This article uses romance as an analytical framework for approaching Cavendish's work. Building from Patricia Parker's seminal study of the romance genre, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics ofa Mode (1979), the article asks readers to consider how romance-a genre that Cavendish was preoccupied with throughout her career-structures Cavendish's companion scientific works: Observations on Experimental Philosophy to which is added The Description ofa New Blazing World (1666). Despite the fact that Cavendish published these works in tandem, there is no scholarly edition of the two texts together; instead, Blazing World is often deemed "romancical" in contrast to the more serious academic work of Observations. Rather than view Cavendish's investment in romance and her investment in natural philosophy as distinct, I read them as working in concert. The epistemological structure of opposition that defines romance proves useful to Cavendish as a way of exploring and explaining the workings of the natural world. Ultimately, this article argues that Cavendish mobilizes romance as a design for thinking that facilitates the production of new knowledge.
Although there has been much influential scholarship on England's global economy in the past few decades, relatively little of it has taken women's writing as a primary focus of analysis. This article contends that centering the works of early modern women can productively influence our literary and historical narratives about England's embeddedness within global capitalism and how it shifted across the seventeenth century. The article focuses primarily on the works of two royalist writers: Margaret Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure (1668) and Dorothy Calthorpe's "In commendations of a country Life it being so innocent" (1672-84) and "A Discription of the Garden of Edden" (1672-84). Both authors subtly reframe the usual expectations of country house discourse in the period to emphasize insularity and female retreat while simultaneously welcoming in the products and colonial labor practices of foreign trade. These texts thus make visible some of the gendered mechanisms by which the workings of global trade became increasingly familiar and palatable to seventeenth-century readers. In addition, this analysis shows how the process of imagining the seventeenth-century global economy and England's place within it enables these writers to establish forms of authority connected to their subject positions as white Englishwomen.
Focusing on Mid-Wives just Petition, a 1643 anti-war tract often dismissed as apolitical satire of women's sexual appetites, Megan Matchinske imagines the possibility instead put forward by its narrator of a post-Lockean propertied self that genders female and has inalienable rights. When we pay attention to the tract's parodic midwives as powerful provocateurs, we discover something key. In both A) foregrounding midwifery as a marketable vocation in which practitioners attained through expert knowledge economic independence, mobility, and prestige and B) focusing our attention on the consequences of midwives' multi-pronged labors-labors they undertake in the community and those they oversee to fulfill those obligations-this mock petition advocates a rights platform that demonstrates how early designers of individual political rights could have adapted and modified their ideas, outlining a propertied and embodied right to bear that genders female, justifies domestic labor, and offers its subjects and, even more pertinently, the workers that deliver them, protection from unprovoked and unjust civil war.
Civil war and domestic conflict are two sides of the same coin, each a source of shame for how they tear families apart. Although the English Civil War looms large as a troubling event in political history, the other form of domestic unrest barely registers in historical accounts of this period. And while civil wars have a beginning, middle, and end, domestic violence in the household forms a continuous but unacknowledged backdrop to civil violence and its aftermath. We must look to early modern women's civil war writings to uncover the hidden history of this violence and include it on the continuum of violence in the seventeenth century. This article considers the diary of Mary Rich and Margaret Cavendish's Orations of Divers Sorts (1662) for their reflections and analyses of domestic violence and as powerful examples of how historical women writers made sense of this societal injustice.
Contemporary feminists routinely argue that "capitalism" is a rapacious monster who harms women by enclosing them within the domestic sphere and seducing them into buying things they do not want. This idea that women are vulnerable Eve-like creatures who are coerced into participating in the market economy is countered by early modern women writers who celebrated the rise of the market economy as a medium through which they could use commodities to fashion selves other than those of wife and mother. The market economy was not something that was done to them but something they helped to do. This article will discuss Margaret Cavendishs' play, The Convent of Pleasure (1668) as one such example. The protagonist, aptly named Lady Happy, envisions and creates an alternative version of a convent-one in which the "sisters" can escape the trials and tribulations of wifedom and motherhood and focus solely on fulfilling their desires for pleasure by consuming goods made available by the global marketplace. Commerce and wealth are not preventatives to women's abilities to escape traditional roles and form alternative female selves and sisterly relations, but rather the precondition.
This article argues that two early modern women writers, Anne Bradstreet and Lucy Hutchinson, wrote epics that challenge the patriarchal ideology of epic form. Both writers were connected to prominent political men and were thus privileged with a "status- linked right" (to use Pierre Bourdieu's term) to take on the challenge of writing in the privileged masculine form of epic: Brad street's father and husband were governors of Massachusetts; and Hutchinson's husband was a prominent parliamentarian during the English Civil Wars. They both wrote during, in the wake of, and about the English Civil Wars, which brought tumultuous upheaval to the political and social order of English society. Indeed, Anne Brad street's "Dialogue between Old and New England" dramatizes an overturning of war- torn Old England's authority over its colony as a dialogue between a diseased and aged mother with her not entirely reverential daughter. Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse (1650) and Hutchinson's Order and Disorder (1679) deploy epic conventions-invocations, catalogues, similes-to announce their self- conscious participation in the epic tradition; through their emphasis on the importance of the maternal line, they challenge the predominantly patriarchal ideology of epic, and through their deployment of elegy, they mobilize its counter- ideology of epic form.
This article traces a de facto debate between scholars of the eighteenth century and those of the twentieth century regarding the period of emergence of foreplay. Finding much to be appreciated in both scholarly accounts, this article instead traces the history of foreplay in England as a term, concept, representation, and practice from the mid- seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. In so doing, the article understands foreplay as a temporal and ideological regime that organizes and attributes value to a vast of array of sexual practices. Reading across "obscene" literary texts, diaries, marriage manuals, sexological literature, newspaper accounts, and a range of other cultural materials, this article endeavors to explain how the sexual body became genitally organized.
Near the turn of seventeenth- century Old Christian Spaniards continued to be preoccupied with acquiring and policing new converts on the Peninsula and across the Atlantic-whether they be Conversos, Moriscos, or Indigenous. Despite conversion, there was a divide between the Old and the New. Food and its preparation was among the many ways Inquisitors ver iled the sincerity and established some borders of the New Christians. This link between food and proper conversion went beyond Iberian tribunals and is developed metaphorically in Spanish cleric Martin del Barco Centenera's 1602 evangelical epic poem La Argentina y conquista del Rio de la Plata, which he published after spending 24 years in the less- documented Rio de la Plata region. Considering food's preexisting function of demarcating Otherness on the Peninsula among new converts, as well as its practical role in the survival or peril of Spanish Colonizers, Barco Centenera uses food- related references not only to reflect colonial dangers but also to offer warnings and possible solutions regarding conversion via individual administration and close monitoring in light of past ideological practices.
Cornelius de Pauw was very well known in the last decades of the eighteenth century for his Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains. That work was developed on a naturalist hypothesis that asserted that nature conditioned all living beings. From this, he analyzed and compared American nature, including its animals and inhabitants, and concluded that it was degenerated and inferior in all fields to that of the Old World. This article contends with an author that represents a central link in the eighteenth- century process of indigenous dehumanization. For doing this, the article first points out de Pauw's context and influences. Second, it expounds his description of American nature and then, as the outcome of this, his characterization of the indigenous "natural" condition. After that, the article considers his reasoning regarding indigenous non- adaptation to Western way of life as a case of moral disengagement. Finally, the author reflects about the type of work de Pauw wrote and stresses his role in promoting the dehumanization and annihilation of the indigenous Americans.
Amazon warriors were a source of intense fascination and anxiety for early modern English authors and audience members alike. As masculine women who functioned outside of male control, they threatened to collapse a socially imposed gender binary and hinted at the viability of a non- patriarchal social structure. Elizabethan authors such as William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser registered this apprehension by writing Amazonian characters who destabilize natural social order but are ultimately defeated through either re- domestication or destruction. These solutions are always imperfect, however, and the Amazon's subversive influence persists even after the Amazon herself is gone. The only complete and effective solution is to remove the Amazon altogether, allowing her to exist in her own discrete society. Under the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a masculine woman, this solution is impossible; only during the Restoration can the Amazon be dismissed rather than eradicated. This Restoration solution is exemplified in John Weston's forgotten 1667 play The Amazon Queen, in which the Amazon, because she is dismissed f rom patriarchal culture, is actually praised and admired. While still not compatible with a patriarchal society, Weston's Amazons, freed from direct comparison with Queen Elizabeth, become potential sources of entertainment and laudable virtue.
This article considers Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) alongside Amber Jamilla Musser's theorization of masochism to read the titular character as embodying a queer chastity. Through premodern critical race studies and queer studies, this article suggests that Mariam's adjacency to whiteness-affirmed by Petrarchan beauty standards, martyrdom narratives, and foiling of Mariam against other women-gives her ability to queer her chastity into a masochistic position that plummets her toward execution. Mariam rejects Herod's advances, which would likely save her from an execution he commanded, to uphold her own narrativization of her white value. Chastity becomes mobilized as an erotic register that, as a white woman, Mariam can pervert for her own resistance and pleasures in Herod's kingdom. Fundamentally, the abjectness of Mariam's solitary existence in the play highlights the violence of white womanhood, which creates distance and rivalry rather than solidarity.
A Midsummer Night's Dream follows a queer trajectory of female pleasure both in its representation of same- sex relationships and bestial desires, as well as through its public dissemination of forms of knowledge pertaining to the crafting of female pleasure in marriage for purposes of conception. The biblical Song ofSongs serves as a scriptural subtext in the play, undergirding the relations between Titania and Bottom through which secrets of female pleasure and generation are transmitted. While the Song was used during the Protestant Reformation in support of a normative ideal of marital fertility, Shakespeare satirically subverts its redemptive heterosexual telos of desire by highlighting its oral and scatological links with queer forms of female pleasure. The meta- theatricality of Pyramus and Thisbe further reveals the Song to be an imaginative space for the fantasization, production, and transmission of transgressive sexual knowledge and practices pertaining to the artificial creation of female pleasure in marriage and the ultimate realization of a queer conception.
In the comedy Mother Bombie (c. 1589), John Lyly presents a highly verbal conception of human wit as a key element of emergent capitalism, presents it as inconsistent with the inheritance framework underlying Elizabethan society, and yet tries to imagine society adapting to the rising importance of this human capital without completely sacrificing its longstanding model of socioeconomic stratification. Mother Bombie addresses the stress that non- heritable human capital (i.e., wit, for Lyly) was increasingly placing on a socioeconomic structure reliant on primogeniture, and then attempts to alleviate this stress. The play makes this latter move by reframing mental (dis)ability as the determining factor for class, rather than the reverse. By reconceptualizing wit as human capital rather than hereditary symbolic capital, Lyly shores up defined social categories by preserving wit as a classed attribute with which the societal ingroup can define itself against the witless outgroup of an "idiot" underclass. Instead of making the inarticulate foolish characters at the center of the action or their dysfluency completely disappear by the end of the play, Lyly has the play end with them becoming highly legible as dysfluent fools.
This article analyzes the anti- Black racism that undergirds the character of Dog in Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford's true- crime play The Witch of Edmonton (1621). By situating Dog in the intersecting traditions of Black devils in witchcraft literature and Black characters on the early modern stage, this article argues that the play uses Dog's Blackness to situate Mother Sawyer's turn to witchcraft as an act of apostasy. Witchcraft thus functions as a form of racecraft, a means through which the play actively constructs semantic associations between Blackness and evil and between whiteness and godliness. Ultimately, this article concludes with a call for scholars, theater reviewers, and theatrical practitioners not to reproduce The Witch of Edmonton's racial politics in their own engagement with the play.
In the century between 1660 and 1760, political economists and moralists throughout the British Atlantic world articulated new ideas concerning the proper use time. Improvers like Benjamin Franklin emphasized the virtues of industriousness while warning against wasting time in idle pursuits. At a time when few among the learned challenged the growing consensus concerning the conscientious use of time, the New Jersey Quaker John Woolman developed an important critique of the new orthodoxy. Drawing on the Bible as well as the writings of mystics and early Quakers, Woolman characterized the bourgeois emphasis on time management as a pernicious obsession with wealth that was reflected in a generalized societal "hurry." A key result of the frantic and unending pursuit of riches was the exploitation and oppression of the powerless-enslaved people, but also debtors, wage laborers, and livestock. Woolman alternatively articulated a social vision centered on the transcendence of time rather than its maximization. A radical reformation in which less time was devoted to the pursuit of wealth would eradicate a host of social evils while leaving more time for education, spiritual development, and civic engagement.
In Shakespeare's 1623 Folio, Titus Andronicus contains a controversial scene absent from the previous quarto printings of the play-the mid- play fly- killing scene. In the first half, the long monologue of Titus highlights Lavinia's markedly feminine suffering from rape and dismemberment, and in the second half the dialogue between him and Marcus problematizes the racially charged motif of Blackness. This added scene first increases the sympathies an audience has for Titus and especially Lavinia, and then redirects it by intensifying the language-and social concern-of race, through Titus's livid critique of Aaron, the "Cole- blacke Moore."
This article discusses depictions of the Dutch Revolt in the early modern English theater, with a particular focus on the representation of gender. It highlights the extent to which the emergent Republic was associated by contemporary observers with an unprecedented degree of freedom for women, and argues that these associations were central to the manner in which English writers and audiences conceptualized the new state. The article explores these issues through readings of the anonymous A Larum for London (1602) and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619). It argues that in these plays the representation of gender is deployed in order to imagine the possibilities, and threats, of England's alliance with the Dutch. The depiction of Dutch women serves to present the Republic as alternately alluring and as a dangerous threat to English masculinity. At the same time, this imaginative process also works both ways, with the portrayal of a disorderly Dutch state opening up new possibilities for gender roles as well as war, politics, and economics.
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's 1619 drama Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt stages events culminating in the execution of Johan van Oldenbarnavelt, political leader and Land's Advocate of Holland, which took place only weeks earlier. The play's title character continually reminds his onstage and offstage audience of his heroic role in gaining the United Provinces' independence from Spain earlier in the Dutch Revolt. Many have noted the censorship of the play, from Master of the Revels George Buc's markings on the manuscript to Bishop of London John King's halting of a performance just as it was to go on stage. The censored material in the manuscript is all political: the play's unflattering portrayal of Oldenbarnavelt's enemy Maurice of Orange, its depiction of the Arminian religious sect's involvement in a political conflict, and its extensive discussions of monarchical vs. republican (as typified by ancient Roman) government. Twentyeight years after the play's eventual debut in 1619, Humphrey Moseley's consequential omission of Barnavelt from the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher First Folio was likely also a political choice. The royalist Moseley's front matter presents Fletcher and Francis Beaumont as safe for public consumption, while scrupulously avoiding any mention of the substantial contributions to the volume by the politically provocative Massinger.
The Peace of Munster (1648) ended the war between the Dutch Republic and Spain after eight decades of conflict. This article investigates performances that took place throughout the Low Countries to mark the Peace of M & uuml;nster. Studying these plays and songs reveals more about how communities were processing the past war and how the public at large was (encouraged) to deal with the trauma of the war that had just ended. First, the article discusses the different ways in which the Dutch Revolt is depicted in these performances, ranging from abstract mythological allusions to more general atrocity literature and specific episodes from the war. This will be followed by an analysis of the proposed ways in which the audience are told that they should remember and move on from the trauma that they individually and as a collective have suffered during the war. This includes ideas about forgetting, forming new alliances, and acts of oblivion. And finally, the article addresses the potential for Europe-wide peace but also the concern that war -related violence would not actually end and the trauma will thus continue, even if it is not directly experienced in the Low Countries.
