Dido's daughters : literacy, gender, and empire in early modern England and France / Margaret W. Ferguson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ferguson, Margaret W., 1948-

Series:

ACLS Fellows’ publications.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

European literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

European literature.

Literature, Modern--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

French literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

French literature.

English literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

English literature.

Women and literature--England.

Women and literature.

Women and literature--France.

Women--Education--England.

Women.

Women--Education--France.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (521 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c2003.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

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. Feguson'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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1. Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models

3. Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars

3. Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies

Interlude

4. An Empire of Her Own Literacy as Appropriation in Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cité des Dames

5. Making the World Anew Female Literacy as Reformation and Translation in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron

6. Allegories of Imperial Subjection Literacy as Equivocation in Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam

7. New World Scenes from a Female Pen Literacy as Colonization in Aphra Behn's Widdow Ranter and Oroonoko

Afterword

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [435]-483) and index.

ISBN:

9786611125592

9781281125590

1281125598

9780226243184

0226243184

OCLC:

476228107