This chapter proposes that early modern women essayists invoked anger to negotiate new modes of publicity in the nascent public sphere. By reading the writings of Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, and Margaret Cavendish alongside the history of humanist education, it shows that anger’s original object was not misogyny writ large, but the rhetorical training that limited women’s access to privileged protocols of speaking and writing. By the end of the early modern period, it argues, anger dissipates as the rise of salon conversation and letter writing expand the field in which literacy can be displayed, weakening rhetoric’s grip on the republic of letters.

establishes Speght’s position within a Calvinist community of writers, preachers, and printers that included her father and husband. Like Whately’s sermons, Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) deploys domestic and biblical rhetoric to give “good councell” in the political realm. If, for Speght, the doctrine of male superiority becomes a manifesto of the obligations of the ruler, the wife is authorized to enforce those obligations as a significant influence on her husband’s ability to exercise good government. In her later work Mortalities Memorandum (1621), Speght offers a prefatory Dreame in which a distinctively female voice provides a Calvinist framework for the pursuit of godly knowledge that draws on the Song of Songs. Mortalities Memorandum, the lengthy poem that follows, capitalizes on this voice to deliver a significant religious and political message to English men and women at a crisis point in their history.