Hands and seals: ciphered politics in early modern women's writing

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Date
2019
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Publisher
University of Alabama Libraries
Abstract

Ciphered Politics offers a history of women’s secret politicking in the early modern period by tracing the practice across literary genres and neglected archival materials. The book includes studies of more than forty under- and unexamined archival manuscripts to show how women writers encrypted political critiques in pastoral romances, biographies, biblical epics, gossip, letters, and petitions. My subjects include canonical writers, such as Mary Wroth and Lucy Hutchinson, as well as their understudied contemporaries, such as Frances Vane and Helen Hay Wariston. Ultimately, Ciphered Politics argues that politicking women writers influenced public sentiment, shaped literary tradition, and innovated constitutional orders in seventeenth-century England. Chapter 1 argues that Lucy Hutchinson’s self-presentation is advanced at the expense of John’s legacy such that it interferes with the commendatory aims of his biography, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. It shows how Lucy Hutchinson regularly eclipses her protagonist in order to preserve the history of her own expert political activism. Chapter 2 centers upon a single ciphered letter and key—exchanged between two disenfranchised Republican women—in order to reveal a complex tradition of women’s secret epistolary culture. Tracing the material history of this letter which uses ciphers that are borrowed from the names of characters from prose romances, I recover a covert network of women, whose secret politicking was inspired by the romantic tradition. Chapter 3 attends to the letters, petitions, and interrogations of Republican and Royalist women preserved from 1660-1668. It recovers, transcribes, and contextualizes more than thirty archival manuscripts preserved in the State Papers, the majority of which are unpublished and untreated, to recover a complex dialectic exchange wherein female petitioners test and incline the will of the English monarch and his advisors in order to protect themselves, their husbands, and their property. Chapter four examines the material history and reception of Henry Vane’s posthumous writing. Tracing readers’ engagements, preserved in marginal evidence and diary entries, I argue that Henry Vane effectively used the genre of English martyrology to present himself and—importantly—his wife, Frances Vane, as exemplars of a providential genealogy that would inspire Milton’s depiction of Eve in Paradise Lost.

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Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Keywords
English literature, Women's studies, European history
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