Dido's Daughters : Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France

Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing.

Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003aRoland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in "Dido's Daughters," this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure DidoOCobuilder of an empire that threatened to rival RomeOCoFerguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France." Frontmatter List of Illustrations (page ix) Acknowledgments (page xi) Prologue (page 1) PART 1 Theoretical and Historical Considerations 1 Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models (page 31) 2 Sociaolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars (page 83) 3 Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies (page 135) PART 2 Literacy in Action and in Fantasy Case Studies Interlude 4 An Empire of Her Own Literacy as Appropriation in Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Citré des Dames (page 179) 5 Making the World Anew Female Literacy as Reformation and Translation in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron (page 225) 6 Allegories of Imperial Subjection Literacy as Literacy as s Equivocation in Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam (page 265) 7 New World Scenes from a Female Pen Literacy as Colonization in Aphra Behn's Widdow Ranter and Oroonoko (page 333) Afterword (page 375) Notes (page 379) Select Bibliography (page 435) Index (page 485)