Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Labyrinthine Baroque
- 2 The Female Baroque
- 3 Catholic Female Baroque
- 4 Protestant Baroque
- 5 The Female Baroque in Court and Country
- 6 Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
- 7 From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
- Postscript
- About the Author
- Index
3 - Catholic Female Baroque
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Labyrinthine Baroque
- 2 The Female Baroque
- 3 Catholic Female Baroque
- 4 Protestant Baroque
- 5 The Female Baroque in Court and Country
- 6 Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
- 7 From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
- Postscript
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
After two largely theoretical accounts of the Female Baroque, this chapter focuses on the seemingly natural association of the Baroque with Counter-Reformation Catholicism, looking at two English Catholic women, Gertrude More and Mary Ward, exiled in Catholic Europe. While More and Ward have attracted attention within the history of religious devotion, neither has been viewed in broader cultural contexts. I examine them through the Baroque taxonomy of fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch and plateauing, and show their distinctive contributions to understanding the Female Baroque, especially the distinctive religious variation of Hörigkeit—self-abasement verging on masochism. I contrast the spiritual quietism of More and the outward activism of Ward, though both are manifestations of these women's participation in the culture of the Baroque.
Key words: Gertrude More; Mary Ward; Recusant women in exile; Baroque Melancholy; religious Hörigkeit; women and the Counter-Reformation
Women are the foremost architects of this new dwelling-place we call mystical experience: an erotic, lethal escalation propels them to the summit of excessus.
‒ Julia KristevaUntil recently, most early modern Catholic women have received relatively little attention in English-language literary and cultural scholarship. As Jenna Lay points out, ‘Catholic women's influence on mainstream literary culture beyond the sphere of the Stuart court’ has yet to receive sustained analysis. ‘To create a more complete picture of English literary history’, Lay argues, ‘we must ask how nuns and recusant women who were not central to England's courtly life shaped its literary culture’. Chapter Five will discuss the two Stuart Catholic queens, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria, and their influence upon the English court, but the two nuns with whom I open this exploration of the Female Baroque – Gertrude More (1605–1628), and Mary Ward (1585–1645) – have, by comparison, been sidelined in English literary and cultural history: by their religion (Catholicism), vocation (nun), abode (continental Europe, not England) and the fact that their writings are not novels, poems, plays, or treatises but biographical and autobiographical accounts, letters, and miscellaneous communications to their associates or followers. Neither could be seen as belle-lettrists but both were, in Kristeva's phrase, writing women.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary CultureFrom Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, pp. 75 - 114Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020