Dido's Daughters

by Ferguson, Margaret W.

• ISBN13: 9780226243115
• ISBN10: 0226243117
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Didobuilder of an empire that threatened to rival RomeFerguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

Author Biography

Margaret W. Ferguson is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Theoretical and Historical Considerations

Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts: Definitions, Debates,Interpretive Models

Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars

Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies

Literacy in Action and in Fantasy Case StudiesInterlude

An Empire of Her Own: Literacy as Appropriation in Christine de Pizan'sLivre de la Cite des Dames

Making the World Anew: Female Literacy as Reformation and Translation inMarguerite de Navarre'sHeptameron

Allegories of Imperial Subjection: Literacy as Equivocation in Elizabeth Cary'sTragedy of Mariam

New World Scenes from a Female Pen: Literacy as Colonization in Aphra

Behn'sWiddow

Ranterand

Oroonoko

Afterword

NotesSelect

Bibliography

Index

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