Constructing a City of Ladies; MARGARET P. HANNAY
Shakespeare Studies 01-01-1997
EARLY MODERN WOMEN WRITERS searched for a tradition
and a community. Theirs was not so much the anxiety of influence as
"the anxiety of absence," as I observed in 1985, an absence that I felt
myself, as did many others working in this field (Silent 1). Our
writing was often no more valued than that of the women we studied,
giving us a sense of solidarity with them. Parallels between the women
we studied and our own situation are evident in Jean R. Brink's 1980
introduction to Female Scholars: "Learned women, conscious of being
"exceptions," made every effort to establish contacts with contemporary
women who lived in other countries and also to study the work of their
predecessors regardless of nationality" (p. 1).
More an angle of
vision than a single methodology, the study of early modern women
requires interdisciplinary, cooperative scholarship across national
boundaries. Our focus has widened as we have looked beyond Europe and
as we have discovered a multiplicity of hitherto overlooked texts and
material objects, such as wills and other legal documents, diaries,
personal and business correspondence, medical receipts, advice books,
religious meditations, musical compositions, paintings, architecture,
monuments, and needlework. At the symposium on "Attending to Women in
Renaissance England," sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and
Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland (1990), I was at first
exhilarated and then utterly overwhelmed by the avalanche of new
materials on women writers, artists, musicians, theologians,
politicians, and scientistsnot just aristocratic women, my own
primary
focus of study, but women of all social ranks. I was beginning to
despair, realizing that I could never master all these new discoveries,
when I had a moment of epiphanyno one person needs to know it all.
The
field is being shaped by an international community of scholars who now
use a wide array of critical methodologies to study early modern women
of all races and nationalities. Each of us brings different stones to
the building, but together we are, like Christine de Pisan, shaping a
City of Ladies. My comments, therefore, will be drawn primarily from my
own field of English literature, with occasional glances at other
locales and disciplines, as I consider two related questions: How did
early modern women find communities that empowered their work, and how
do we? My attempt to answer these questions has become a parallel
search for networks of early modern women and networks of contemporary
scholars.
By asking about early modern women, we raise questions
of what we mean by historical research. How close can we come to
reconstructing their lives and putting their achievements in context?
How much are we blinded by our own position? When we read proscriptions
for women, can we be certain how they were read and to what extent they
were followed by typical women of the time? We have access to the
cultural ideal through advice books, homilies, and even funeral sermons
for women who were praised for conforming to the ideal. But the
specific women who have left records tend to be exceptionalthose
whose
violation of standards is recorded in legal records, or those whose
social rank gave them prominence, or those who made a significant
achievement in the arts or in politics.
We know that some women
were an important part of the political community. For aristocratic
women, the court and the country house served as the primary foci for
women to meet together. In the sixteenth century, an age of queens,
these female conversations had unprecedented political import when
Marguerite de Navarre and her daughter Jeanne d'Albret, Catherine
de'Medici, Mary Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Elizabeth Tudor acted on the
public stage. While non-royal women were still barred from the formal
power structures, women close to a queen wielded considerable informal
power, as indicated by the assiduity with which their favor was courted
by male courtiers and ambassadors. Women like Marguerite de Navarre and
Queen Elizabeth, known for their eloquence, also empowered women
writers and, to some undefinable extent, may have raised the
expectations of most women. As Anne Bradstreet later observed in her
elegy on Elizabeth, "Let such as say our sex is void of reason, / Know
'tis a slander now but once was treason" (198).
We know that the
court could also serve as a venue for a literary coterie. In the court
of Henry VIII, for example, the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS add.
17492) was evidently circulated among the Howard family and others
associated with Anne Boleyn by Mary Shelton, who also inscribed some
original verse; Margaret Douglas and Mary
Howard Fitzroy were also actively involved in the transcription and
circulation of poetry within this "restricted social group" (Marotti
39). The family could also provide a community for personal verse, like
the epitaphs written by Anne Cecil, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby, and Katherine
Cooke Killegrew.
We know that many early modern English women of
all social ranks sought support in a religious community. That some of
them chafed under gender restrictions is evident in their writings, as
in Anne Lok's dedication to another devout woman, Anne Russell Herbert,
countess of Warwick. Using the code phrase of building the walls of
Jerusalem to mean contributing to the Protestant cause, Lok poignantly
articulates the limitations placed on women:
Euerie one in his
calling is bound to doo somewhat to the furtherance of the holie
building; but because great things by reason of my sex I may not doo,
and that which I may, I ought to doo, I have according to my duetie,
brought my poore basket of stones to the strengthening of the walls of
that Jerusalem, whereof (by grace) wee are all both Citizens and
members. (sig. A3v-4)
Lok presents herself both as a full member
of this religious community and as a woman disempowered because of her
gender. It is not that she is incapable of "great things," she says,
but that she is forbidden to do them. Lok shared a sense of mission
with other deeply devout Protestant women and men. This religious
community also empowered the works of other early Tudor women writers
and translators. For example, Katherine Parr published her original
Prayers Stirryng the Mynd unto Heavenlye Medytacions (1545) and The
Lamentacion of a Sinner (1547); Anne Cooke Bacon translated fourteen
sermons by Bernadino Ochino (1548) and Bishop John Jewel's volume of
Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1564); and Elizabeth Cooke Hoby (who
later became Lady Russell) translated A Way of Reconciliation Touching
the True Nature and Substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in the
Sacrament (eventually published in 1605). Anne Dowriche's The French
Historie (1589) was intensely Protestant, including "fiery descriptions
of the Catholic persecution of the godly" (Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 103).
Recusant women were similarly empowered in their own days of
persecution, including Elizabeth Cary and the daughter who wrote her
biography as a (somewhat irregular) Catholic saint's life. For such
women the religious controversy overrode cultural injunctions to
silence, yet none of these English women defined herself or was defined
by her society primarily as a writer; each wrote as part of a
religious, rather than literary, community.
We know that these
political, family, and religious communities were all the more
important to such learned women in the early sixteenth century because
they had no English women as role models. Some of them evidently turned
to Marguerite de Navarre, who was part of the international Protestant
community, an accomplished stateswoman and published writer who served
as a model for both royal women and for aspiring writers. Young
Elizabeth Tudor translated Marguerite de Navarre's The Mirror of the
Sinful Soul as a gift for her stepmother Katherine Parr; and Anne, Margaret,
and Jane Seymour wrote a series of Latin distichs, the Hecatodistichon
(1550), in honor of her. Perhaps because she was celebrated as a
political, religious, and literary figure, Marguerite seems to have
been the most empowering model for English women writers, but they
could look to the Continent for a wider tradition: in addition to
celebrated medieval writers like Christine de Pisan, some women like
Cecilia Gonzago, Baptista da Montefeltro Malatesta, Isotta Nogarola,
and Laura Cereta were active in the humanist movement in the Italian
Renaissance; women like Gaspara Stampa, Madeleine and Catherine des
Roches, Veronica Franco, and Louise Labé were recognized poets;
and in
France women such as Pernette du Guillet could be "welcomed in
independent literary coteries" that allowed them to "construct a
literary self" by affiliating with a master (Jones 80-81). Prior to the
seventeenth century such access to literary communities was denied to
English women, even the few who did publish, and their public discourse
was largely confined to religious matters.
Mary Sidney, countess
of Pembroke, stands as a liminal figure between women writing as sacred
duty and writing as belles lettres. Before the 1592 publication of her
translations of Robert Garnier's Antonius and Philippe de Mornay's
Discourse on Life and Death, the only secular translation published by
an English woman was Margaret Tyler's
translation of The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood by Diego
Ortuñez de Calahorra (1578); Tyler's preface nervously attempted
to
justify secular translation for women. Mary Sidney's translations,
published without apology under her own name, we might call
"semi-secular," secular works which raised important religious and
ethical questions, as did her original encomia in praise of her brother
and in praise of Elizabeth. But her most important writing was her
poetic paraphrase of the Psalms, a work which could be praised as
suitably "godly" even as it provided a model for later writers such as
Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth, and therefore the beginning of a woman's
literary tradition in English. Before Mary Sidney, no woman in England
was an acknowledged part of the poetic community. Although she was
undoubtedly empowered by the example of women like her mother's friends
the Cooke sisters, and although she may have known the coterie writings
by women, the published writers who surrounded and celebrated her as
she wrote were, to our knowledge, exclusively male. By situating
herself as avatar of her brother Philip Sidney, she found a voice, as
many who sought her patronage recognized. Thomas Churchyard, for
example, presents the Sidney heritage as overcoming cultural
injunctions to female silence: she is "a Sidney right" who "shall not
in silence sit" (Churchyard sig. B1v). Mary Sidney herself evidently
sought female predecessors in the scriptures, identifying with the
women who sang in Psalm 68:
Wee house-confined maids with
distaffs share ye spoyle Whose hew though long at home the chimnys
glosse did foyle Since now as late enlarged doves wee freer skyes do
try. (Early draft recorded by Samuel Woodforde, Bodleian MS Rawlinson
poet 25)
This original rendition of the psalm reveals her most
effective strategy for finding a speaking voice. Though the women had
been confined to the female role symbolized by the distaff (her
original addition to the psalm), speaking God's word frees them to soar
like doves, in the familiar association of poetry with flight. Mary
Sidney herself speaks through the words of the psalmist, thereby
creating an impeccably virtuous self that cannot be tained by the
frequent connection of female eloquence and unchastity, and creating an
individual voice that speaks out of and on behalf of the godly
community. In this her position is similar to that of Anne Lok, who
wrote a sonnet sequence on Psalm 51, yet the countess of Pembroke was
in her lifetime celebrated not only as a religious figure like Lok, but
also as a writer.
Recent research has demonstrated how her
example empowered Aemilia Lanyer, who appeals to her as a writer whose
"holy Sonnets" are celebrated on earth and in heaven, thereby
continuing to connect female writing with devotion (Salve Deus 27). In
her religious meditation, Lanyer constructs "an enduring community of
good women that reaches from Eve to contemporary Jacobean patronesses,"
as Barbara Lewalski has established (Writing Women 213). Mary Wroth,
who barely mentions religion, also constructs a community of good women
in her Urania; Pamphilia and her friends recite poems, as well as share
their experiences of politics, love, marriage, and child rearing. Her
bold move from a religious to a literary community was empowered by her
position as a Sidney, but she was castigated for her secular writings.
In Edmund Denny's familiar words, she has wasted her time on
"lascivious tales and amorous toys," and should instead follow the
example of her "vertuous and learned aunt." Denny's words are
particularly ironic, for Wroth's writing was undoubtedly encouraged by
her aunt, who is shadowed in the Urania as the queen of Naples, an
accomplished secular poet who recites a love complaint she has written
(490).
Literary coteries empowered seventeenth-century women who
wrote, transcribed, and circulated both sacred and secular poems, such
as Katherine Thimelby Aston, who contributed verse to the manuscript
compiled by her sister-in-law Constance Aston Fowler, part of the
collection of the Astons of Tixall, which also included one of the most
important manuscripts of the Sidney Psalmes. We see with what joy
Katherine Philips writes to her circle of friends; as "Orinda" she
became a model for other women writers. Yet when Anne Finch, countess
of Winchilsea, searches for a tradition in her "Introduction," she does
not acknowledge Philips or her contemporaries, but, like Pembroke,
claims her poetic predecessors in scripture; like Pembroke, she
pictures herself as a bird, but whereas Pembroke's doves soar, Finch's
bird sings "with contracted wing, / To some few freinds." Those
friends, however few, constituted a community that enabled her work:
without them, she may not have written at all, and she certainly would
not have published even a selection of her poems that carefully omits
transgressive works (Williamson 119).
We now know that early
modern women had extensive networks in political, family, religious,
and eventually literary circles. Many were well known to their
contemporaries, so why were their works unknown to my own undergraduate
and graduate professors? Why were these women and their
interconnections lost to scholars for so long? The answer again seems
to lie in communities. As English literature became an academic
discipline, it sought respectability by rigorous pruning of the
literary tradition to construct a coherent canon of works by male
authors that would rival those taught in classics departments. Memories
of early modern women writers were kept (barely) alive in such
marginalized collections as George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies
of Great Britain (1752), Louisa Costello's Memoirs of Eminent
Englishwomen (1844), and Frederic Rowton, The Female Poets of Great
Britain (1853). Such works, while acknowledging the existence of early
modern women writers, often tended to disparage them, so that in the
early twentieth century women writers were still seeking a usable past.
Virginia Woolf was searching for a female tradition when she looked on
the shelves "for books that were not there" and lamented that "nothing
is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in
my mind to turn about this way and that" (A Room of One's Own, 68-69).
As Margaret Ezell has demonstrated, her
judgments have had considerable impact on subsequent scholarship.
What
Woolf lacked was not access to works by women, for she often wrote in
the British Library, which houses most of the print works by early
modern English women and also many of their manuscripts. Nor did she
entirely lack knowledge of early women writers, since she mentions Anne
Finch, Margaret Cavendish,
Dorothy Osborne, and Aphra Behn. What Woolf lacked was a community that
valued these works: Finch was too consumed with "hate and fear" to be a
great poet; Margaret Cavendish
was "hare-brained, fantastical"; Dorothy Osborne "wrote nothing.
Letters did not count"; Aphra Behn "earned [women] the right to speak
their minds" by earning her living as a writer, but she was so
notoriously unchaste that she frightened society and "the door was
slammed faster than ever" (A Room of One's Own, 87-98). Viewing the
early modern period through the lens of Trevelyan's History of England,
with its depiction of early modern women as "locked up, beaten and
flung about the room" (A Room of One's Own, 66), Woolf could not accept
these women as part of her literary tradition. She also appeared to
lack knowledge of the scholarly community that was already creating the
histories that she sought, works that focused on the cultural climate
for women, their education, and the restrictions on their behavior,
such as Foster Watson, Vives and the Renascence Education of Women
(1912); Mary Agnes Cannon, The Education of Women During the
Renaissance (1916); and Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England,
1650-1760 (1920).
More important was the question of genre, for
works by several early modern women were available in modern editions
in whole or in part when Woolf wrote. Despite her dismissal of Dorothy
Osborne, she was so drawn to her lively style that she later devoted an
essay to her letters, noting that "The art of letter-writing is often
the art of essay-writing in disguise" (Second Common Reader, 52),
thereby anticipating recent work on the epistolary genre. Besides
Dorothy Osborne's letters, she had available in print other
collections, such as The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis
(1842), the Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (1854), and the letters of
Arbella Stuart (1866). Diaries, such as The Journal of Lady Mildmay
(1911), she must have discounted as writing, especially since she must
have known of The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford edited by Vita
Sackville-West (1923). Translations she must also have discounted, such
as Margaret Beaufort's translation of De
imitatione Christi (1893), Elizabeth's translation of Marguerite de
Navarre (1897), and three of her classical translations (1899). She may
also have discounted autobiographical writing and memoirs, such as Lucy
Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (1806), the
Memoir of Lady Warwick: Also Her Diary (1848), and The Examination of
Anne Askew (1849). She either did not know, or did not value, original
works available in nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions, such as
The Lamentacion by Catherine Parr (1808), poems by Katherine Philips in
Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (1905), and Elizabeth Cary's The
Tragedie of Mariam (1914). Although she wrote an essay on Philip
Sidney's dedication to his sister in "The Countess of Pembroke's
Arcadia," she does not recognize the countess as a writer herself, nor
does she mention Frances Young's 1912 biography Mary Sidney.
The
state of scholarship on early modern women was not quite as dire in
1929 as Woolf thought, and yet in the next decade research continued
primarily in the muted form of unpublished dissertations, notably Rugh
Willard Hughey's "Cultural Interests of Women in England from 1524 to
1640, Indicated in the Writings of the Women" (1932), and Charlotte
Kohler's "The Elizabethan Woman of Letters: the Extent of Her Literary
Activity" (1936). Other studies in the field tended to focus on why
women had not written more, often by examining the controversy over
women in medieval and Renaissance texts. Such works often served to
establish early modern women in an environment that was essentially
hostile to their independence and achievement, as in Louis B. Wright's
"The Popular Controversy over Women" in Middle-Class Culture in
Elizabethan England (1935) and Frances Utley's The Crooked Rib: An
Analytic Index to the Argument About Women in English and Scots
Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (1944). Their efforts were
continued by Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance
(1956) and Katharine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of
Misogyny in Literature (1966).
All these works were available by
the time I graduated from college and yet, like Woolf, I had no
knowledge of this tradition. Then Joan Kelly-Gadol asked a provocative
question, "Did Women have a Renaissance?" in her essay appearing in the
aptly titled collection Becoming Visible: Women in European History
(1977). In the 1970s women were indeed becoming more visible in
biographical studies such as Roland Bainton's three volumes on Women of
the Reformation (1971) and Pearl Hogrefe's Tudor Women: Commoners and
Queens (1975) and Women of Action in Tudor England (1977). The study of
early modern women raises new questions by the nature of the material
itself. Ironically, at a time when the death of the author is loudly
proclaimed, we have been engaged in a quest for the author. Since so
many of these women are unknown, we had to begin with basic
biographical and textual recovery; indeed, the rediscovery of these
hundreds of "new" early modern texts has contributed to the resurgence
of textual scholarship in a poststructural age, as Josephine Roberts
discussed in the previous forum. We cannot give a psychoanalytical or
New Historicist or even a gendered reading of a text or painting that
is unknown and unavailable, nor can we comment on the historical
importance of a life until the basic facts are collected.
Thus
our first step is to discover and disseminate the works themselves. The
gradual development of the field can be seen in the waves of
anthologies, with a gradually sharpening focus. In the early 1970s
general anthologies of women's writing were useful to supplement texts
such as the ubiquitous Norton major authors volume that included no
women. A few medieval and early modern representatives were included in
the first general surveys of women writers, like By a Woman Writt:
Literature from Six Centuries By and About Women, edited by Joan
Goulianos (1973) and The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women
Poets in England and America, 1552-1950, edited by Louise Bernikow
(1974). More focused was Mary R. Mahl and Helene Koon, The Female
Spectator: English Women Writers before 1800 (1977), but the first
anthology devoted solely to the works of early modern women was The
Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance, edited
by Betty Travitsky (1981). After compiling collections of works by many
women, the next step is to produce scholarly editions of major works;
Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus, Elizabeth Cary's Mariam, and Lady Mary
Wroth's Urania have recently become available, and many other editions
are in preparation, including the works of Queen Elizabeth, the
Countess of Pembroke, and Katherine Philips. Parallels in art history
can be seen in the movement from the ground-breaking exhibition Women
Artists 1550-1950 held in Los Angeles in 1976, to the more focused
exhibition Sofonisba Anguissola: A Renaissance Woman, presented at The
National Museum of Women in the Arts in 1995; and similar parallels
could be drawn for other disciplines as scholars move from the initial
discovery that there were early modern women in their fields to full
incorporation of these women into the normal corpus of materials
studied, enabling theorists to construct new models of the past.
Like
early modern women themselves, contemporary scholars who study them
have searched for and have built communities. Academic conferences have
replaced the court and the country house as venues, and the modern
technologies of telephone, fax, and the internet have had an impact on
our modes of communication as revolutionary as the advent of print. Our
own networks and alliances, which cut across disciplines and
geographical boundaries, may be at their most visible through the most
typical of all publications in the field, the collection of essays,
often based on conferences or panels, such as the 1982 Yale conference
on "Renaissance Woman/Renaissance Man," resulting in Rewriting the
Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern
Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson,
Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (1986). Several other volumes in
the 1980s also reflect conference panels: Beyond their Sex: Learned
Women of the European Past, edited by Patricia H. Labalme (1984), was
based on papers delivered at commemorative conferences at Swarthmore
and Vassar Colleges celebrating the tercentenary for the first
doctorate in philosophy awarded to a woman, Elena Cornaro (1678);
Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and
Writers of Religious Works, edited by Margaret
Hannay (1985) was an outgrowth of "Renaissance Women and the Scriptural
Tradition," sponsored by the Conference on Christianity and Literature,
MLA 1983; Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and
Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (1986) was based on
"Changing Perspectives on Women in the Renaissance," a 1983 conference
at The Newberry Library.
Like literary coteries assembling
poetic miscellanies, modern scholars have joined together in
collaborative projects. Perhaps most important has been the NEH-Brown
Women Writers Project initiated by Susanne Woods, which has undertaken
to make texts available for classroom use, first in photocopies, and
now in affordable paperback editions and on electronic database.
Because of the circulation of such individual texts, and the inclusion
of early modern women writers in many recent anthologies, these writers
regularly appear in the classroom. There is now enough interest in
pedagogical strategies to justify a volume on Teaching Early Modern
British Women Writers in the MLA series, another collaborative effort.
Other large-scale projects include the facsimile series being issued by
Scolar Press, the compilation of texts by women in the French
Renaissance by the Groupe d'analyse et de recherche sur
l'écriture des
femmes au XVIe siècle, and English translations of texts by
continental
women in the forthcoming series, "The Other Voice in Early Modern
Europe, 1350-1750." Our knowledge is also extended by bibliographic
surveys such as the Women Writers Bibliography Project at the
University of Oklahoma. Paralleling these rediscoveries of women
writers has been the scholarship interpreting these works; so extensive
has the literature become that the Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies is creating a database of secondary source
materials. Such collaborative efforts are both products and producers
of scholarly communities.
Discussion groups have provided
another opportunity for community building, notably three groups that
were outgrowths of the Folger Colloquium on "Women in the Renaissance"
(1985-89). Members of the Folger group who wanted to extend discussions
of recent scholarship on early modern women founded colloquia in New
York at CUNY in 1987, in New England at the Center for Literary and
Cultural Studies at Harvard University in 1987, and in Washington at
the National Museum for Women in the Arts in 1989. In 1994 the Society
for the Study of Early Modern Women (EMW) was founded to promote
discussion across disciplinary boundaries and across geographical
borders. The internet also enables ongoing discussions on Women Writers
Project ListServe and now on the EMW Listserve.
We have
discovered a tradition and created a community that values it. This
international group of scholars, tied together through meetings at
conferences, joint projects, and discussions on the Internet, has
undertaken an enormous communal task: the reinterpretation of the past
to include early modern women, constructing a true City of Ladies. In
some parts of this city we are still laying the foundations by doing
biographical research and editing texts; in other parts of the city, we
are building theoretical structures. Here each of us, women and men who
utilize a wide spectrum of methodologies can, like Anne Lok, bring our
own "basket of stones to the strengthening of the walls of that [City],
whereof ... wee are all both Citizens and members."
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