1st Edition

Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700 Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer

Edited By Micheline White Copyright 2009

    Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer have emerged as important literary figures in the past ten years and scholars have increasingly realized that their bold and often unorthodox works challenge previously-held conceptions about women's engagement with early modern secular and religious literary culture. This volume collects some of the most influential and innovative essays that elucidate these women's works from a wide range of feminist, literary, aesthetic, economic, racial, sexual and theological perspectives. The volume is prefaced by an extended editorial overview of scholarship in the field.

    Contents: Introduction; Bibliography; Part I Anne Locke Prowse: 'In a mirrour clere': Protestantism and politics in Anne Lok's Miserere Mei Deus, Rosalind Smith; Anne Lock's Meditation: invention versus dilation and the founding of Puritan poetics, Roland Greene; 'An Englishe box': Calvinism and commodities in Anne Lok's A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, Christopher Warley; Curing the soul: Anne Lock's authorial medicine, Susan M. Felch. Part II Isabella Whitney: Oppositional ideologies of gender in Isabella Whitney's Copy of a Letter, Paul A. Marquis; Literary property and the single woman in Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay, Laurie Ellinghausen; The maids lawful liberty: service, the household, and 'Mother B' in Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay, Patricia Phillippy; Isabella Whitney and the female legacy, Wendy Wall. Part III Aemilia Lanyer: Lanyer and Early Modern Patriarchy: 'Let us have our libertie againe': Amelia Lanier's 17th-century feminist voice, Lynette McGrath; Aemilia Lanyer and the invention of white womanhood, Barbara Bowen; Woman's desire for man in Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Theresa M. DiPasquale; 'To undoe the booke': Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and the subversion of Pauline authority, Esther Gilman Richey; A woman with St Peter's keys? Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and the priestly gifts of women, Micheline White; The gendering of genre: literary history and the canon, Marshall Grossman. Lanyer and the Patronage System: Writing in service: sexual politics and class position in the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson, Anne Baynes Coiro; Breaking 'the rule of the cortezia': Aemilia Lanyer's dedications to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Lisa Schnell; An arbor of one's own? Aemilia Lanyer and the early modern garden, Christine Coch; To play the man: Aemilia Lanyer and the acquisition of patronage, Pamela Joseph Benson. Lanyer and Poetic Authority: Prophecy and gendered mourning in Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Elizabeth M.A. Hodgson; Remembering Orpheus in the poems of Aemilia Lanyer, Kari Boyd McBride. Index.

    Biography

    Micheline White, Associate Professor of English, Carleton University, Canada