The Selected Correspondence of Elizabeth Bourne
The Selected Correspondence of Elizabeth Bourne

Author: Cristina León Alfar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9781003144311

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"The documents contained in Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies tell a story of Mistress Bourne's petition for divorce, its resolution, and the ongoing dispute between Mistress Bourne and her husband about their marriage and separation, and subsequently between Mistress Bourne and Sir John Conway both for custody of her daughters and her financial security. The letters capture the contradiction between married women's official legal limitations and the often messy and complicated avenues of redress available to them. Elizabeth's narratives and desire for divorce challenge literary representations of patient endurance where appropriate feminine behavior restores a husband's devotion. The Bourne case offers a unique set of documents heretofore unavailable except through the British Library, National Archives' State Papers, and Hatfield House. Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne is tremendously important to early modern scholars and our knowledge about and view of women's negotiations for legal autonomy in the sixteenth century"--

Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne
Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne

Author: Cristina León Alfar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-28

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1000340287

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The documents contained in Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies tell a story of Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and the ongoing dispute between Mistress Bourne and her husband about their marriage and separation, and subsequently between Mistress Bourne and Sir John Conway both for custody of her daughters and her financial security. The letters capture the contradiction between married women’s official legal limitations and the often messy and complicated avenues of redress available to them. Elizabeth’s narratives and desire for divorce challenge literary representations of patient endurance where appropriate feminine behavior restores a husband’s devotion. The Bourne case offers a unique set of documents heretofore unavailable except through the British Library, National Archives’ State Papers, and Hatfield House. Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne is tremendously important to early modern scholars and our knowledge about and view of women’s negotiations for legal autonomy in the sixteenth century.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700
The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

Author: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-22

Total Pages: 897

ISBN-13: 0192604732

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on—and challenges—the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

Marriage, Separation, and Divorce in England, 1500-1700
Marriage, Separation, and Divorce in England, 1500-1700

Author: K. J. Kesselring

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0192849956

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.

Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England
Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England

Author: James Daybell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-26

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0192566687

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book represents the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period so far undertaken, and acts as an important corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political. Based on over 3,000 manuscript letters, it shows that letter-writing was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has been hitherto assumed. In that letters constitute the largest body of extant sixteenth-century women's writing, the book initiates a reassessment of women's education and literacy in the period. As indicators of literacy, letters yield physical evidence of rudimentary writing activity and abilities, document 'higher' forms of female literacy, and highlight women's mastery of formal rhetorical and epistolary conventions. The book also stresses that letters are unparalleled as intimate and immediate records of family relationships, and as media for personal and self-reflective forms of female expression. Read as documents that inscribe social and gender relations, letters shed light on the complex range of women's personal relationships, as female power and authority fluctuated, negotiated on an individual basis. Furthermore, correspondence highlights the important political roles played by early modern women. Female letter-writers were integral in cultivating and maintaining patronage and kinship networks; they were active as suitors for crown favour, and operated as political intermediaries and patrons in their own right, using letters to elicit influence. Letters thus help to locate differing forms of female power within the family, locality and occasionally on the wider political stage, and offer invaluable primary evidence from which to reconstruct the lives of early modern women.

Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays
Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays

Author: Cristina León Alfar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-02-10

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1134773382

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare’s work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men’s accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men’s superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women’s bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women’s agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare’s cuckoldry plays, women’s rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to “shift it” as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.

John Donne and the Conway Papers
John Donne and the Conway Papers

Author: Daniel Starza Smith

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 019166832X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How and why did men and women send handwritten poetry, drama, and literary prose to their friends and social superiors in the seventeenth century-and what were the consequences of these communications? Within this culture of manuscript publication, why did John Donne (1572-1631), an author who attempted to limit the circulation of his works, become the most transcribed writer of his age? John Donne and the Conway Papers examines these questions in great detail. Daniel Starza Smith investigates a seventeenth-century archive, the Conway Papers, in order to explain the relationship between Donne and the archive's owners, the Conway family. Drawing on an enormous amount of primary material, he situates Donne's writings within the broader workings of manuscript circulation, from the moment a scribe identified a source text, through the process of transcription and onwards to the social ramifications of this literary circulation. John Donne and the Conway Papers offers the first full-length analysis of three generations of the Conway family between Elizabeth's succession and the end of the Civil War, explaining what the Conway Papers are and how they were amassed, how the archive came to contain a concentration of manuscript poetry by Donne, and what the significance of this fact is, in terms of seventeenth-century politics, patronage, and culture. Answers to these questions cast new light on the early transmission of Donne's verse and prose. Throughout, John Donne and the Conway Papers emphasizes the importance of Donne's closest friends and earliest readers—such as George Garrard, Rowland Woodward, and Sir Henry Goodere—in the dissemination of his poetry. Goodere in particular emerges as a key agent in the early circulation of Donne's verse, and this book offers the first sustained account of his literary activities.

Shakespeare Studies
Shakespeare Studies

Author: Leeds Barroll

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 1999-11

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780838638354

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing more than three hundred pages of essays and studies by critics from both hemispheres.