Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700

Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700 PDF

Author: Jane Couchman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 1351871277

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In response to a growing interest, among historians as well as literary critics, in women's use of the epistolary genre, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion analyzes persuasive techniques in the personal correspondence of late medieval and early modern women. It includes studies of well-known women (Isabella d'Este, Teresa of Avila, Marguerite de Navarre, Catherine de Medicis), of those less-known (Alessandra Macigni Strozzi, Louise de Coligny, Glikl of Hameln, Argula von Grumbach, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Anna Maria von Schurman, Barbara of Brandenburg ) and of others virtually unknown to history (prosperous women like Elizabeth Stonor and Cornelia Collonello and pauper women seeking poor relief in Tours). Comprehensive in scope, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700 looks at women from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and from various levels of society, encompassing the nobility, the gentry, the middle class, and the poor. Each of the essayists considers letters both as historical documents giving insights into women's lives, and as texts in which variations on epistolary forms are used for specific persuasive purposes. The authors of the essays analyze their subjects' capabilities and limitations as letter writers and the techniques they used to influence correspondents, setting these observations in the framework of the women's particular 'stories.' Taken together, the essays and the letter writers discussed therein illustrate in new ways how far from silenced many early modern women were, how they were able to adopt and adapt strategies from the epistolary conventions available to them, and how they could have an impact on their worlds through their letters.

Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450-1700

Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450-1700 PDF

Author: J. Daybell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-05-17

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0230598668

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This landmark book of essays examines the development of women's letter writing from the late fifteenth to the early eighteen century. It is the first book to deal comprehensively with women's letter writing during the Late Medieval and Early Modern period and shows that this was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has generally been assumed. The essays, contributed by many of the leading researchers active in the field, illustrate women's engagement in various activities, both literary and political, social and religious.

Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance

Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance PDF

Author: Meredith K. Ray

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0802097049

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

During the Italian Renaissance, dozens of early modern writers published collections of private correspondence, using them as vehicles for self-presentation, self-promotion, social critique, and religious dissent. Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance examines the letter collections of women writers, arguing that these works were a studied performance of pervasive ideas about gender as well as genre, a form of self-fashioning that variously reflected, manipulated, and subverted cultural and literary conventions regarding femininity and masculinity. Meredith K. Ray presents letter collections from authors of diverse backgrounds, including a noblewoman, a courtesan, an actress, a nun, and a male writer who composed letters under female pseudonyms. Ray's study includes extensive new archival research and highlights a widespread interest in women's letter collections during the Italian Renaissance that suggests a deep curiosity about the female experience and a surprising openness to women's participation in this kind of literary production.

Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690

Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690 PDF

Author: James Daybell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1134771983

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690 is the first collection to examine the gendered nature of women’s letter-writing in England and Ireland from the late-fifteenth century through to the Restoration. The essays collected here represent an important body of new work by a group of international scholars who together look to reorient the study of women’s letters in the contexts of early modern culture. The volume builds upon recent approaches to the letter, both rhetorical and material, that have the power to transform the ways in which we understand, study and situate early modern women’s letter-writing, challenging misconceptions of women’s letters as intrinsically private, domestic and apolitical. The essays in the volume embrace a range of interdisciplinary approaches: historical, literary, palaeographic, linguistic, material and gender-based. Contributors deal with a variety of issues related to early modern women’s correspondence in England and Ireland. These include women’s rhetorical and persuasive skills and the importance of gendered epistolary strategies; gender and the materiality of the letter as a physical form; female agency, education, knowledge and power; epistolary networks and communication technologies. In this volume, the study of women’s letters is not confined to writings by women; contributors here examine not only the collaborative nature of some letter-writing but also explore how men addressed women in their correspondence as well as some rich examples of how women were constructed in and through the letters of men. As a whole, the book stands as a valuable reassessment of the complex gendered nature of early modern women’s correspondence.

Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing

Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing PDF

Author: Mark Sebba

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-05-22

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1136486208

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frameworks have been based on spoken code-switching. This volume presents a collection of new work on the alternation of languages in written form. Written language alternation has existed since ancient times. It is present today in a great deal of traditional media, and also exists in newer, less regulated forms such as email, SMS messages, and blogs. Chapters in this volume cover both historical and contemporary language-mixing practices in a large range of language pairs and multilingual communities. The research collected here explores diverse approaches, including corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, literacy studies, ethnography, and analyses of the visual/textual aspects of written data. Each chapter, based on empirical research of multilingual writing, presents methodological approaches as models for other researchers. New perspectives developed in this book include: analysis specific to written, rather than spoken, discourse; approaches from the new literacy studies, treating mixed-language literacy from a practice perspective; a focus on both "traditional" and "new" media types; and the semiotics of both text and the visual environment.

Women and Learning: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide

Women and Learning: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide PDF

Author: Margaret King

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-06

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 0199811040

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland

Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland PDF

Author: Marie-Louise Coolahan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-01-28

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0199567654

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book discusses women's writing in early modern Ireland. It explores the ways in which women contributed to the power struggles of the period; how they strove to be heard, forged space for their voices, and engaged with new and native language-traditions to produce poetry, petition-letters, depositions, and autobiography.

Debate of the Romance of the Rose

Debate of the Romance of the Rose PDF

Author: Christine de Pizan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-04-15

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0226670147

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365–1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read Romance of the Rose for its blatant and unwarranted misogynistic depictions of women. The debate that ensued, over not only the merits of the treatise but also of the place of women in society, started Europe on the long path to gender parity. Pizan’s criticism sparked a continent-wide discussion of issues that is still alive today in disputes about art and morality, especially the civic responsibility of a writer or artist for the works he or she produces. In Debate of the “Romance of the Rose,” David Hult collects, along with the debate documents themselves, letters, sermons, and excerpts from other works of Pizan, including one from City of Ladies—her major defense of women and their rights—that give context to this debate. Here, Pizan’s supporters and detractors are heard alongside her own formidable, protofeminist voice. The resulting volume affords a rare look at the way people read and thought about literature in the period immediately preceding the era of print.

Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ

Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ PDF

Author: Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-04-15

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0226864901

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Read by Protestants and Catholics alike, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–94) was the foremost German woman poet and writer in the seventeenth-century German-speaking world. Privileged by her social station and education, she published a large body of religious writings under her own name to a reception unequaled by any other German woman during her lifetime. But once the popularity of devotional writings as a genre waned, Catharina’s works went largely unread until scholars devoted renewed attention to them in the twentieth century. For this volume, Lynne Tatlock translates for the first time into English three of the thirty-six meditations, restoring Catharina to her rightful place in print. These meditations foreground women in the life of Jesus Christ—including accounts of women at the Incarnation and the Tomb—and in Scripture in general. Tatlock’s selections give the modern reader a sense of the structure and nature of Catharina’s devotional writings, highlighting the alternative they offer to the male-centered view of early modern literary and cultural production during her day, and redefining the role of women in Christian history.

Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth

Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth PDF

Author: Margaret P. Hannay

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1317100050

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Despite her fascinating life and her importance as a writer, until now Lady Mary Wroth has never been the subject of a full-length biography. Margaret Hannay's reliance on primary sources results in some corrections, as well as additions, to our knowledge of Wroth's life, including Hannay's discovery of the career of her son William, the marriages of her daughter Katherine, her grandchildren, her last years, the date of her death, and the subsequent history of her manuscripts. This biography situates Lady Mary Wroth in her family and court context, emphasizing the growth of the writer's mind in the sections on her childhood and youth, with particular attention to her learned aunt, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, as literary mentor, and to her Continental connections, notably Louise de Coligny, Princess of Orange, and her stepson Prince Maurice. Subsequent chapters of the biography treat her experience at the court of Queen Anne, her relationships with parents and siblings, her love for her cousin William Herbert, her marriage to Robert Wroth, the birth and early death of her only legitimate child, her finances and properties, her natural children, her grandchildren, and her last years in the midst of England's civil wars. Throughout the biography attention is paid to the complex connections between Wroth's life and work. The narrative is enhanced with a chronology; family trees for the Sidneys and Wroths; a map of Essex, showing where Wroth lived; a chart of family alliances; portraits; and illustrations from her manuscripts.