Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain

In Tudor and Stuart Britain, women writers were shaped by their culture, but they also helped to shape and reproduce culture through their writing, their patronage and their network of family and friends. Although they submitted to the cultural constraints of femininity, women helped to fashion gender roles. Denied positions of power in government - with the exception of queens - women sought to influence their society\u27s politics through their writings and personal relationships. Through the lens of cultural studies, the editors explore women\u27s material culture, women as agents in reproducing culture, popular culture and women\u27s pamphlets, and women\u27s bodies as inscriptions of culture. As the only collection on early modern British women\u27s writing to draw primarily on feminist cultural studies, this book covers new ground, especially in the scope and breadth of the authors surveyed. In addition to essays by the editors on Mary Queen of Scots, poetry and gift exchange, Lady mary Wroth\u27s anti-absolutist sonnets, and Elizabeth Cary\u27s portrait of the queen in Edward II, the book includes Margaret Hannay on class in Pembroke\u27s psalms, Mary Ellen Lamb on Aemilia Lanyer and patronage, Elaine Beilin on Anne Dowriche\u27s Protestant history, Barbara McManus on the pamphlet controversy about women, and Carole Levin on the assimilation of female saints into reformation England.http://digitalcommons.framingham.edu/books/1043/thumbnail.jp