Women Writing History in Early Modern England

by Megan Matchinske

• ISBN13: 9780521508674
• ISBN10: 0521508673
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In 1603 an English gentlewoman, Elizabeth Grymeston, composed for her young son a series of meditations meditations that would offer posthumous advice and reflection on everything from the nature of sin to the limits of royal authority. Six months later Grymeston was dead and her words memorialized not just for a small boy but also for an English audience eager for moral edification and enlightenment. As one of the first writers of the mother's legacy to appear in England, Grymeston looked to history to find her answers. Using life experience as her witness, she drew immediate and powerful connections between yesterday's actions and tomorrow's possibilities. She was not alone throughout the seventeenth century, scores of Englishwomen did likewise, exploring in their own 'histories' the shifting relationships between past and future. This book focuses on this dynamic exchange, asking us to look seriously at the ends of history.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. viii
Strategies for survival: gender, ethics and history	p. 1
Inheriting history	p. 2
History as discipline	p. 4
Gender and genre as ethical categories	p. 7
Structure and method	p. 12
Past and future	p. 18
Truth in the telling: moral, method and history in Anne Dowriche's The French Historie	p. 20
History writing in Elizabethan contexts	p. 24
Providentialism	p. 26
History as lesson learning	p. 28
The documentary impulse	p. 37
Gendering Catholic conformity: equivocal history and cultural context in Elizabeth Grymeston's Miscelanea	p. 45
The background	p. 46
Grymeston's Miscelanea	p. 48
Equivocation: its historic contexts	p. 53
Equivocation and the middle path	p. 54
Equivocation: its material contexts	p. 60
Metaphorical equivocation: good Catholics make bad wives	p. 65
Equivocal pragmatism	p. 67
Equivocation and outcome: policy-making in action	p. 70
Strategic equivocation: a politics of feminist historical thought	p. 72
From here to 'henceforth': history, gender and identity in the diary writings of Lady Anne Clifford	p. 74
Early modern autobiography	p. 76
Form, function and identity in autobiogaphy	p. 81
Lady Anne Clifford	p. 85
History and historical precedent	p. 86
Serial justification	p. 87
The 'Great Picture'	p. 94
Beyond Clifford	p. 98
Temporality	p. 101
Receptive readers: dissimulation and historical truth in Mary Carleton's bigamy trials	p. 103
Carleton's history	p. 105
Wit, sexuality and the court	p. 107
Restoration erotics	p. 113
Criminal biography, history and truth	p. 115
Raillery and rectitude	p. 115
Oath taking and oath breaking	p. 120
Receptive readers	p. 125
Political and domestic bigamy	p. 127
History and historical protocols	p. 129
Multiple pasts	p. 133
The 'dying-tale': history and the ethics of action	p. 136
Nuntio's charge	p. 137
Disciplines and boundaries	p. 139
Problems and protocols: the evidence of evidence	p. 145
Conversations: the postmodern dilemma	p. 149
Lying like truth: promises and the past	p. 150
Ethics and responsibility	p. 152
The death of fathers: history as revenge	p. 153
History and conflict	p. 154
Notes	p. 158
Bibliography	p. 210
Index	p. 237
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