will be a discussion of The Pulter Project as a poetic corpus. How do we incorporate multiple versions and edits of a work into discussions of THE text? How do we teach a text that lacks a contemporary published “master” version? We will also address questions of our social and cultural “takeaway”: what unique (and what same) perspectives does Pulter offer on important aspects of 17th-century life as those of other of her female contemporaries: motherhood and grief, civil strife, theories of the structure of the universe, religious and cultural identity, and the like?

               Ultimately, the first and second parts of our presentation, we expect, will intertwine. If the Pulter Project offers innovative ways of editing texts, those path-breaking methods should at the same time open up new ways of seeing a woman author in her own time from our digital age

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