Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700)

This Book Reveals That Seventeenth-century Women?s Very Marginality To Traditional Institutions Of Church And State Made Them Catalysts For Imagining An Expanded Public Culture Beyond These Institutions. Women Authors Such As The Conduct Writer Dorothy Leigh, The Prophet Sarah Wight, And The Poet Katherine Philips Recast Sites Of Private Dialogue?the Extended Family, The Religious Coventicle, And The Poetic Coterie?as The Bases Of Public Debate That Crossed National Borders. By Revealing Women Writers? Key Role In The Heated Controversies Of This Period, Gray Offers A New Reading Of Those Struggles As Fractured By Private Affiliation And Extended By Transnational Alliance. Crossing Borders: From Private Dialogue To Public Debate -- Feeding On The Seed Of The Woman: Dorothy Leigh And The Figure Of Maternal Dissent -- At 'liberty To Preach In The Chambers': Sarah Wight, Henry Jessey, And The New-modeled Community Of Saints -- The Knowing Few: Katherine Philips And The Post-courtly Coterie -- News From The New World: Anne Bradstreet And Pan-protestant Poetics -- Gathering And Scattering In Katharine Evans And Sarah Cheevers. Catharine Gray. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [225]-247) And Index. This book reveals women writers'key role in constituting seventeenth-century public culture and, in doing so, offers a new reading of that culture as begun in intimate circles of private dialogue and extended along transnational networks of public debate. No further information has been provided for this title