Building on the turn to religious and political networks in the field of early modern women’s writing, the Introduction draws on the theory of intersectionality and the historiography of Puritan culture to argue that uses of the female voice in early Stuart England cut across lines of gender to build coalitions and undermine the essentialism on which the field is based. Challenging critics who suggest that early modern male ventriloquism leads to repression of the female voice, the Introduction offers the counter-example of Thomas Scott, who uses Esther’s words to articulate his own radical politics. Situating the present study as a necessary intervention in a field that is increasingly marginalized even as its archive has ballooned and its dispersal celebrated, this book answers the call for a larger narrative that puts the female subject and her voice at the heart of the early Stuart political imaginary.

In Propertius 4.7, Cynthia is conceived as the character who, in her role as the beloved, can infuse a sinister sensation of the grotesque into the very concept of elegiac love, of which she is the source and the protagonist. The poet ventriloquizes her voice, superimposing her role and gender identity on his, in a strategy that enables him to transmit to the realm of his aesthetic choices her grotesque embodiment of elegy, as well as her allegation that, in charging her with infidelity, he was not truthful about her. In this poem, Propertius’ elegiac programme appears to be centrally committed to a grotesque ethos, derisive and destabilizing of the epistemological and aesthetic conventions by which the genre is presumed to be governed. As a result, the conceptual and aesthetic domains of the genre appear deeply marked by uncanny imagery, contradiction, and instability of form. The imaginative world of this elegy requires readers to shift their interpretive base continually, accepting the incongruous realm of beauty pierced by ugliness as the manifestation of a poetic congruity of a higher order. That dialectical form of congruity is the distinctive feature of the Propertian elegiac grotesque.

This chapter examines the variety of ways in which women poets in early eighteenth-century Ireland negotiated expectations of gender. It focuses on Mary Barber’s Poems on Several Occasions (1735), a volume containing work by several other writers, most notably six poems by Constantia Grierson (c. 1705–1732). Female poets tempered the appearance of poetic ambition by means of several strategies. In Barber’s case the best known of these is ventriloquism, in the various poems she wrote to be spoken by her young son. Both Barber and Grierson firmly place their work in the context of decorous female sociability by emphasising its occasional nature: particularly noteworthy being the ruse of presenting poems not as distinguished artefacts, but as supplementary objects, in the several poems taking the form of ‘lines written’ in books. Ambition can, however, be discerned. Barber sought and gained significant patrons in Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Orrery, and successfully raised an impressive subscription list. More subtly, the volume as a whole also shows each poet help to secure the poetic reputation of the other through an elaborate poetics of compliment, reflecting self-consciously on female authorship.

Sociologist Andrés Guerrero famously examined how nineteenth-century liberal legislation in Ecuador created a “ventriloquist’s voice” that mediated Indigenous expressions of resistance to exclusionary governing structures. The assumption is that intermediaries purportedly spoke out in defense of subaltern rights but in reality only desired to advance their own interests. Intermediaries allegedly added another layer of exploitation to an already marginalized and silenced population. Careful studies, however, reveal that Indigenous activists did advance their own agendas, both alone and in collaboration with sympathetic urban allies. Recovering subaltern voices, nevertheless, is complicated by a lack of the written archival documentation that typically forms the basis for scholarly examinations. This lack of sources is not the fault of local organic intellectuals, but rather a result of the racist attitudes of a dominant class who did not find the thoughts and actions of Indigenous people worthy of preservation. This essay examines the gap between the perception of both domestic and international surveillance operations and the realities of rural mobilizations.