Mary Wroth

"How do I love thee? Let me mount the ways", wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed the literary and erotic conventions that strongly influenced their fates as women, wives, and lovers.

Mary B. Moore analyzes and provides context for love sonnet sequences by Italian, French, English, and American women poets in the light of current knowledge concerning attitudes women at the time they wrote. Through close readings of the poems combined with theory and criticism about constructs of women, historical events, and biographical contexts, Moore reveals patterns of revision among women poets that shed further light on the poets themselves, on Petrarchism as a convention, and on ideas about women. She focuses on Petrarchan sonnet sequences by women because the poems serve both as works of art and as documents that illuminate the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects (agents of speech, action, knowledge, and desire) as well as their more usual roles as erotic objects.

Combining theory with close reading, Moore enhances the value of many generally neglected poems by women. After a thorough discussion of the Petrachan sonnet tradition, she analyzes the work of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Gwynne Kennedy is the first scholar to investigate thoroughly the subject of women's anger in early modern England. She analyzes portrayals of and attitudes toward women's anger in printed texts written by or purporting to be written by women during the period.

Recognizing that ideas about emotions vary historically as well as culturally, Kennedy draws from recent critical work on emotions by historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and psychologists, as well as comparative studies of the emotions by cultural anthropologists. She contends that ideas about women's anger in early modern England are both like and unlike those in twentieth-century America. Although women's anger is often dismissed as irrational in both eras, for instance, in the early modern era women were thought to become angry more often and more easily than men due to their inherent physiological, intellectual, and moral inferiority.

To establish early modern attitudes toward women's anger, Kennedy also examines a number of male-authored works, including sermons, conduct literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. The focus of her work, however, is on representations of women's anger in printed works signed with women's names in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. She addresses the ways these writings conform to, conflict with, or appear to reconfigure prevailing beliefs about women's anger.

In exploring her subject, Kennedy deals with many popular genres of the period. She looks at such literary texts as Mary Wroth's romance, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, the first fiction by an English woman; Elizabeth Cary's play, The Tragedy of Mariam, the earliest extant play in English by awoman; and Aemilia Lanyer's verse collection, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. She also discusses religious writings by Protestant martyr Anne Askew and Elizabeth Cary's history of Edward II. Kennedy considers as well defenses of w

The structure of Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is governed by a distinctive and complex set of proportions, found also in the sonnet sequences of Fulke Greville and Robert Sidney written under its influence. For all these works to be ordered around the same set of proportions indicates a remarkable degree of careful planning and precise execution, and in turn affects their meaning. The tremendous effort of constructing the sequences according to intricate mathematical patterns suggests that the patterns themselves held a particular significance, one that requires investigation for the light it throws on these authors' intentions in composition. In this study Tom Parker reveals cosmological ideas implicit in the form of Astrophil and Stella, ideas which not only undermine much of the romantic and biographically-based criticism of the sequence, but call into question how we should read the sonnet sequences that were influenced by Sidney, both within and beyond his immediate circle. As well as those of Greville and Robert Sidney, the book looks in detail at the sonnet sequences of Giordano Bruno, Mary Wroth, Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, and Michael Drayton, to determine the extent to which the sonnet vogue of the 1590s incorporated Sidney's broader cosmological concerns.

A completely new examination of mid-seventeenth-century verse from the British Islands, this work questions and discards the old label "Cavalier Poetry" and argues for a literary interpretation that demonstrates the verse as a canon rich in tumultuous, pluralistic, and radical writing.

Aside from a few famous queens, warriors and religious leaders, little information is available about the many extraordinary women of the medieval and Renaissance world. This resource brings together engagingly written biographical profiles of 70 women, most of whom are "unsung," but all of whom are remarkable for their courage, initiative, and accomplishments in a world where the conventional wisdom was for women to be "chaste, silent, and obedient." The women profiled here represent 18 countries and excelled in 19 fields of endeavor. They include artists, builders, mystics, political leaders, religious activists, diarists and dramatists, poets and writers, and scholars.