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Women's Worlds in England presents a unique collection of source materials on women's lives in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The book introduces a wonderfully diverse group of women and a series of voices that have rarely been heard in history, from Deborah Brackley, a poor Devon servant, to Katharine Whitstone, Oliver Cromwell's sister, and Queen Anne. Drawing on unpublished, archival materials, Women's Worlds explores the everyday lives of ordinary early modern women, including their: * experiences of work, sex, marriage and motherhood * beliefs and spirituality * political activities * relationships * mental worlds In a time when few women could write, this book reveals the multitude of ways in which their voices and experiences leave traces in the written record, and deepens and challenges our understanding of womens lives in the past.
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of civil strife in Britain can escape the historiographer's gaze, then how many more like her lurk in the archives? Nadine Akkerman's search for an answer to this question has led to the writing of Invisible Agents, the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies, demonstrating that the allegedly-male world of the spy was more than merely infiltrated by women. This compelling and ground-breaking contribution to the history of espionage details a series of case studies in which women -- from playwright to postmistress, from lady-in-waiting to laundry woman -- acted as spies, sourcing and passing on confidential information on account of political and religious convictions or to obtain money or power. The struggle of the She-Intelligencers to construct credibility in their own time is mirrored in their invisibility in modern historiography. Akkerman has immersed herself in archives, libraries, and private collections, transcribing hundreds of letters, breaking cipher codes and their keys, studying invisible inks, and interpreting riddles, acting as a modern-day Spymistress to unearth plots and conspiracies that have long remained hidden by history.
This pioneering book explores for the first time how ordinary women of the early modern period in England understood and experienced their bodies. Using letters, popular literature, and detailed legal records from courts that were obsessively concerned with regulating morals, the book recaptures seventeenth-century popular understandings of sex and reproduction. This history of the female body is at once intimate and wide-ranging, with sometimes startling insights about the extent to which early modern women maintained, or forfeited, control over their own bodies. Laura Gowing explores the ways social and economic pressures of daily life shaped the lived experiences of bodies: the cost of having a child, the vulnerability of being a servant, the difficulty of prosecuting rape, the social ambiguities of widowhood. She explains how the female body was governed most of all by other women—wives and midwives. Gowing casts new light on beliefs and practices of the time concerning women’s bodies and provides an original perspective on the history of women and gender.
The first comprehensive anthology of seventeenth-century English women writers
Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.
The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is the eagerly-awaited study by the feminist scholar who was among the first to address the issue of early modern female homoeroticism. Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography and medicine. Contrary to the silence and invisibility typically ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. By means of sophisticated interpretations of a comprehensive set of texts, the book not only charts a crucial shift in representations of female homoeroticism over the course of the seventeenth century, but also offers a provocative genealogy of contemporary lesbianism. A contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.
This volume collects the private letters and published epistles of English women philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1650-1700). It includes the correspondences of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. These women were the interlocutors of some of the best-known intellectuals of their era, including Constantijn Huygens, Walter Charleton, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion, moral theology, and ethics to epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. For the first time in one collection, the philosophical correspondences of these women have been brought together to be appreciated as a whole. Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England is an invaluable primary resource for students and scholars of these neglected women thinkers. It includes original introductory essays for each woman philosopher, demonstrating how her correspondences contributed to the formation of her own views as well as those of her better-known contemporaries. It also provides detailed scholarly annotations to the letters and epistles, explaining unfamiliar philosophical ideas and defining obscure terminology to help make the texts accessible and comprehensible to the modern reader. This collection and its companion volume, Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-Century England (forthcoming), provide valuable historical evidence that women made substantial contributions to the formation and development of early modern thought and reflect the intensely collaborative and gender-inclusive nature of philosophical discussion in the early modern period.
Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain offers a new account of women's engagement in the poetic and political cultures of seventeenth-century England and Scotland, based on poetry that was produced and circulated in manuscript. Katherine Philips is often regarded as the first in a cluster of women writers, including Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, who were political, secular, literary, print-published, and renowned. Sarah C. E. Ross explores a new corpus of political poetry by women, offering detailed readings of Elizabeth Melville, Anne Southwell, Jane Cavendish, Hester Pulter, and Lucy Hutchinson, and making the compelling case that female political poetics emerge out of social and religious poetic modes and out of manuscript-based authorial practices. Situating each writer in her political and intellectual contexts, from early covenanting Scotland to Restoration England, this volume explores women's political articulation in the devotional lyric, biblical verse paraphrase, occasional verse, elegy, and emblem. For women, excluded from the public-political sphere, these rhetorically-modest genres and the figural language of poetry offered vital modes of political expression; and women of diverse affiliations use religious and social poetics, the tropes of family and household, and the genres of occasionality that proliferated in manuscript culture to imagine the state. Attending also to the transmission and reception of women's poetry in networks of varying reach, Sarah C. E. Ross reveals continuities and evolutions in women's relationship to politics and poetry, and identifies a female tradition of politicised poetry in manuscript spanning the decades before, during, and after the Civil Wars.
This study examines women’s prophetic writings in seventeenth-century Britain as the literary outcome of a discourse of social transformation that integrates religious conscience, political participation, and gender identity. The following pages approach prophecy as a culture, a language, and a catalyst for collective change as the individual prophet conceptualized it. While the corpus of prophetic writing continues to grow as the result of archival research, this monograph complements our particular knowledge of women’s prophecy in the seventeenth century with a global assessment of what makes speech prophetic in the first place, and what are the differences and similarities between texts that fall into the prophetic mode. These disparities and commonalities stand out in the radical language of prophecy as well as in the way it creates an authorial centre. Examining how authorship is represented in several configurations of prophetic delivery, such as essays on prophecy, poetic prophecy, spiritual autobiography, and election narratives, the different chapters consider why prophecy peaked in the years of the civil wars and how it evolved towards the eighteenth century. The analyses extrapolate the peculiarities of each case study as being representative of a form of textually-based activism that enabled women to gain a deeper understanding of themselves as creators of independent meaning that empowered them as individuals, citizens, and believers.