Women in the business of revolutionary news: Elizabeth Alkin, “Parliament Joan,” and the commonwealth newsbook

Nevitt, Marcus

doi:10.1080/01440359808586640

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Her espionage work continued into the Interregnum and extended into the publication of newsbooks. 29 Alkin's example provides clear evidence of women's participation in the supposedly masculine sphere of intelligence gathering, espionage, and news production. As Nevitt notes, by publicly declaring herself to be a spy and seeking recompense for her services from the government in order to support her impoverished children, "spying is presented .…”

Section: The News Revolution and Monastic Womenmentioning

confidence: 95%

Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks

Walker

2012

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The wealth of recent scholarship on early modern English news culture has paid scant attention to women as consumers and producers of news. This article argues that women not only read about the tumultuous events of the Civil War and Interregnum, but that they participated in the collection, transmission, and interpretation of news. Abbess Mary Knatchbull of the Benedictine abbey in Ghent not only operated as the royalists’ postmistress in the 1650s, she also accessed reports from England about unfolding political events, which she passed on to the prince’s ministers. Much of this information was transmitted in correspondence, but the abbess also forwarded printed newsbooks and compiled manuscript newsletters for the royalists. This essay reveals how cloistered nuns engaged directly with the public sphere through their access to news, and how their receipt and transmission of intelligence cemented their position as valuable royalist agents in the 1650s.

show abstract

Section: The News Revolution and Monastic Womenmentioning

confidence: 95%

Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks

Walker

2012

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Thieves, Bawds, and Counterrevolutionary Fantasies: The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith

Mowry¹

2005

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

his is an essay about a failed polemic. In 1662, bookseller William Gilbertson offered his patrons the anonymously written Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. Commonly called Mal Cutpurse. Exactly Collected and now Published for the Delight and Recreation of all Merry Disposed Persons. In this work, readers found a shocking transformation. Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse, had metamorphosed from the rebellious imp of Renaissance stage and street culture to a royalist heroine and counterrevolutionary whose life emphasized the perils of public interactions voided of principles of obligation and duty. Not only did the late Stuart period produce the majority of biographies on Frith, but all three of the extant biographies emphasize Frith's royalism. As late as Alexander Smith's version of her life, published as part of his A Complete History of the lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Shoplifts, and Cheats of Both Sexes (1714), Moll appears as a cavalier champion in contrast to Oliver Cromwell, the "Arch-traitor" (149). Smith even embellishes the earlier biographies' presentations of Frith's royalism by fabricating an episode in which she is "known" to have accosted and robbed the Parliamentarian general Thomas Fairfax on the road to Hounslow Heath (142-43). The emphasis on Frith's political disposition, however, proved not to be enduring. For by 1722, just eight years after Smith's work, Daniel Defoe used Moll Cutpurse as shorthand for Moll Flanders' deft pick pocketing, describing her as "dexterous, as ever Moll Cut-Purse was," without any apparent refer

show abstract

Women in the business of revolutionary news: Elizabeth Alkin, “Parliament Joan,” and the commonwealth newsbook

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks

Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks

Thieves, Bawds, and Counterrevolutionary Fantasies: The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About