Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Making sects: women as reformers, writers, and subjects in Reformation England
- 1 The death of the author (and the appropriation of her text): the case of Anne Askew's Examinations
- 2 Representing the faith of a nation: transitional spirituality in the works of Katherine Parr
- 3 ‘[A] pen to paynt’: Mary Sidney Herbert and the problems of a Protestant poetics
- 4 A new jerusalem: Anne Lok's ‘Meditation’ and the lyric voice
- 5 ‘A Womans writing of diuinest things’: Aemilia Lanyer's passion for a professional poetic vocation
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
Introduction: Making sects: women as reformers, writers, and subjects in Reformation England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Making sects: women as reformers, writers, and subjects in Reformation England
- 1 The death of the author (and the appropriation of her text): the case of Anne Askew's Examinations
- 2 Representing the faith of a nation: transitional spirituality in the works of Katherine Parr
- 3 ‘[A] pen to paynt’: Mary Sidney Herbert and the problems of a Protestant poetics
- 4 A new jerusalem: Anne Lok's ‘Meditation’ and the lyric voice
- 5 ‘A Womans writing of diuinest things’: Aemilia Lanyer's passion for a professional poetic vocation
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
Summary
I have no difficulty in stating the central premise of my argument. It is that over a relatively short time – certainly no more than a generation or so – women have moved from being the objects of … poems to being the authors of them. It is a momentous transit. It is also a disruptive one. It raises questions of identity, issues of poetic motive and ethical direction which can seem impossibly complex. What is more, such a transit – like the slow course of a star or the shifts in a constellation – is almost invisible to the naked eye. Critics may well miss it or map it inaccurately.
Eavan Boland, Object lessonsOur very reformation of Religion, seems to be begun and carried on by Women.
Bathsua Makin, An essay to revive the ancient education of gentlewomenThe sixteenth century saw the emergence of women in England as not just readers and writers, but as published authors. Due to the important contributions of feminist scholars in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary studies, we no longer ponder the ‘perennial puzzle’ described by Virginia Woolf. We now know that women were writing in the early modern period, and in numbers. What has been less clear is how the literary products of these women should be mapped within their own historical context. The critical charting of women's texts within sixteenth-century English culture itself has still operated on the (however tacit) assumption that their literary products were devalued in that particular context.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008