Betty Travitsky

Anne M. Haselkorn

This volume offers 18 essays on women as writers or as objects of representation in the English Renaissance. By analyzing the ways in which women are treated both in the traditional canon and in writings hitherto excluded, the book establishes a broader context for the interpretation of these writings. At the same time, the essays treat texts as cultural documents that raise questions about English politics, religion, economics and power relations. Together, the pieces reveal much about the gender system operating in Renaissance England and the range of women's experience during this period. The book explores the interrelated subject of women's visibility/invisibility, empowerment/suppression and voice/silencing and also documents the efforts of individual women who engaged, not necessarily consciously, in the creation and recreation of a female cultural presence and discusses differences and similarities between male and female representations of women's experience. The book is arranged in five sections. Part 1 explores women's voices in three literary genres. Part 2 examines portrayals of female empowerment, suppression and resistance in Renaissance drama. In part 3, the authors look at the woman ruler, discussing both her authority and her limitations. Part 4 treats the repression of women in the private sphere and part 5 addresses the voices and silences of women in texts by male and female writers of the Sidney family. The final chapter is an annotated bibliography covering women writers from 1500 to 1640. It establishes the current parameters of scholarship in this area and suggests directions for future research and publishing.

Counterbalancing the Canon

The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print

Prostitution in Elizabethan and Jacobean Comedy

Many distinctive features of the English Renaissance -- its lateness relative to the Renaissance in southern Europe, its adaptations to the wide swings of the Tudor and Stuart political, economic, cultural, and religious programs, its generally sober, religious tone, its governance for a stretch of approximately fifty years by a woman -- are widely recognized. But the consequences of these peculiarities for English women are less familiar. The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print attempts to investigate these consequences by examining cultural products of Tudor and Stuart England. Focusing chiefly on literary texts, the essays in this collection correlate writings by men that have traditionally been contained within the literary canon with writings by women that have traditionally been marginalized. The essays in this collection treat cultural documents in ways that necessarily raise and address questions about English Renaissance politics, religion, and economics. Many of the gendered assumptions of the English Renaissance are highlighted by this counterbalancing of representations of Renaissance women by contemporary men with writings (on related topics) by Renaissance women.

Anne M. Haselkorn

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