Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World
Rethinking Female Adolescence

Cutting-edge theories of cognition inform readings of Shakespearean girls to show the dynamism of adolescent female brainwork.

Caroline Bicks (Author)

9781108844215, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 July 2021

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.587 kg

'… original and imaginative book … Recommended.' D. Pesta, Choice Connect

This groundbreaking study of girlhood and cognition argues that early moderns depicted female puberty as a transformative event that activated girls' brains in dynamic ways. Mining a variety of genres from Shakespearean plays and medical texts to autobiographical writings, Caroline Bicks shows how 'the change of fourteen years' seemed to gift girls with the ability to invent, judge, and remember what others could or would not. Bicks challenges the presumption that early moderns viewed all female cognition as passive or pathological, demonstrating instead that girls' changing adolescent brains were lightning rods for some of the period's most vital debates about the body and soul, faith and salvation, science and nature, and the place and agency of human perception in the midst of it all.

1. 'A spectacle to men and angells': Juliet Capulet and the case of Mary Glover
2. 'Imagination helps me': liberating brainwork in Comus, Othello, and The Two Noble Kinsmen
3. 'The progresse of an art': daughters and the invention of new knowledges
4. 'If I should tell / My history': memory, trauma, and testimony in Pericles and Hamlet
5. 'Put on the minde': cognitive play in Gallathea, The Winter's Tale, and The Convent of Pleasure
6. 'From thirteene Yeares … resolved to serve God': Mary Ward's adolescent brainwork.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]