Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Dowd, Michelle M.

doi:10.1057/9780230620391

Cited by 22 publications

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“…78 Existing scholarship has called attention to how "Whitney … emphasizes the heightened sexual vulnerability of women in service positions" in this letter, and it has stressed the preoccupation with "sexual risk" at "the center of the poem." 79 Even as the epistoler warns her "good sisters" to internally "exile out of [their] minde[s]" any and "All wanton toyes," she also gestures towards the externalized dangers posed by male sexual predation. 80 Ann Rosalind Jones suggests that Whitney's allusions to the "many … / that would … soone infect" young women and to those who "would … / Procure [their] shame" evoke "the domestic discord caused by the seduction, impregnation, and firing of maidservants," and I would further propose that her persona's sisterly words of admonition in this piece may be calculated to raise readers' suspicions that Whitney's own unspecified error is not unrelated to such matters.…”

Section: Exile and Error In A Sweet Nosgaymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint

Reid

2020

Early Modern Women's Complaint

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Calling attention to the Ovidian contours of Isabella Whitney's cursus litterarum, this essay reconsiders the literary heritage of the personae she adopts in The Copy of a Letter (c. 1566) and A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Existing analyses of Whitney's Ovidianism have tended to emphasize her debts to the female-voiced epistles of the Heroides while simultaneously overlooking profound intertextual connections between A Sweet Nosgay and Ovid's exilic writings. In contrast, this essay argues that the outlines of a self-consciously classical career trajectory (its stages demarcated by Whitney's subtle aesthetic shift from Heroidean amatory complaint to Tristian exile complaint) can be detected when The Copy of a Letter and A Sweet Nosgay are read contiguously.

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Section: Exile and Error In A Sweet Nosgaymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint

Reid

2020

Early Modern Women's Complaint

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“…The production of pre‐modern books printed on paper in Europe between the medieval period and eighteenth century, no matter the language or nation of origin, relied on the labor of ragpickers operating across England and the Continent. Attending to the history and representation of ragpickers therefore benefits from a transnational, transhistorical approach; attention to ragpickers also intersects with several recent studies on the cultural history of work in early modern England that attend to manual labor, rural and urban labor, labor of the working poor, and labor performed by women, particularly how such work contributed to early modern cultural production (Dowd, ; Rutter, ; Smith, ; Whittle & Hailwood, ). Natasha Korda's scholarship on the previously unacknowledged labor of women in and around the to the present, across countries and culturesearly modern commercial theater offers a model for studies of ragpickers.…”

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confidence: 99%

Rags, ragpickers, and early modern papermaking

Craig

2019

Literature Compass

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In medieval and early modern Europe, paper for writing and printing was made from recycled linen rags. Before they could be made into paper, rags first had to be acquired by individuals. Ragmen, rag‐women, ragpickers, rag‐rakers, rag‐gatherers, and rag‐collectors collected rags from door‐to‐door and picked them out of refuse piles, and eventually conveyed them to papermakers. This article begins with a short description of early modern papermaking in Europe and then shifts to its main subject: ragpickers and their rags in early modern England as understudied historical subjects and as figures of metaphor in the period's discourse. As an underclass, then as now, ragpickers have not been the subject of sustained historical attention. Although ragpickers' work went unnoticed or unacknowledged by some early modern writers, other writers invoked ragpickers and their rags to express ideas about literary production, class, filth, disease, and the relationship between London and the provinces. Studies of ragpickers and rags therefore intersect with recent research on labor in rural and urban England in the early modern period; on waste objects; and on women in the early modern book trade. Because Western papermaking relied on rags for over five hundred years, and because rags and paper continually traversed geographical boundaries over that period, studies of the rag‐trade transcend traditional scholarly boundaries of nation and periodization. Therefore, while this article focuses on early modern England, it also offers possible directions for transnational, transhistorical, and comparative approaches to rags and ragpickers.

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“…Alewife appearances in comic literature of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries reveal their tremendous power over the living conditions of the community. The early sixteenth-century precedent for Mistress Quickly's character shows female tavern owners or workers in the process of being judged on their cumulative 11 Dowd, Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, (Dowd 2009, pp. 2-3).…”

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Sour Beer at the Boar’s Head: Salvaging Shakespeare’s Alewife, Mistress Quickly

Romanelli

2019

Humanities

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Using William Shakespeare’s character Mistress Nell Quickly as an example, this article contends that familiarity with both the literary tradition of alewives and the historical conditions in which said literary tradition brewed aids in revising our interpretation of working-class women on the early modern stage. Mistress Quickly, the multi-faceted comic character in three history plays and a city-comedy, resembles closely those women with whom Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have lived and worked in their day-to-day lives. Rather than dismissing her role as minor or merely comic, as previous criticism largely has, scholarship can embrace this character type and her narrative as an example to complicate teleological progressions for women.

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Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint

The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint

Rags, ragpickers, and early modern papermaking

Sour Beer at the Boar’s Head: Salvaging Shakespeare’s Alewife, Mistress Quickly

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