Early Modern Women in Conversation

by Larson, Katherine R.

• ISBN13: 9780230298620
• ISBN10: 0230298621
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

To converse is, in its most fundamental sense, to engage with society. The potency of conversation as an early modern social networking tool is complicated, both by its gendered status in the period and by its conflation of verbal and physical interaction. Conversation was an embodied act that signified social intimacy, cohabitation, and even sexual intercourse. As such, conversation posed a particular challenge for women, whose virtuous reputation was contingent on sexual and verbal self-control. Early Modern Women in Conversation considers how five women writers from the prominent Sidney and Cavendish families negotiated the gendered interrelationship between conversation and the spatial boundaries delimiting conversational encounters to create opportunities for authoritative and socially transformative utterance within their texts. Conversation emerges in this book as a powerful rhetorical and creative practice that remaps women's relationship to space and language in early modern England.

Author Biography

KATHERINE R. LARSON is Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research and teaching interests centre on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, gender and language, music and literature, and women's writing. She has published in international journals including English Literary Renaissance, The Sidney Journal and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Note on Texts and References
Introduction
Beyond the Humanist Dialogue: The Textual Conversations of Early Modern Women
PART I: GENDERING CONVERSATION AND SPACE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
'Intercourses of Friendship': Gender, Conversation, and Social Performance
Markets and Thresholds: Conversation as Spatial Practice
PART II: THE SIDNEYS IN CONVERSATION
Speaking to God with 'a cloven tongue': The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter
Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Mary Wroth's Love's Victory and Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost
PART III: THE CAVENDISHES IN CONVERSATION
'The language of friendship and conversation': Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's Conversational Alliances
The Civil Conversations of Margaret Cavendish and Ben Jonson
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index