Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Cristina Malcolmson, Mihoko Suzuki

      Pages 1-12

3. Manuscript and Debate

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

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   2. Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies in Early Modern England

      • Cristina Malcolmson

      Pages 15-35

   3. Anne Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Manuscript

      • Elizabeth Clarke

      Pages 37-53

4. Print, Pedagogy, and the Question of Class

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 55-55

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   2. Muzzling the Competition: Rachel Speght and the Economics of Print

      • Lisa J. Schnell

      Pages 57-77

   3. Women’s Popular Culture? Teaching the Swetnam Controversy

      • Melinda J. Gough

      Pages 79-100

5. Women’s Subjectivity in Male-Authored Texts

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 101-101

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   2. The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice

      • Sandra Clark

      Pages 103-120

   3. “Weele have a Wench shall be our Poet”: Samuel Rowlands’ Gossip Pamphlets

      • Susan Gushee O’Malley

      Pages 121-137

6. Generic Departures: Figuring the Maternal Body, Constructing Female Culture

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 139-139

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   2. The Mat(t)er of Death: The Defense of Eve and the Female Ars Moriendi

      • Patricia Phillippy

      Pages 141-160

   3. “Hens should be served first”: Prioritizing Maternal Production in the Early Modern Pamphlet Debate

      • Naomi J. Miller

      Pages 161-184

   4. Crossed-Dressed Women and Natural Mothers: “Boundary Panic” in Hic Mulier

      • Rachel Trubowitz

      Pages 185-206

7. Politics, State, and Nation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 207-207

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   2. Monstrous Births and the Body Politic: Women’s Political Writings and the Strange and Wonderful Travails of Mistris Parliament and Mris. Rump

      • Katherine Romack

      Pages 209-230

   3. Elizabeth, Gender, and the Political Imaginary of Seventeenth-Century England

      • Mihoko Suzuki

      Pages 231-253

8. Back Matter

   Pages 255-265

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This book explores the construction of gender ideology in early modern England through an analysis of the querelle des femmes - the debate about the relationship between the sexes that originated on the continent during the middle ages and the Renaissance and developed in England into the Swetnam controversy, which revolved around the publication of Joseph Swetnam's The arraignment of lewd, forward, and inconstant women and the pamphlets which responded to its misogynist attacks. The volume contextualizes the debate in terms of its continental antecedents and elite manuscript circulation in England, then moves to consider popular culture and printed texts from the Jacobean debate and its effects on women's writing and the developing discourse on gender, and concludes with an examination of the ramifications of the debate during the Civil War and Restoration. Essays focus attention on the implications of the gender debate for women writers and their literary relations, cultural ideology and the family, and political discourse and ideas of nationhood.

• England
• gender
• Middle Ages
• Renaissance
• women

"...this volume establishes a threshold of excellence that will become the ideal for later scholarship to emulate." - A.C. Labriola, Choice

"This is a rich and unusual collection of essays. The book differs strikingly from most collections of essays because it not only studies past debates focused on questions of gender but also stages - in an intelligent, well-controlled, but refreshingly sharp way - a modern critical activity of debating gender. The editors introduction is superb, as are their strategies for organizing this set of highly original and cogently-argued essays." - Margaret Ferguson, University of California at Davis

• Bates College, USA

  Cristina Malcolmson

• University of Miami, USA

  Mihoko Suzuki

CHRISTINA MALCOLMSON is Associate Professor of English and former Chair of Women's Studies at Bates College. Her previous books include Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic and Longman Critical Readers: Renaissance Poetry.

MIHOKO SUZUKI is Associate Professor of English and former Director of Women's Studies at the University of Miami. She is the author of Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic and editor of Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser.

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