350:619                                                                                          

Index # - 52880

Distribution Requirement:  A2, C

Thursday – 9:50 a.m.

MU 207

Jacqueline Miller

Seminar:  The Writing of Renaissance Woman

The centerpiece of this course will be one of the major literary texts written by a woman in the Renaissance: the domestic and imperial project of Mary Wroth’s fascinating and sprawling prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania.  When the first part of the Urania made its original and controversial appearance in print in1621, Wroth, the literary heir of her uncle Philip Sidney and her aunt, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was denounced as a “hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster.”  The language of the charge itself suggests the kinds of boundaries a Renaissance woman was perceived as crossing when she wrote and published. (Wroth withdrew Part I of the Urania from circulation and it was not published again until the mid 1990s; the second part appeared in print for the first time in 1999.)

We will surround and intersperse our reading of the Urania (approx. 4 weeks) with various related literary constructions of women in the period.  Some of the questions we’ll be asking specifically concern women writers (what forces—theological, political, literary--helped shape the emergence of women’s writing in the Renaissance?  (How) did women reconfigure genres and conventions? How did they negotiate a place from which to speak—and increasingly to publish--in a culture that prized female silence as a virtue akin to chastity?), but our concern will also be to explore how cultural discourses of femininity and gender informed the range of voices both male and female writers constructed for themselves, the readerships they imagined, the texts they produced, and (in turn) the cultural work those texts perform.  In conjunction with Wroth’s Urania we’ll read Book III of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and parts of Sidney’s Arcadia/s; we’ll look at Anna Weamys’s mid-17th-c continuation of Sidney’s Arcadia;  we’ll read Wroth’s sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus alongside Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Spenser’s Amoretti.  Time permitting, we’ll likely consider the significance of the early works of translation by women (eg., Tyler); of Mary Sidney’s roles as writer, translator, and as reader and literary executor of her brother’s work; of the psalm-based sonnets of Anne Lock (now recognized as the first sonnet sequence in English); of Anne Askew’s account of her interrogation and torture and how it was framed and shaped by Protestant reformers;  we may look at some of the poetry of Whitney, Lanyer, Philips, and Speght in the context of Wyatt, Jonson, Donne, and Marvell; we’ll try to fit in drama by Elizabeth Cary (Mariam) and a domestic tragedy like Arden of Faversham, and (to complete our reading of Wroth’s opus) her pastoral comedy, Love’s Victory.  We will frame the entire course with readings from the rather remarkable material known as the querelle des femmes (Gosynhill, Anger, Swetnam, Sowernam, Munda, etc.) and other related documents (eg,, John Knox’s “First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”; the writings of Queen Elizabeth; the debates about cross-dressing [Hic Mulier/Haec Vir], perhaps some medical and legal constructions of femininity/ masculinity, sexuality/gender) and we’ll also look at some of the major documents of Renaissance literary criticism (Puttenham’s Arte, Sidney’s Defense) and consider the significance of their gendering of poetry and rhetoric.

Some of this material will be relatively unfamiliar even to early modern specialists; non-specialists are welcome.  The structure of the course will allow each student's critical and theoretical predilections to shape the nature of his or her contributions (oral and written) to the class.  Coursework will include a substantial end-of-term paper, plus an oral presentation and/or short exploratory paper during the semester.