Women Writers And Public Debate In 17th Century Britain

This book reveals women writers' key role in constituting seventeenth-century public culture and, in doing so, offers a new reading of that culture as begun in intimate circles of private dialogue and extended along transnational networks of public debate.

This book reveals that seventeenth-century women's very marginality to traditional institutions of church and state made them catalysts for imagining an expanded public culture beyond these institutions. Women authors such as the conduct writer Dorothy Leigh, the prophet Sarah Wight, and the poet Katherine Philips recast sites of private dialogue--the extended family, the religious coventicle, and the poetic coterie--as the bases of public debate that crossed national borders. By revealing women writers' key role in the heated controversies of this period, Gray offers a new reading of those struggles as fractured by private affiliation and extended by transnational alliance.

This book reveals women writers' key role in constituting seventeenth-century public culture and, in doing so, offers a new reading of that culture as begun in intimate circles of private dialogue and extended along transnational networks of public debate.

The first comprehensive anthology of seventeenth-century English women writers

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Leipzig (Institut für Anglistik), course: Culture and Literature of 17th century England , language: English, abstract: Contents Introduction 1 The 17th Century Britain 1.1 Political Background 1.2 Population and Religion 1.3 Literature and Theatre 2 Female Authorship 2.1 Situation of Women 2.2 Writing and Publishing as a Woman 3 Margaret Cavendish 3.1 Biography 3.2 Life and Work as a Writer 3.3 Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy 3.4 The Atomic Poems Summary Bibliography Introduction The present paper deals with the topic oft female authorship in the literary world of the seventeenth-century England and puts the emphasis on an exceptional and prolific female writer: Margaret Cavendish. This works is divided into three main parts. The first section serves as an introduction to the main topic and provides the reader with background information about the political, social, religious and literary situation during that time. It presents a review of the tumultuous succession of the English throne, the rising Puritan movement throughout the century and the development of English theatre after the era of the Elizabethan Stage at the end of the sixteenth century. The second part describes women’s role in the patriarchal society of the seventeenth century and the difficulties of their every-day life. It also points out the obstacles and difficulties women encountered when trying to enter the male-dominated literary world and names Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips as two women, who, nevertheless, established themselves as successful female writers. Finally, the third and last part of this paper is dedicated to the prolific writer Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. It contains an overview of her life and work and especially examines her as the first woman to publish her own natural philosophy, for which she was criticized by many of her contemporaries.

This book is the first comparative study of early modern English and Dutch women writers. It explores women’s rich and complex responses to the birth of the public sphere, new concepts of privacy, and the ideology of domesticity in the seventeenth century. Women in both countries were briefly allowed a public voice during times of political upheaval, but were increasingly imagined as properly confined to the household by the end of the century. This book compares how English and Dutch women responded to these changes. It discusses praise of women, marriage manuals, and attitudes to female literacy, along with female artistic and literary expressions in the form of painting, engraving, embroidery, print, drama, poetry, and prose, to offer a rich account of women’s contributions to debates on issues that mattered most to them.

In Domesticity and Dissent Katharine Gillespie examines writings by seventeenth-century English Puritan women who fought for religious freedom. Seeking the right to preach and prophesy, women such as Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Wentworth envisioned the modern political principles of toleration, the separation of Church from state, privacy, and individualism. Gillespie argues that their sermons, prophesies, and petitions illustrate the fact that these liberal theories did not originate only with such well-known male thinkers as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Rather, they emerged also from a group of determined female religious dissenters who used the Bible to reassess traditional definitions of womanhood, public speech and religious and political authority. Gillespie takes the 'pamphlet literatures' of the seventeenth century as important subjects for analysis, and her study contributes to the important scholarship on the revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War in England.

During the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, women produced writings in both manuscript and print. This volume represents recent scholarship that has uncovered new texts as well as introduced new paradigms to further our understanding of women's literary history during this period.