World-Making Renaissance Women
Rethinking Early Modern Women's Place in Literature and Culture

This collection affirms the shaping authority of early modern women in literature and culture, evident well beyond their own moment.

Pamela S. Hammons (Edited by), Brandie R. Siegfried (Edited by)

9781108831154, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 December 2021

300 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.63 kg

This book answers three simple questions. First, what mistaken assumptions do we make about the early modern period when we ignore women's literary contributions? Second, how might we come to recognise women's influence on the history of literature and culture, as well as those instances of outright pathbreaking mastery for which they are so often responsible? Finally, is it possible to see some women writers as world-makers in their own right, individuals whose craft cut into cultural practice so incisively that their shaping authority can be traced well beyond their own moment? The essays in this volume pursue these questions through intense archival investigation, intricate close reading, and painstaking literary-historical tracking, tracing in concrete terms sixteen remarkable women and their world-shaping activities.

Introduction
The literary contours of women's world-making Brandie R. Siegfried and Pamela S. Hammons
Part I. Early Modern Women Framing the Modern World: 1. Erotic origins: genesis, the passion, and Aemilia Lanyer's Queer temporality Erin Murphy
2. Aphra Behn's fiction: transmission, editing, and canonization Paul Salzman
3. From aisling vision to Irish queen: the reimergence of Gráinne Ní Mháille in Europe's revolutionary period Brandie R. Siegfried
4. Reframing the picture: screening early modern women for modern audiences Lisa Walters and Naomi Miller
Part II. Remaking the Literary World: 5. Uncloseted: geography and early modern women's dramatic writing Marion Wynne-Davies
6. Lucy Hutchinson's memoirs as auto-biography Laura DeFurio
7. Commonplace genres, or women's interventions in non-traditional literary forms: Madame de Sablé, Aphra Behn, and the maxim Victoria E. Burke
8. Form, formalism, and literary studies: the case of Margaret Cavendish Lara Dodds
Part III. Connecting the Social Worlds of Religion, Politics, and Philosophy: 9. Royalism and resistance: the personal and the political in Anne, Lady Halkett's Meditations, 1660–1699 Suzanne Trill
10. Hester Pulter's dissolving worlds Marshelle Woodward
11. The feminist worlds of Margaret Cavendish David Cunning
12. Augustus reigns, but poets still are low: Aphra Behn's world in the emperor of the moon (1687) Elaine Hobby
Part IV. Rethinking Early Modern Types and Stereotypes: 13. Learning to imitate women: male education and the grammar of female experience Catherine Loomis
14. Mothers and widows: world-making against stereotypes in early modern English women's manuscript writings Pamela Hammons
15. Queer virgins: nuns, reproductive futurism, and early modern English culture Jaime Goodrich
16. Defensor Feminae: Aemilia Lanyer and Rachel Speght Elizabeth Hodgson
17. Margaret Cavendish's Melancholy identity: gender and the evolution of a Genre Tina Skouen and Henriette Kolle.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]