World-Making Renaissance Women

Pamela S. Hammons is Professor of English and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami. She has authored Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse (2010), Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (2002), and essays on manuscript culture, poetry, and women's writing. She edited Katherine Austen's Book M: A London Widow's Life Writings (2013) for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Awards have included a Mellon Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and Fellowship. She is currently editing Mary Carey's A Mother's Spiritual Dialogue, Meditations, and Elegies for The Other Voice. Brandie R. Siegfried is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University. Her interests include relations between Elizabethan literary history and sixteenth-century Ireland. Recent articles concern Henry Sidney in Ireland, Irish counter-Tudor campaigns and the typology of Israel, Irish ballads, and bardic conceptualizations of sovereignty. Her books focus on Margaret Cavendish—including the co-edited God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish (2014) and a modern spelling edition of Poems and Fancies (2018) for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, which won the Josephine Roberts Scholarly Edition Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.

Introduction; The literary contours of women's world-making Brandie R. Siegfried and Pamela S. Hammons; Part I. Early Modern Women Framing the Modern World: 1. Erotic origins: genesis, the passion, and Aemilia Lanyer's Queer temporality Erin Murphy; 2. Aphra Behn's fiction: transmission, editing, and canonization Paul Salzman; 3. From aisling vision to Irish queen: the reimergence of Gráinne Ní Mháille in Europe's revolutionary period Brandie R. Siegfried; 4. Reframing the picture: screening early modern women for modern audiences Lisa Walters and Naomi Miller; Part II. Remaking the Literary World: 5. Uncloseted: geography and early modern women's dramatic writing Marion Wynne-Davies; 6. Lucy Hutchinson's memoirs as auto-biography Laura DeFurio; 7. Commonplace genres, or women's interventions in non-traditional literary forms: Madame de Sablé, Aphra Behn, and the maxim Victoria E. Burke; 8. Form, formalism, and literary studies: the case of Margaret Cavendish Lara Dodds; Part III. Connecting the Social Worlds of Religion, Politics, and Philosophy: 9. Royalism and resistance: the personal and the political in Anne, Lady Halkett's Meditations, 1660–1699 Suzanne Trill; 10. Hester Pulter's dissolving worlds Marshelle Woodward; 11. The feminist worlds of Margaret Cavendish David Cunning; 12. Augustus reigns, but poets still are low: Aphra Behn's world in the emperor of the moon (1687) Elaine Hobby; Part IV. Rethinking Early Modern Types and Stereotypes: 13. Learning to imitate women: male education and the grammar of female experience Catherine Loomis; 14. Mothers and widows: world-making against stereotypes in early modern English women's manuscript writings Pamela Hammons; 15. Queer virgins: nuns, reproductive futurism, and early modern English culture Jaime Goodrich; 16. Defensor Feminae: Aemilia Lanyer and Rachel Speght Elizabeth Hodgson; 17. Margaret Cavendish's Melancholy identity: gender and the evolution of a Genre Tina Skouen and Henriette Kolle.