Early Modern Women and Writing
In A Room of One鈥檚 Own (1929), Virginia Woolf infamously claimed that, had the impossible figure of the early modern female writer existed, 鈥渨hatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.鈥 A century later, we are still engaged in the labour of recovering and re-centring early modern women鈥檚 writing and attending to its frequently non-normative, hybrid nature.
This course will examine a selection of women-authored texts in English from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and consider a range of genres and modes (including poetry and drama; political speeches, treatises, and religious texts; and more personal documents, such as letters, diaries, and household records). Together, we will explore how early modern women writers negotiated their public and domestic personae, laid claims to agency and authority, and grappled with their socio-political and personal contexts. In addition to looking at contemporary discussions of gender and sexuality, we will also experiment with using present-day theoretical approaches, such as ecofeminism, critical race theory, and motherhood studies, to make early modern women鈥檚 writing newly intelligible and meaningful to twenty-first century readers.
Students will have an opportunity to engage with early modern women鈥檚 writing more directly by using online resources to access digitized versions of original publications and manuscripts. Among the better-known authors we might consider are: Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, Rachel Speght, Elizabeth Cary, Katherine Philips, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Phillis Wheatley. We will also discuss some early modern works attributed to women writers at the time of their publication.