Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660

Nevitt, Marcus

doi:10.4324/9781315233819

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In other words, what this particular pamphlet war was bringing to the fore, at least initially, relates to issues at the core of government and the commonwealth of the people. It thus stands as a rather typical example of the kind of pamphleteering that, as Marcus Nevitt suggests in Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 16 is directed in general at matters of religious toleration and questions of agency.…”

Section: A Restoration Pamphlet Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

The Bishop of Exeter Versus Benjamin Hoadly: Pamphlets, Controversy, and the Uses of Epistolarity in Restoration England

Bayer

2024

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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This essay discusses the use of epistolarity in a pamphlet controversy that played out over a published sermon by the Bishop of Exeter and a critical response by Benjamin Hoadly. While the political, religious, and social aspects of the resulting pamphlet war are substantial, the present article discusses how the form of the letter was employed by the various authors who contributed to this controversy. It argues that the writers drew on readerly expectations about letters that reveal much about the role played by epistolarity within literary culture in Restoration England, in particular, how letters negotiated a contested space between factuality and fictionality that was shaped also by contemporary notions of novelistic writing.

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Section: A Restoration Pamphlet Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

The Bishop of Exeter Versus Benjamin Hoadly: Pamphlets, Controversy, and the Uses of Epistolarity in Restoration England

Bayer

2024

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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“…The visibility of these petitions produced satiric petitions purportedly by women, which, despite their misogynist import, nevertheless assume female literacy and political involvement (Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects 153–54). In fact, at the end of the Commonwealth era, Quaker women produced a petition against tithes with 7000 signatures (Nevitt 160–78).…”

Section: Literacies Of Non‐elite Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women's Literacies and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern England

Ferguson

Suzuki

2015

Literature Compass

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This article argues for a historically contextualized investigation of literacy that attends to early modern literacies in different and mixed media and to literacy as a complex set of practices and theories. Early modern literacy, for example, does not necessarily include both reading and writing: the criterion of measuring literacy by the signature is biased against women of various ranks as well as against poor men. Therefore, literacy rates of women should not be measured solely by means of their ability to sign their names but also by evidence provided by books dedicated to noblewomen or addressed to women of different ranks. A more expansive conception of authorship that includes anonymously, pseudonymously, and collectively written documents, as well as translations, can give a more accurate idea of the literacy of women of different social groups. Future research on literacy will be advanced by the discovery of hitherto unknown writings, and scholars will need to work on cultural documents of many kinds to gather evidence on the so-called "unlettered women," and thereby to focus our attention on the negatively charged side of the literacy/illiteracy dyad.for the negative part of the dyad "literate/illiterate"; the expression litteras (ne)scire, "not to know letters," may refer to lack of culture rather than to illiteracy in the narrow sense (Harris 5).Although Adam Fox argues that "by the end of the 14th century the modern usages [of literacy], denoting basic ability to read and write in the vernacular, were becoming widespread," and that "[i]n the 16th century they were normal" (46; our emphasis), he offers no evidence for this claim that literacy was considered to be the ability both to read and write by the 16th century. In fact, reading and writing skills were not taught together, either in schools or homes, and this fact has significant consequences for students of early modern literacy. 2 Children in England learned to read religious textsand recite catechismsseveral years before they learned to write, if they learned the latter (expensive) skill at all. 3 Many children, especially girls and lower-class boys, did not stay in school long enough to embark on writing instruction. Moreover, in some early modern primary schools, curricula were differentiated in ways that ref lected the views of pedagogical authorities such as Thomas Salter, who advised women to work with the "distaffe, and Spindle, Nedle and Thimble" rather than develop "the skill of well using a penne" (Trill 1). 4 Fox's view of literacy as "widespread" in England by the 16th century is countered by the research of many scholars and particularly by the statistics compiled by David Cressy and others who use the "signature method" of measuring literacy rates across the population. Cressy, who shares R. S. Schofield's view that the ability to sign one's name on a document constitutes an imperfect but nonetheless the best available measure of literacy (see Schofield 319), concludes from his research on signed documents, including business a...

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“…Overshadowed by the more stylistically complex Memoirs, this manuscript has been somewhat bypassed, a victim of scholarship's tendency -especially when focused on women -to transform "agency into a privilege of the rhetorically gifted". 14 It has not been studied as a document in its own right, but simply for how it corresponds to the later Memoirs as either a loosely connected forerunner, or draft version. Thus, its own importance has been overlooked.…”

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confidence: 99%