Women Writers Online Syllabus Collection

Course description

In addition to thoughtful and active participation in class discussion you are expected to write four papers, one short, two medium, and one long.

“Each time that in one way or another, the question of language comes to the fore, that signifies a series of other problems is about to emerge, the formation and enlargement of the ruling class, the necessity to establish more ‘intimate’ and sure relations between the ruling groups and the national popular masses, that is, the reorganization of cultural hegemony.” Anthony Gramsci. “The Modern Prince and other Writings” (quoted in James Donald, “Language, Literacy and Schooling” in The State and Popular Culture, p. 44).

“Thus towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.” Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”, p. 68.

Course description

Weekly topics:

• Humanist Institutions I+II
• Courtiership and Authorship
• The Popular Theater
• Early Modern Homoerotics
• Place, Material Culture, and Authority
• Gendered Subjects
• Women, Voice, and the Word
• English Books: Their Purposes and Publics
• Theatricality and Royal Power
• Empire and Other
• Writing the Renaissance

Course description

In this course we will read waork in a variety of genres—fiction and non-fiction prose, diaries, autobiographies, poetry, translations, drama— compoesed by English women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We’ll consider what possibilities were available to women; the extent to which they conformed to, adapted or differentiated themselves from the genres used by their male contemporaries; the conditions under which they wrote and encouraged others to write; the attitudes they took toward themselves as writers and toward their work; their writing as it exemplifies their concerns as individuals, as members of social and historical groups.

Our reading includes a good deal of old but new (i.e., uncanonical, newly discovered, newly available) material; much of it has been relatively unknown until now; most of it is undergoing reevaluation. The course will be a group project involving the exploration and study of these texts. Together we will consider how they are to be approached and what we can make of them. The texts we read will make considerable demands on your time, intellect, imagination, and attention. Anything you know ( and whatever you can learn) about the historical and literary context of these writings will be helpful. Most helpful will be a willingness to explore new genres and entertain new ideas, to deal with the unfamiliar and the fragmentary, to work to put things together in your own reading and in class discussion.

I expect you to prepare for class by reading carefully and thoughtfully; keeping a journal of your responses and questions; I also expect that you’ll attend faithfully and share questions and interpretations with other members of the class. There will be frequent informal writing, some oral reporting, two papers, and a good deal of class discussion.

Course description

For over two hundred years now, Samuel Richardson has been both celebrated and devalued as an author of “feminine sensibilities.” Critics have typically contrasted Richardson’s acute pereception of female psychology with Henry Fielding’s “robust masculinity,” leaving this gendered category of literary taxonomy unexplained. This course assumes that like all literary taxonomies, the feminine/masculine dichotomy is not a self-evident, “natural” way of classifying literature, but part of a pervasive and enduring ideological system that must eb examined. We will enhance our intensive study of Richardson’s great masterpiece, Clarissa, with readings in women’s writing in Richardson’s lifetime (1689-1761), and in recent critical theory aimed at producing a new historical and ideological critique of the period. Works by early women writers to be studied include Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (the first original epistolary novel in English, and the bestselling novel of Richardson’s youth), selections from “novels” by Jane Barker, Delariviere Manley, and Mary Davys, and poetry, essays, feminist polemic, autobiography, and letters by women writers of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Our overview of criticism since 1980 will include readings in post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, New Historicist and feminist reinterpretations of Richardson and early 18th-century literature and culture. By working together to account for the extraordinary resurgence of Richardson studies in recent years, we will also help one another to determine the most exciting directions for our own productive research.

Some previous acquaintance with eighteenth century history or culture is highly recommended. Some familiarity with the basic terms of contemporary literary theory would also be useful. (Suggested background reading might include Terry Eagleton’s or Raman Selden’s introductory guides to literary theory, or Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice.) Obviously, an advance reading of all or part of Clarissa would also be an enormous practical advantage.

Course description

This course should 1) intoduce you to some of the great literature of this very rich period; 2) confront you with issues raised by the age and the literature, issues of the self and society that still face us today; 3) delight youwith the pleasures of closely reading difficult texts; and 4) challenge you to become better readers and thinkers and writers as you consider an alien world and the critical methods one might use to decipher it.

Some assumptions: reading is an active and demanding process; it is a process of constructing meaning. Thus, you should read with a pencil in your hand and questions in your mind: talk back to the text, question assumptions and techniques, try to understand why the text is as it is or how it could be different. Learn to trust in your own interpretations rather than immediately turning to Authorities—either in books, notes, or teachers. And don’t expect to understand this literature with one quick reading—it takes time and effort.

This class will be much more profitable and enjoyable if we all come to class each day ready to discuss the work. You won’t fully understand or even appreciate this literature if I’m the only one who talks about it in class; conversely, you have much to learn from each other. Thus, even though I’ll be providing background lectures and will lead out discussions, our class sessions should involve a common effort to comprehend and appreciate more fully what we’ve read outside of class.

Course description

This module will examine issues surrounding women’s reading during the 18th and early 19th centuries, focusing specifically on the powerful intersection of debates over the culturally contested form of the novel with ideological constructs of ‘the female reader’. Why was women’s reading of the novel in particular seen as problematic—what effects was it believed to have on both body and mind? Is women’s reading an issue in and of itself, or can the anxieties expressed about it be read as a convenient focal point for the articulation of a range of social, cultural, and political tensions in 18th and 19th century British Society? Novels will be read alongside a range of materials such as educational tracts, conduct books, and periodical criticism in order to bring to light some of the major debates surrounding women’s reading of the novel.

Course description

In this course, we will be reading, discussing, and writing about women writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will be concentrating upon English women, but will venture into other realms occasionally.

Course description

Study of the history of European society from the onset of the Black Death in 1348 until the French Revolution is fundamental to further studies of European and American (both North and South) culture. It was an era of dynamic change; encompassing the religious upheaval of the Reformation period, a changing view of the cosmos and the place of humans within it engendered by explorations around the world and intellectual trends, and technological developments with far-reaching impact, such as the printing press. This course will explore major themes of the period beginning with significant demograhic and economic changes, and including consideration of family, gender, religious, intellectual, and political issues. The emphasis of the course will be on the interrelationship among these themes and the ways in which they illuminate the experience of living in early modern Europe.

Students will have a chance to work with primary source materials fromt he period and to develop their understanding of historical source materials and the process of writing history. Students will be asked to write papers, make oral presentations, and prepare a final demonstration project.

Trying to make sense of the past experiences of humans living in an organized society is not a science, but an art. The fundamental questions asked by historians of the past are who, what, when, where, and, most importantly, why is an event or experience significant. Our understanding is based on our interpretation of those events and experiences (data) which each of us selects as the most important ones to answer those fundamental questions. In this sense, history is a creative process. The historian gathers the data he or she decides is important, develops a hypothesis about the meaning of the data, and then synthesizes these hypotheses into a coherent interpretation- very much in the same way a landscape designer sets about dealing with a specific site or a sculptor works from a chosen block of marble. Furthermore, each historian, like each artist, works within a context- cultural assumptions, time constraints, limitations of materials- all of which have an impact on the resulting ìhistoryî or work of art.

Course description

This graduate course introduces works by Renaissance Englishwomen and considers women as writers, readers, and subjects of literature during the English Renaissance, 1500-1660. Although women writers worked on the margins of the literary scene, in an intellectual and social world that expected them to be “chaste, silent, and obedient,” many of them nevertheless were highly literate, well educated, and socially historical conditions that enabled them to participate in English literary culture—and the limits of that participation—form the focus of the course.

Scholars are still identifying and editing the works of these early modern writers; many important texts are still not readily available. Our course, then, will be in part an exploration, surveying what is known and identifying what is yet to be learned. Library work (including, if possible, a trip to the Newberry collections) and reports will help to important texts and commentaries. Through independent work and class discussion, we will attempt some understanding of the achievements and circumstsmances of women writers in the English Renaissance.

Course description

In this course we will explore teh boundaries of early modern selfhood by studying three forms of the opposition between Self and Other and by attending to the instability of that opposition. We will investigate how Reanaissance thinkers and artists theorized about and depicted racial, gendered, and sexual difference. First, we will consider Europeans’ confrontation with a racial Other in the Americas and investigate the representation of native Americans in European texts. To conclude this first section, we will consider individuals who crossed the boundary between the European and the American such as Dona Marina, Hernando Cortes’s native translator, and Pocahontas, the native American princess who became an English gentlewoman. Do such cases clarify or blur the boundary between Self and Other? Next, we will address a second opposition between masculine and feminine genders of gender oppositions, we will also explore cross-dressing on and off the stage. The third section of this course will take up the question of whether or not the “homosexual” or the “heterosexual” were categories that early modern men and women used to define themselves. Was this twentieth century opposition always unstable in the Renaissance? To conclude the course, we will return to America to examine William Bradford’s account of native Americans, women, and “sodomy” at the Plymouth plantation. What do Bradfrd’s anxieties about debauchery and assimilation suggest about the instabilty of our three oppositions? Have our inquiries in this course enabled us to speculate about the causes of such instability?

Course description

Welcome to the study of early modern women writers. Many of the texts that we will be reading this term have only been available in recent years. Consequently, there is relatively little critical material written about some of these writers and texts. Over the course of the semester, we will become familiar with the current state of scholarship in this field, while we identify additional areas of interest that have yet to be explored.

Course description

“He’s a real Renaissance man!” Today the term Renaissance man suggests someone able to master any challenge (think of Danny Devito’s film by that title). But what do we imagine when we hear the phrase “Renaissance woman”? Is a similar kind of mastery something she shares? In Shakespeare’s England, writers and playwrights were fascinated by several types of masterful, rebellious women. We’ll look at such female figures in a number of plays by Shakespeare and several other men and women of this time period. What gives such dangerous yet seductive women their threatening power? How are they tamed (or are they really tamed)? What happens to virgins and queens, witches and shrews, amazons and female lovers, when they appear in poems and plays by women writers? And what types of male roles are associated with these female characters? We’ll end the semester with one 20th century woman’s story about an otherwise invisible “Renaissance woman”: Shakespeare’s sister Judith in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Course description

Course requirements will include an annotated bibiliography on the works of a specific critical theorist, a 10-15 minute oral presentation, an 8-10 page paper on the oral presentation topic, and an article-length critical essay, complete with endnotes (20-25 pages).

Course description

This course has three purposes: to introduce you to new historical information, to new kinds of historical sources; to new ways of thinking about the past in relation to the present.

For those of you who have studied traditional history, this will be the story of what the other half of Europe’s population was doing from prehistory to the end of the 18th century. So, it is a new history.

To do “women’s history,” however, we must also look at new historical sources. Women appear only incidentally in most traditional sources (laws, church documents, government letters, etc.). so we have to look at memoirs, letters, folktales, and much more to reconstruct their experiences and points of view.

European women’s, like European men’s, history does not exist out there somewhere separate from us. All of our present, even here in the United States, is linked to their past. To be part of the “Western Culture” means that we are tied to the traditions, patterns and attitudes of those people whether Euro-American, African American, Asian or Native American. In this course we will continually discuss two aspects of that culture:

• the fact that, no matter what their class or circumstance women were considered naturally subordinate to men;
• the way in which the words “feminine” and “masculine,” “male” and “female,” “lady” and “gentleman,” took on meaning, and whether or not those meanings have survived in our own time.

Please note that each book has been chosen to be part of a basic library on women’s history, something you will want to have as an educated person, and for your daughter or niece. A History of Their Own is a general survey history, a secondary work. All the rest are primary sources, books written or told by women from past time.

In addition to reading the books, you will be asked to view one of the following movies as homework, and to writer about it: Henry V; The Devils; The Return of Martin Guerre; Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews; Orlando or Impromptu.

Course description

Our aim in this course will be to address the fullest possible range of textual production attributable to women in early modern England. Some of the writings fit into familiar literary categories: lyric poems, plays, imaginative prose. Of equal or perhaps greater significance are the diaries, letters, domestic account books, midwifery and cookery handbooks, books of simples (medical prescriptions), prayers, religious autobiographies, Quaker and Baptist prophetical tracts, translations, trial testimony, and "last dying speeches" that constitute the scattered remains of that elusive political and psychological subject: the early modern Englishwoman. The authorial status of many of these documents is far from simple (and therefore of considerable methodological and theoretical interest). In what manner shall we say that a translator “authors” a text? When an illiterate woman’s testimony before a magistrate is reported by an anonymous secretary, or when an illiterate woman tells her story to a scribe, has him read it back to her, and certifies the scribal account as authentic before she is put to death, may we construe that account as in some sense woman-authored? How are we to think about and account for the realms of scribal, jurisprudential, and interrogatory mediation? And what about religion? How did the paradoxical status of the embodied Word and the newly contested status of the vernacular word in early modern Christianity affect the way in which women of this period understood and negotiated their own linguistic opportunities and constraints? How do those historically specific opportunities and constraints--women’s uneven access to printed texts, to literacy itself, to sites and models for public speech, their anomalous status as legal subjects, as caretakers of property and persons, as conregants in (and martyrs to) a divided church--condition in turn our own interrogation of surviving texts?

Course description

Explores authorship and identity in 18th-century Britain.

Course description

An introduction to Shakespeare.

Course description

This course is divided into two parts, a period of study of drama and theatre for young audiences and a period of invention and development of a theatre experience for children/youth.

Course objectives: 1) explore the nature, sources, history, and scope of theatre for young audiences; 2) establish connections between theatre, education, and the growth and development of the child and adolescent.

Course description

This course introduces bibliographical and theoretical approaches to the study of early women writers (from the 15th through the 17th centuries) from primary, textual materials and a variety of other sources. Rather than offering a survey of major women writers as such, the forms, media, and genres in which it participated in order to understand better the range o fpositions available to the woman writer within late medieval and early modern literary culture. As much as possible, we will be examining women’s writing from origional sources; this course therefore offers an introduction to the bibliographical methodologies that make this kind of examination possible- paleography, the study of early printed sources and visual materials, and a growing range of on-line sources. Our examination will also necessarily engage some of the larger, theoretical issues that early wonen’s writing raises for literary study more broadly: in what specific, material ways have acts or artifacts of writing been gendered inthe late medieval and early modern periods? what role has “the woman writer” played in the history of reading, writing, authorship, and the book? what meanings and values have been made to define “women’s writing” at different historical moments? and how have women writers employed the various media, genres, and materials of writing to different ends and effects?

Course description

This course is primarily exploratory, since we will read few works actually considered to be canonical romantic texts, thus forcing us to query in what way we can understand the texts on our reading list. Women writers constituted a large number of the poets and novelists writing during the British romantic period, yet already by the high Victorian period that reality was being rewritten to exclude those women from literary memory. Our task will be to ask two questions: why were these writers and their tasks dropped from the canon of literary works, and why are they now being ressurected by romantic scholars?

Course description

This class will take up and join the dialogue between various feminisms and the discourses of science. Scientists and feminists (and feminist scientists) have carried out significant and compelling debates about gender and sexuality, especially as they are understood in medicine; about the self-understanding of science as a particularly masculine activity; and about the metaphoric construction of nature as female. The class will focus on the work of reading texts, and understanding how they construct and contest scientific understandings of nature. The course should help students understand how scientific writing shapes the social imaginary, and how political and ideological struggles are organized on the terrain of science. It will also introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of science studies, one of the strongest areas in contemporary cultural studies.

Course description

Did Women have a Renaissance? Renaissance literature courses generally feature the work of famous male authors: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton. But women also wrote during thsi period, producing interesting work of all kinds, influencing literary traditions, and affecting social policies. This course will center on their work and a variety of literary types. Reading these works will introduce you to some great, little-known literary achievements and will also raise a number of interesting questions about literary value and the canon. For instance, to what extent can we find “literary merit” (and just how shall we define that term?) in controversial writing- in pamphlets and the like- and personal forms such as diaries? How does the woman writer in the Renaissance create a context for herself as a poet and public voice? How do Renaissance practices of patronage and manuscript circulation shape—and promote or inhibit—the work of women writers? How do our critical practices—the effects of New Critical assumptions, for instance—shape the Renaissance canon and our definitions of “good” literature?

Course description

This Honors Seminar has four objectives: (1) to acquaint you with the research methods and reference tools available for advanced study in the field of Canadian literature; (2) to introduce you to the basic concepts of feminist literary criticism;(3) to provide you with an overview of the historical development of literature (in English) by Canadian women, with the major emphasis on poetry; and (4) to give you an opportunity to examine in depth the work of a few, selected, Canadian women poets.

Works will be examined in both their literary and socio-historical contexts. There will be a combination of lectures, seminar presentations, and class discussions. In lectures, attention will be drawn to various issues raised by feminist literary critics who have studied women’s poetry in Britain and the U.S., as well as within Canada (the English language as “man made,” the literary canon as “his story,” the masculinist bias of traditional literacy judgements, woman’s relation to poetry, woman’s muse, images of women and men in poetry, and so on), and also by scholars working within the interdisciplinary rubric of Canadian women’s studies. Seminar reports will explore in detail the life and writing of a selection of Canadian women poets.

Course description

When we think of the Romantic Period in Britain, six male poets immediately come to mind: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. We do not usually recall women poets such as Cristall, Robinson, Barbauld, Smith, Tighe, and Baillie; indeed, we may not even know that they existed. Yet the poetic works of these women writers were at least as widely read and as influential during the romantic period as were those of the “big six”. This course will not provide for exhaustive study of any one of these authors. Rather, through selected, comparative readings of thematically-linked works, it will focus on the qualitative similarities and differences among men and women writers of the period. We will explore the significance of gender both as a factor mediating the representations in the poems and as a key element in the shaping of poetic consciousness. Ultimately, through our discussions of the poems and poetic discourses and of past and contemporary criticism, we will seek to clarify the extent to which we can or should understand the romantic period as a construct of literary history.

Course description

This seminar will attempt to define a distinctively “romantic” period in the British female literary tradition. Using approaches garnered from the new historicism and feminist theory, we will survey a broad range of women’s writing in England between 1780 and 1840, focussing on both generic and ideological issues. We will look at the major genres in which women wrote during this period: fiction, poetry, drama, the literary essy, children’s literature, religious tracts, political polemic. We will analyse the ways in which a spectrum of women writers widely differing in class, race, and political orientation dealt with such social issues as the rights of women, marriage and motherhood, political change, the slave-trade and the abolitionist movement, and religious doctrine. What theoretical positions and generic expectations do these women share? In what ways do they differ from and contradict each other?

Course description

This seminar is designed to explore the idea that women writers made distinct contributions to the development of the novel in English, to play against the idea that art is androgynous as well as against the idea that women did not contribute significantly to the development of the novel. We will read several texts in common, doing assigned reports and written work on the scholarship currently available on these authors. Then each of you will choose for your own research the work of and secondary sources on another 17th or and early 18th century (before 1750) woman who wrote in narrative form.

Course description

The purposes of this course are: 1) to learn how authors get lost; 2) to learn how authors get found; 3) to learn how authors get attention and sometimes get canonized; 4) to learn what scholars do what work and how they are regarded by the profession; 5) to learn to read criticism critically; 6) (and for one or two may this be item #1) to learn to take delight in early women writers.

Course description

This is a writing/rhetoric fellows course. All undergraduates must accept the assistance of the fellows. Graduate students are invited to use their services if they so choose. Briefly, this means help in revising two of the three short papers, and help in presenting the oral presentations.

Course description

The Elderhostel participants were quite taken aback to find that so much had been written by women during the 1700s in England, and they asked many questions about quality—were these writers really as good as the men. But that question opened up a broader discussion of different reasons for reading literature and different questions to ask of it.

Course description

This course focuses on early modern women as subjects of writing and as writing subjects. We will consider how paradigms of selfhood and self-fashioning shaped women’s lives in the early part of this period as well as how such paradigms were later reinvented and renegotiated to map out an expanded range of subject positions. In addition to the primary and secondary texts listed below, we will be reading other essays drawn from recent work on women’s writing in the period.

Course description

Part of the goal for this course is to help you become critical readers; by that I mean not simply readers who analyze the words before them, but readers who ask questions about what they have been offered to value, what has been withheld, what impulse led to this anthology or editoion of a recovered text, what the anthologizers, editors, and scholars hope to accomplish by bringing this work to the attention of the reading public.

For each writer on the syllabus, you should develop the following habits: is she in the Norton Anthology? If she appears there, read the headnote. If she is in both Norton and Hodgson-Wright, compare the selections: do you get the same impression of this writer’s interests and abilities from the two sourcses? What principles seem to govern the anthologizers’ choices about inclusion and exclusion?

Then, as you read her work, you might consider some of these questions: what causes her to write? what does she think literature is “for”? how difficult is it for her to decideto write? what constitutes her sense of authority to speak? does she imagine herself as part of a literary, religious, or political tradition? if so, how does she adopt or adapt to that tradition? does she incorporate personal experience into her writing, and if so in what way? how does she use the Bible in her work, either to support her argument or to interpret her experience in terms of past paradigms? are these “stresses and tensions” such as Adrienne Rich suggests looking for, in her her work?

As you read secondary materials, your first responsibility is to identify the scholar’s argument. But then you should ask the same kinds of questions that you would ask of anthology selections: why is this scholar interested in this writer? does she have a particular critical or theoretical agenda? how nuanced is her attention to the writer’s historical and literary circumstamces? how are the answers to these questions influenced by when this scholar is writing?

Each student will be responsible for writing 7 one-half to two page papers. Students will be assigned to a group with three other students. Those students whose talking papers are due on a particular day will be responsible for opening the discussion. Talking papers may address a controversial or provicative point in the day’s reading and material from earlier readings or discussion, or raise questions that the reading provokes.

Each student will write two 7-10 page papers on the topic of her or his choice.

Each student will be responsible for exploring the reception history of a woman writer or, if she is a prolific writer, of one of her major works. The preliminary work for this reception history will be due during our discussion of that writer or of that work and should eb accompaned by a brief summary of the writer’s or work’s reception history and a paragraph-length discussion of three articles about the writer or work, drawn from different decades fi possible. Students will be expected to distribute these summaries to the class and to discuss briefly their preliminary findings.

Course description

The late English Renaissance was a period of great political, religious, scientific and social upheaval, and ultimately changed the character of British life from the Tudor mode of a strong monarch and church and literature largely as a productionof the eductated nobility, to a new mode of Parliamentarian rule alongside the monarch, a more passive church, the roots of modern science, and a cadre of professional writers. We will explore a few of the products of these changes, focusing specifically on issues of religious experience, science, social class, and gender.

Course description

The Elizabethan Age was a “Golden Age” for British literature and a time of foment about women, perhaps in part because a female sovereign, Elizabeth I, led the country for nearly fifty years, despite significant opposition to woman’s rule. In this course, we will be looking at works by Elizabethan writers in light of questions raised by feminist and New Historicist critics. How are female and male characters presented? Do they achieve self-knowledge in similar ways? What are the sexual politics in these works? What similarities and differences exist between works by men and works by women?

Course description

Goals:1) To master significant Renaissance Texts; 2) To consider various critical approaches to literature; 3) To discover connections between popular literature of the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries by focusing on questions of spirituality and sexuality.

Course description

The title of this course is ambiguous--even slightly "punny"--in that it refers to two things at once. Most obviously, this is a course about women writers working in England between about 1550 and 1700. But you will notice that a number of important male writers are represented as well. That is not because there are not enough women’s works to fill a whole semester; on the contrary, texts have so proliferated over the past decade that I have had to be very selective. I have included such important male writers as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton because they are central to the story of writing women in the Renaissance.

Why are these men so central? They are central because of the way literature both reflects and, in turn, influences--even re-invents--life. Due in part to social factors, in part to the power of their vision, these male poets have indelibly shaped the way men have imagined and represented women, as well as the way countless female readers have imagined and represented themselves. Thus, even when writing for others of their own sex, women must write in response to male voices, male pens, male images of female identity.

Some recent critics have argued, in fact, that if people write history, they are also "written" by it. Each of our lives, they say, is a kind of fiction, written in collaboration with the social forces that shape our lives. And, especially in the early modern period, those forces tended to privilege the male perspective. The Renaissance was a period of enormous change and upheaval, in which a relatively unified and stable medieval world-view gave way to what would become the Enlightenment. It was a period in which men (at least an elite of outstanding and privileged men) were involved actively in a reconstruction of identity, a reconstruction Stephen Greenblatt has called "Renaissance self-fashioning."

Women, too, were engaged in this "self-fashioning" enterprise--but with a difference. Less free to begin the enquiry from "scratch," they engaged in the process under the jealous eye of a patriarchal society which saw them, essentially, as passive members--valued above all, as Suzanne Hull has noted, for three traditional virtues: chastity, obedience, and silence. Even as they wrote, then (and many did write), they were also "being written"--by male writers, and yet more profoundly by the social conventions that shaped both male and female roles.

Thus we will need to keep two key questions in mind in our reading (and writing) this semester. First, we need to keep asking ourselves about the context of the literature we read: what were the social conditions under which it was produced? (These social conditions finally take into account every branch of history--social, intellectual, and economic--as well as theology and its manifold nuances.) But we also need to read each text--closely and with open minds--in order to see the extent to which Renaissance writers, male and female, were "written" by the context in which they wrote; and to see, conversely, the extent to which they managed to "re-write," or "refashion" themselves and one another.

All semester we will see both phenomena--the writing and "being written"--occurring again and again. But the best criticism, to my mind, uses theory to illuminate texts--not to reduce them to evidence for a particular point of view or ammunition for a particular agenda. Thus, our story will not be a "neat" one. Different writers will reveal a different mix of freedom and constraint, originality and conventionality, patriarchal bias and impulse toward gender equality. Our verdict will differ, I suspect, from writer to writer, from text to text--and from person to person.

But, whatever our conclusions (and however tentative those conclusions may be) each of us, by the end of the course, will also have "written" Renaissance women to some extent. In fact, if things go really well, we may end up writing a corporate history that does not now exist. In any case, you should know at the outset that the questions we engage this semester are live questions for me--not questions to which I have clear and settled answers. I too want to know how women were written in the Renaissance--and how they in turn rewrote it.

Course description

Welcome to the material Renaissance! Our concern this semester will be the "weighty" matter of books and images. In the early modern period, their composition and consumption created and sustained religious, political, and household communities. Intensely read and re-read, texts shaped minds. Published in the right format, appropriately bound and circulated, a book could literally make a man or a woman. Or else, unmake them. Words and images were a matter of life and death: they sealed romantic relationships and political alliances, but could also hurt, condemn, or kill.

In this class, we will read in familiar and unfamiliar ways, feel, hear, reproduce, and analyze a series of texts and images by early modern men and women—royalty, nobility, and those of the "middling sort." As we discuss their material dimensions, cultural contexts, rhetorical and visual strategies, we will be haunted by the same question: what difference did they make to the lives of their 16th and 17th century audiences?

Let me also remind you that this is an affiliated class of the Women’s Studies Program. Gender issues will often be the subject of discussion in our classroom. But more importantly, I would like to encourage at any time your comments and writings on women authors and, more generally, on the gender dimension of the Renaissance.