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
- 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
Much traditional scholarship on the Baroque sees the notion of the Protestant Baroque as contradictory. This chapter explores ‘emergent’ or ‘partial’ Baroque characteristics in two Protestant poets, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, followed by the Protestant women of Little Gidding, the ‘Arminian nunnery’, whose ‘storying’ and biblical harmonies show how broader cultural dynamics could permeate even a marginalised group of women, who have only recently attracted critical attention. I look across the Atlantic to examine the English equivalent of the colonial Baroque prominent in Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic culture, and consider two New England writers – briefly, Anne Bradstreet and more thoroughly, Anne Hutchinson – to analyse the extent to which New England can be set within the scope of not just colonial but specifically Protestant colonial Baroque.
Key words: Theory of Baroque Culture; Speaking, Prophesying, and Writing Women; The Countess of Pembroke and Aemilia Lanyer; The Ferrar/Collet Women of Little Gidding; Colonial Female Baroque; Anne Hutchinson
The Protestant Baroque … splinters of Divinity harkening back to the source.
‒ Julia Kristeva.The Protestant Baroque? If, as is conventionally assumed, the Baroque is closely aligned with the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation, the phrase ‘Protestant Baroque’ sounds paradoxical, even impossible. The combination of ‘Protestant’ and ‘Baroque’ has become commonplace in the history of music: witness the works of J.S. Bach, in which the term loosely indicates that the composer was a Protestant, and that he wrote within what is even more loosely termed – indeed, this looseness is probably more pronounced than in any other area of cultural production – the Baroque period in musical history. Given the conventional association between the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque, and relentless Protestant attacks on Catholic representational ‘idolatry’, how can the Baroque and Protestantism, and in England in particular, be associated with one another on any substantial basis? Peter D. Skrine, normally ingenious and flexible in defining the Baroque, further asserts that ‘a parliamentary system is by nature incompatible with the baroque, and doubly so in an increasingly middle-class and anti-Catholic country like England’. Yet he points out that near the end of the seventeenth century, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress uncannily shares, ‘across a gaping cultural chasm’, sentiments that create ‘a synthesis of some of the most fundamental features of the baroque’.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary CultureFrom Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, pp. 115 - 162Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020