Module Information

Outline Programme:

Week 1: Introduction: Women and Writing in Renaissance England.
Extracts from books on medicine, theology, law, and political theory.

Week 2: Royal Women.
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) ? selected speeches, poems, letters, and prayers.

Week 3: Martial Women.
Edmund Spenser, Book 3, The Faerie Queene (c. 1596).

Week 4: Women and the City.
Isabella Whitney, `The Last Will and Testament? (1573).
Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl (c1607-1610).

Week 5: Women and Speech.
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1594).

Week 6: Women and the querelle des femmes.
Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611).
John Donne, selected poems from Songs and Sonnets (c. 1593).
Rachel Speght, A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617)

Week 7: Women and Romance.
Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621).
Selections from Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (1591).

Week 8: Women and Science.
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666).

Week 9: Women and the Literary Marketplace.
Hester Pulter, 'Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassa' (1640-1660s).
Katherine Philips (1632-1664), selected poems.

Week 10: Did Englishwomen have a Renaissance?
Revision seminar, dicussing the themes raised in the module and selected extracts from feminist criticism.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf asked 'why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age'. Unable to find any examples of Elizabethan women writers, Woolf invented the imaginary 'Judith Shakespeare', who might have enjoyed a career as successful as that of her brother William, had she only been born a man. In fact, many women wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Queen Elizabeth I herself.

This module will explore some of the writings by and about Renaissance women, and will examine a range of genres, from poems, drama, prose, and fiction, to prophecies, letters, polemics, and philosophy. Each week, we'll focus on a particular woman writer or on a male-authored work in which the representation of women is of central importance. The texts will be read within the contexts of the life and social milieu of the author, her or his political and religious affiliations, and the historical moment. Wherever possible, writings by women will be set in 'conversation' with male-authored works of the same period or genre, thus enabling an assessment of the role of gender difference in helping shape literary and authorial identity in Renaissance England.