Book contents
- World-Making Renaissance Women
- World-Making Renaissance Women
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction The Literary Contours of Women’s World-Making
- Part I Early Modern Women Framing the Modern World
- Part II Remaking the Literary World
- Part III Connecting the Social Worlds of Religion, Politics, and Philosophy
- Part IV Rethinking Early Modern Types and Stereotypes
- Chapter 13 Learning to Imitate Women: Male Education and the Grammar of Female Experience
- Chapter 14 Mothers and Widows: World-Making against Stereotypes in Early Modern English Women’s Manuscript Writings
- Chapter 15 Queer Virgins: Nuns, Reproductive Futurism, and Early Modern English Culture
- Chapter 16 Defensor Feminae: Aemilia Lanyer and Rachel Speght
- Chapter 17 Margaret Cavendish’s Melancholy Identity: Gender and the Evolution of a Genre
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 14 - Mothers and Widows: World-Making against Stereotypes in Early Modern English Women’s Manuscript Writings
from Part IV - Rethinking Early Modern Types and Stereotypes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2021
- World-Making Renaissance Women
- World-Making Renaissance Women
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction The Literary Contours of Women’s World-Making
- Part I Early Modern Women Framing the Modern World
- Part II Remaking the Literary World
- Part III Connecting the Social Worlds of Religion, Politics, and Philosophy
- Part IV Rethinking Early Modern Types and Stereotypes
- Chapter 13 Learning to Imitate Women: Male Education and the Grammar of Female Experience
- Chapter 14 Mothers and Widows: World-Making against Stereotypes in Early Modern English Women’s Manuscript Writings
- Chapter 15 Queer Virgins: Nuns, Reproductive Futurism, and Early Modern English Culture
- Chapter 16 Defensor Feminae: Aemilia Lanyer and Rachel Speght
- Chapter 17 Margaret Cavendish’s Melancholy Identity: Gender and the Evolution of a Genre
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In their multi-generic mid-seventeenth-century manuscripts, Lady Mary Carey and Katherine Austen create fascinating worlds in which they resist the pervasive negative stereotyping of mothers and widows. They are especially important to consider together as a pair because both work in innovative ways to counter condemnatory perceptions of themselves. Their writings constitute a rich, rare archive of unique, female-authored manuscripts that add greater depth to our understanding of the lives of early modern mothers and wives from their own perspectives – rather than through the lenses of the numerous printed male-authored ventriloquized voices of ordinary women that Catherine Loomis analyzes in Chapter 13 of this volume or those of canonical fictions, such as William Shakespeare’s plays, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
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- Information
- World-Making Renaissance WomenRethinking Early Modern Women's Place in Literature and Culture, pp. 230 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021