Dido's Daughters

by Ferguson, Margaret W.

• ISBN13: 9780226243122
• ISBN10: 0226243125
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• 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 a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry and coeditor of a number of books, most recently The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Prologue	1	(30)
PART 1 Theoretical and Historical Considerations
1 Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts
Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models	31	(52)
2 Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies
Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars	83	(52)
3 Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies	135	(38)
PART 2 Literacy in Action and in Fantasy
Case Studies
Interlude	173	(6)
4 An Empire of Her Own
Literacy as Appropriation in Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cité des Dames	179	(46)
5 Making the World Anew
Female Literacy as Reformation and Translation in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron	225	(40)
6 Allegories of Imperial Subjection
Literacy as Equivocation in Elizabeth Cart's Tragedy of Mariam	265	(68)
7 New World Scenes from a Female Pen
Literacy as Colonization in Aphra Behn's Widdow Ranter and Oroonoko	333	(42)
Afterword	375	(4)
Notes	379	(56)
Select Bibliography	435	(50)
Index	485