Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-06T08:15:08.969Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski*
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Extract

If there is anything that scholars in the Renaissance and scholars of the Renaissance (of whatever ideological persuasion) might be expected to share, it is delight in the recovery of texts worthy of attention as aesthetic objects and/or as significant documents for interpreting the period. Arguably such new texts—and especially texts and artworks by women—will constitute the most enduring element in our ongoing reconstruction of the Renaissance. Thanks to a decade or so of feminist and cultural studies focussed on gender and the social construction of identity, we now know a good deal about how early modern society constructed women within several discourses—law, medicine, theology, courtiership, domestic advice.

Type
From the 1991 National Conference
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This essay is a version of the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture delivered at the National Conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Durham, NC, in spring, 1991.

References

Amussen, Susan Dwyer. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. Oxford, Eng., 1988.Google Scholar
[Anon]. Jane Anger her Protection for Women. London, 1589.Google Scholar
[Bacon], Jane Cornwallis, The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis, 1613-1644. London, 1842.Google Scholar
Beilin, Elaine. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton, NJ, 1987.Google Scholar
Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London and New York, 1985.Google Scholar
Boose, Linda E.The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans, or—the Politics of Politics.” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 707-42.Google Scholar
Brink, Jean R. Female Scholars: A Tradition of Learned Women before 1800. Montreal, 1984.Google Scholar
Byard, Margaret M.The Trade of Courtiership: The Countess of Bedford and the Bedford Memorials.” History Today (January, 1979): 2028.Google Scholar
C[ary], Elizabeth]. The Tragedie of Mariam, the Faire Queene of Jewry. London, 1613. Rpt. Oxford, Eng., 1914.Google Scholar
[Cary] Elizabeth], F[alkland]. The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, King of England, and Lord of Ireland. With the Rise and Fall of His Great Favourites, Gavaston and the Spencers. London, 1680.Google Scholar
[Cary]Elizabeth, (Falkland), trans.] The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinal! of Perron, to the Answeare of the Most Excellent King of Great Britaine. Douay, 1630.Google Scholar
Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford, Eng., 1923.Google Scholar
Charlton, H. B., ed. The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander. 2 vols. London, 1921.Google Scholar
Clark, Alice. The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. [London, 1919.] Rpt., London, 1982.Google Scholar
Clifford, Anne. Lives of Lady Anne Clifford and of her Parents. Ed. J. P. Gilson. London, 1916.Google Scholar
Clifford, Anne. The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford. Ed. Vita Sackville-West. London, 1923.Google Scholar
Daniel, Samuel. Certaine Small Poems Lately Printed: With the Tragedie ofPhilotas. London, 1605.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe.” In The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion and Political Disorder in Art and Society, ed. Barbara Babcock, 147-90. Ithaca, NY, 1978.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, 1979.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France.” In Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, eds. Thomas C. Heller, et al., 53-63. Stanford, 1986.Google Scholar
Dubrow, Heather, and Richard, Strier, eds. The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture. Chicago and London, 1988.Google Scholar
Evans, Robert C. Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage. Lewisburg, PA, 1990.Google Scholar
Ezell, Margaret. The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill and London, 1987.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Margaret, Maureen, Quilligan, and Nancy J., Vickers, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago, 1986.Google Scholar
Fienberg, Nona. “Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity.” In Miller and Waller, 1992.Google Scholar
Gardiner, Dorothy. English Girlhood at School. Oxford, Eng., 1929.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature. Stanford, 1983.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks [Q 25]. Ed. Quinten Hoare and Geoffrey Smith. New York, 1971.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Fiction and Friction.” In Shakespearean Negotiations, 66-93. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988.Google Scholar
Greville, Fulke. Mustapha. London, 1609; rev. ed., 1633.Google Scholar
Grimble, Ian. The Harington Family. London, 1957.Google Scholar
Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London. Cambridge, Eng., 1987.Google Scholar
Hannay, Margaret P., ed. Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Kent, OH, 1985.Google Scholar
Hannay, Margaret P., “‘Your vertuous and learned Aunt': The Countess of Pembroke as Mentor to Mary Wroth.” In Miller and Waller, 1992.Google Scholar
Haselkorn, Anne M., and Travitsky, Betty S., eds. The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon. Amherst, 1990.Google Scholar
Henderson, Katherine, and Barbara, Mc-Manus, eds. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640. Urbana and Chicago, 1985.Google Scholar
Hoby, Margaret. The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605. Ed. Dorothy M. Meads. London, 1930.Google Scholar
Howard, Jean E.The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13-43.Google Scholar
Howard, Jean E.Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England.Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 418-40.Google Scholar
Hull, Susanne. Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640. San Marino, CA, 1982.Google Scholar
James, I. The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies. Edinburgh, 1598. Rpt. in Works. London, 1616.Google Scholar
James, I. Basilikon Doran, Or, His Majesties Instructions to his Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince. London, 1603. Rpt. in Works. London, 1616.Google Scholar
Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Totowa, NJ, 1983.Google Scholar
Kelly-Gadol, Joan. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” In Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, 137-64. Boston, 1977.Google Scholar
Labalme, Patricia H., ed. Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. New York, 1980.Google Scholar
Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison, WI, 1990.Google Scholar
Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Women Readers in Mary Wroth's Urania.” In Miller and Waller, 1992.Google Scholar
Lanyer, Aemilia. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Containing, 1. The Passion of Christ. 2. Eves Apologie in defence of Women. 3. The Teares of the Daughters of Jerusalem. 4. The Salutation and Sorrow of the Virgine Marie. With divers other things not unfit to be read. London, 1611.Google Scholar
Laqueur, Thomas. Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA, 1990.Google Scholar
Levin, Carol, and Jeanie, Watson, eds. Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Detroit, 1987.Google Scholar
Lewalski, Barbara K. “Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer.” In Hannay, 1985, 201-24.Google Scholar
Lewalski, Barbara K.Lucy, Countess of Bedford: Images of Jacobean Courtier and Patroness.” In Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, eds. Kevin Sharpeand Steven N. Zwicker, 5277. Berkeley, 1987.Google Scholar
Lewalski, Barbara K.The Lady of the Country-House Poem.” In The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops, et al., 261-75. Hanover, NH, and London, 1989.Google Scholar
Lewalski, Barbara K.Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer.The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 87-106.Google Scholar
Lewalski, Barbara K. “Mary Wroth's Love's Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy.” In Miller and Waller, 19921.Google Scholar
Lewalski, Barbara K. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA, 1992 2, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge, MA, 1980.Google Scholar
Marotti, Andrew. “‘Love is not Love’ “: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order.” ELH 49 (1982): 396428.Google Scholar
Marotti, Andrew. John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison, WI, 1986.Google Scholar
Maurer, Margaret. “The Real Presence of Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and the terms of John Donne's ‘Honour is so Sublime Perfection.’ELH 47 (1980): 205-34.Google Scholar
Milgate, W., ed. The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes of John Donne. Oxford, Eng., 1978.Google Scholar
Miller, Naomi. “‘Not Much to be marked; Narrative of the Woman's Part in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania .’ “ SEL 29 (1989): 121-37.Google Scholar
Miller, Naomi. “Rewriting Lyric Fictions: The Role of the Lady in Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.” In Haselkorn and Travitsky, 1990, 295-310.Google Scholar
Miller, Naomi and Gary, Waller, eds. Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England. Nashville, 1992, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Montrose, Louis. “‘Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture.Representations 2 (1983): 61-94.Google Scholar
Munda, Constantia. The Worming of a mad Dogge: Or, a Soppefor Cerberus. London, 1617.Google Scholar
Neely, Carol Thomas. “Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourse.English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 5-18.Google Scholar
Nyquist, Mary, and Margaret, Ferguson, eds. Remembering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions. New York and London, 1987.Google Scholar
O'Connor, John J.James Hay and The Countess of Montgomerie's Urania .” N&Q, n.s. 2 (1955): 150-52.Google Scholar
Parker, Patricia, and David, Quint, eds. Literary Theory I Renaissance Texts. Baltimore, 1987.Google Scholar
Prior, Mary, ed. Women in English Society: 1500-1800. London, 1985.Google Scholar
Quilligan, Maureen. “Lady Mary Wroth: Female Authority and the Family Romance.” In Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey, 257-80. Ithaca, NY, and London, 1990.Google Scholar
Quilligan, Maureen. “The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority in Wroth's Urania Poems.” In Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine E. Maus, 307-35. Chicago, 1990.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Myra. The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760. Boston and New York, 1920.Google Scholar
Roberts, Josephine A.An Unpublished Lit erary Quarrel Concerning the Suppression of Mary Wroth's Urania (1621).” N&Q, n.s. 24 (1977): 532-35.Google Scholar
Roberts, Josephine. “Radigund Revisited: Perspectives on Women Rulers in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania.” In Haselkorn and Travitsky, 1990, 187-207.Google Scholar
Rose, Mary Beth, ed. Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives. Syracuse, NY, 1986.Google Scholar
Rowse, A. L. Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age. New York, 1974.Google Scholar
Rose, Mary Beth, The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Salve Deus Rexjudaeorum by Emilia Lanier. London, 1978.Google Scholar
Savage, James E., ed. The “Conceited News” of Sir Thomas Overbury and his Friends [1616]. Gainesville, FL, 1968.Google Scholar
Salzman, Paul. “Contemporary References in Mary Wroth's Urania ,” RES 29 (1978): 178-81.Google Scholar
Schochet, Gordon J. Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England. New York, 1975.Google Scholar
Shepherd, Simon. Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama. Brighton, 1981.Google Scholar
Sidney, Robert. The Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P.J. Croft. Oxford, Eng., 1984.Google Scholar
S[impson], R[ichard], ed. The Lady Falkland, Her Life. London, 1861.Google Scholar
Sowernam, Ester. Ester hath hang'd Haman. London, 1617.Google Scholar
Speght, Rachel. A Mouzell for Melastomus, The Cynical Bayter of, and foul mouthed Barker against EVAHS SEX. Or an Apologeticall Answer to that Irreligious and Illiterate Pamphlet made by Jo. Sw. London, 1617.Google Scholar
Speght, Rachel. Mortalities Memorandum with a Dream Prefixed, Imaginarie in manner; reall in matter. London, 1621.Google Scholar
Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England. Athens, GA, 1981.Google Scholar
[Swetnam, Joseph.] Tom Tel-troth. The Arraignment ofLewde, idle,froward, and unconstant women: Or the vanities of them, choose you whether. London, 1615.Google Scholar
Swift, Carolyn. “Feminine Self-Definition in Lady Mary Wroth's Love's Victorie (c. 1621).English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 171-88.Google Scholar
Tenney, M. F.Tacitus in the Politics of Early Stuart England.Classical Journal 27 (1941): 152-63.Google Scholar
Thomson, Patricia. “John Donne and the Countess of Bedford.Modern Language Review 44 (1949): 329-40.Google Scholar
Tricomi, Albert. Anticourt Drama in England, 1603-1642. Charlottesville, VA, 1989.Google Scholar
Warnke, Retha M. Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation. Westport, CT, and London, 1983.Google Scholar
Weigall, Rachel. “An Elizabethan Gentlewoman: The Journal of Lady Mildmay.Quarterly Review 215 (1911): 119-38.Google Scholar
Weintraub, Karl J.Autobiography and Historical Consciousness.” Critical Inquiry I (1975): 841-42.Google Scholar
Williams, Franklin B., Jr. Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books Before 1641. London, 1962.Google Scholar
[Woodbridge] Fitz, Linda T.‘What Says the Married Woman?': Marriage Theory and Feminism in the English Renaissance.Mosaic 13 (1980): 1-22.Google Scholar
Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1640. Urbana and Chicago, 1986.Google Scholar
Wroth, Mary. The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. Written by the most honourable the lady Mary Wroath. Daughter to the right Noble Robert Earle of Leicester and Neece to the ever famous and renowned Sr Philips Sidney knight. And to ye most exelent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased. London, 1621.Google Scholar
Wroth, Mary. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Baton Rouge and London, 1983.Google Scholar
Wroth, Mary. Loves Victory. Ed. Michael G. Brennan. London, 1988.Google Scholar