Seventeenth-century Women Writers Research Articles

Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth‐Century Women Writers – By Shannon Miller

Renaissance StudiesVolume 25, Issue 3 p. 475-476 Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers – By Shannon Miller JOHN FLOOD, JOHN FLOOD University of GroningenSearch for more papers by this author JOHN FLOOD, JOHN FLOOD University of GroningenSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 May 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.2011.00716.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume25, Issue3June 2011Pages 475-476 RelatedInformation

The Universal Principle of Grace: Feminism and Anti-Calvinism in Two Seventeenth-Century Women Writers

This article presents one of the theological contexts for early feminist thought in England in the late seventeenth century. It argues that an emerging universalist soteriology in Platonist and radical thought had a positive impact on discourses about sexual equality, and shows how two female writers (the Quaker Elizabeth Bathurst and the visionary M. Marsin) combined their critique of the doctrine of limited atonement – in other words, the idea of an exclusive elect – with a confident assertion of women's calling to preach and teach in the Church.

Engendering the fall: John Milton and seventeenth-century women writers

The narrative of the Garden of Eden infused seventeenth-century political thought no less than it reflected attitudes toward the relationship between the sexes. Within the contemporary debate over political legitimacy, theorists who supported or questioned the monarchy turned explicitly to the narrative of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve to articulate their theories of governmental authority. Engaging this foundational relationship between gendered interpersonal and governmental organization, Shannon Miller turns to a body of texts produced in England that replot the story of the Garden. She sets a series of writings by women into conversation with the period's most important poetic rendering of the Fall, Milton's Paradise Lost, to illustrate how significant gender was to accounts of social and political organization, and to demonstrate how the Garden narrative plots the role of gender. Her multidirectional and multilayered conversation between numerous seventeenth-century women-such as Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Chudleigh-and Milton's Genesis epic crystallizes the interplay between the narrative of the Fall, the organization of political structures, and the extent to which both were shaped by cultural debates over the role of women.

Public Women

Catharine Gray's new book on seventeenth-century women writers has been eagerly awaited. Her article on Katherine Philips and the post-courtly coterie was published in English Literary Renaissance in 2002, and was quickly recognised as one of the most important contributions to recent scholarly debate on Philips.1 This article now forms the basis of chapter 3 of Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain, where it appears in company with chapters on Dorothy Leigh (also previously published, in English Literary History), Sarah Wight, and Anne Bradstreet, and a conclusion focused on the Quaker missionaries Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers.2 Through detailed attention to these generically and historically diverse writers, Gray aims to show that, although women were ‘statistically marginal to the transforming seventeenth-century public’, they were nonetheless ‘imaginatively central: pivotal for particular communities and for what they tell us about changes in public life more generally’ (p. 15). Studying women writers' contributions to public debate in this period, she argues, ‘both illuminates their distinctive role in shaping seventeenth-century public culture, and in doing so, helps us see this culture differently’ (p. 2).

Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (review)

Salonnieres, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France. By Anne E. Duggan. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 288 pp. Salonnieres, Furies, and Fairies is a compelling study of how seventeenthcentury French writers used literary production to dialogue with one another over issues of class, gender, nobility, religion, politics, morality, and individual subjectivity. Over the course of six clearly written chapters, which weave the stories of the individual writers into a complex sociohistorical context, Anne E. Duggan tells a story (20), beginning with Madeleine de Scudery and the public influence of salon women, moving on to the patriarchal reaction of academicians like Boileau and Charles Perrault, and finally focusing on Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's response to the decline of the salon, the nobility, and the moralist discourses responsible for late seventeenth-century parental and spousal domination. In doing so, Duggan opens up three important paradigms regarding the study of early modern French literary history. Ehe first of these, to which Duggan herself calls attention in the preface, emphasizes the tendency of feminist criticism to study early modern women writers exclusively through the narrow scopes of their (female), their sociocultural milieu (the salon), and their spheres of sociopolitical influence (the private or particular). Drawing upon observations from the works of Scudery, Lafayette, Villedieu, Bernard, Maintenon, and d'Aulnoy Duggan challenges the notion that women writers in the wake of Scudery: strove to create an ecriture that was beyond person and beyond class, but not beyond gender (DeJean, Ten- der Geographies 92, qtd. by Duggan 17), illustrating how early modern women categorically differ from one another on a range of issues that may or may not be gender-related - including the religious persecution of the Catholic counter-reformation (d'Aulnoy vs. Maintenon), the derogation of the haute noblesse (d'Aulnoy vs. Scudery), and even the sociopolitical implications of marriage (d'Aulnoy vs. Lafayette and Bernard). As such, Duggan not only takes issue with Joan Dejean's claims regarding early modern gendered writing, but she also opens up Nancy Miller's theory that seventeenth-century women writers used their works to contest the traditional plots made available by an exclusively male-orchestrated dominant tradition (Subject to Change 8, qtd. by Duggan 17). Illustrating a range of examples in which female authors challenged one another's works, Duggan brings forth several contexts in which women writers articulated ideological points of view on equal footing with men, positioning themselves not as women, but rather as members of particular social classes, religions, regions, and political affiliations. A second important paradigm that Duggan's study addresses concerns the essentialist scope within which important seventeenth-century academic quarrels are generally studied. Addressing this paradigm on two levels, Duggan first takes issue with the nature of the authors and treatises involved. As Duggan demonstrates, the well-known Querelle des Femmes, a debate over the role of women in the public sphere that officially took place between Boileau and Perrault toward the end of the century, was in fact a reactionary quarrel. It was not primarily motivated by classical texts of the remote historical past, as Boileau's position on the ancient side of the quarrel might suggest. Instead, the important sociocultural influence of women writers like Scudery, whose historical novels or fables both asserted and modeled the active participation of women in public affairs, provided an important initial impetus for the debate. By the same token, as Duggan points out, serious engagement with Boileau's misogynistic contribution to the quarrel did not stop with Perrault's Apologie des femmes; rather, it was ultimately taken to task by late seventeenth-century writers, including d'Aulnoy in the context of her novel Histoire d'Hypolite (1690) and her subsequent fairy tales. …

Salonnieres, furies, and fairies: the politics of gender and cultural change in absolutist France

Salonnieres, Furies, and Fairies is a study of the works of two of the most prolific seventeenth-century women writers, Madeleine de Scudery and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. Analyzing their use of the novel, the chronicle, and the fairy tale, Duggan examines how Scudery and d'Aulnoy responded to and participated in the changes of their society, but from different generational and ideological positions. As both Scudery and d'Aulnoy wrote from within the context of the salon, this study also takes into account the history of the salon, an unofficial institution that served as a locus for elite women's participation in the cultural and literary production of their society. In order to highlight the debates that emerged with the increased participation of aristocratic or mondain women within the public sphere, the book explores the responses of two academicians. Nicolas Boileau and Charles Perrault, to the active presence of women within the public sphere.

The Plain Style in the Seventeenth Century: Gender and the History of Scientific Discourse

This article analyzes the statements on plain style made by Royal Society writers and seventeenth-century women writers. Using scholarship in feminist rhetorical theory, the article concludes that Royal Society plain stylists constructed scientific discourse as a masculine form of discourse by purging elements that were associated with femininity, such as emotional appeals. The article also discusses how women writers, particularly Margaret Cavendish, embraced a plain style more out of concern for their audience than out of a desire to eliminate undesirable feminine attributes. The implications of this historical study for understanding of current practice are noted.

Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish by Line Cottegnies , Nancy Weitz (review)

780 Reviews Rhetorical Affectis plagued by a number of problems, mostly but not exclusively of a structural nature. One is that Cockcroft will often introduce exemplary passages for close reading in early chapters, then direct his attention elsewhere, not returning to the passage upon which he and readers have just lavished such focused attention until the fifthand final chapter, where all the various threads of argument come together. Unfortunately, the reader has by then long forgottenwhat was said about the passage in previous chapters. This problem is exacerbated by the density of Cockcroft's critical vocabulary. Take this example from the introduction, which explains Jan Firbas's 'functional sentence perspective' as a key to the 'dynamics of pathos': Firbas distinguishes two [. . .] scales which may work singly or in combination. What he calls the Existential Scale entails, in rising order of dynamism, a setting,a verb denoting appearance or existence,and a phenomenon expressed by the subject. .. Firbas expresses this formulaically as Set=App/Ex = Ph. (pp. 25-26, emphasis original) This is certainly dense prose, but nothing more than the attentive reader can handle. On pages 123-24, however, when we return to the Firbas formula to explicate a pas? sage from Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress, the theoretical explanation that would support Cockcroft's analysis can be retrieved only by flipping back to the previous discussion of Firbas's theory. Finally, Cockcroft's criteria for his selections of text for analysis are never articulated and therefore can seem quixotic. There are many things that Cockcroft does well. His summary of recent linguistic models will open new windows forrhetoricians; his survey of pathos's role in the clas? sical tradition is succinct and helpful. Finally, some of the readings offerstartlingly new perspectives on canonical writers and critics. Perhaps most memorable is Cock? croft's challenge to Stephen Greenblatt's vision of Christopher Marlowe's Tam? burlaine as an 'unremitting machine' (p. 90, emphasis original). After an elegant and sustained analysis of the play's rhetoric, Cockcroft concludes that Marlowe, as an early modern for whom pathos remains connected to logos, is more 'interested in choice than in compulsion' (p. 157). Readers will find much useful information and some rewarding close readings in Rhetorical Affectin Early Modern Writing, but to get the most from Cockcroft's book they must be prepared to expend considerable effort. University of Georgia Christy Desmet Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish. Ed. by Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 238 pp. ?38. ISBN 0-8386-3983-6. Until recently, Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was regarded as a bizarre eccentric, churning out unactable plays and other self-contradictory, unstructured , and uneducated literary and scientific works in blissful ignorance of literary conventions and the laws of science. Mary Evelyn thought her as 'rambling as her books', Charles Lamb loved her eccentricity but also saw her as 'fantastical, and original-brain'd', and for Virginia Woolf she was a 'giant cucumber' that 'spread it? self over all the roses'. More recently, however, Cavendish has become a key figure in the recuperation of seventeenth-century women writers, with critics reading her within, as well as against, prevailing cultural trends, and seeing her contradictions as the result of a tension between her desire for fame and for public utterance and seventeenth-century gender ideologies. Authorial Conquests goes furtherthan any work so far in finding Cavendish's work MLRy 100.3, 2005 781 allegedly purposeful and controlled. She is involved in an 'encyclopedie, comprehen? sive literary project' whose purpose is to pursue 'a conscious and deliberate explo? ration ofthe various forms and genres available to her at the time' (p. 9), and to engage in 'experiments in genre' (p. 196) to develop original hybrid forms which are more appropriate for her purposes, which include challenging traditional constructions of both gender and genre. Sara Mendelson's intriguing piece sees Cavendish's plays demolishing the line between fiction and life-writing, arguing that they combine thinly disguised autobiography with 'dreamlike inversions of Cavendish's own life experi? ences', which Mendelson calls 'anti-autobiography' (p. 201). Gisele Venet argues...

Recent Trends in Research on Seventeenth-Century Women Writers

Recent Trends in Research on Seventeenth-Century Women Writers

A Provincial Masque of "COMUS", 1636

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Provincial Masque of "COMUS", 1636MARTIN BUTLERMARTIN BUTLER Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 171986Renaissance Drama and Cultural Change Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.17.41917217 Views: 1Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 1986 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Back Matter, (Jan 2013): 259–302.https://doi.org/10.1524/9783050062556.bmShannon Miller, Peter C. Herman, Elizabeth Sauer Disruptive partners: Milton and seventeenth-century women writers, (): 156–174.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139094238.012