Maids and mistresses, cousins and queens : women's alliances in early modern England / edited by Susan Frye, Karen Robertson.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Frye, Susan, 1952- editor.

Robertson, Karen, 1947- editor.

Series:

Oxford scholarship online.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--England--History.

Women.

Women--Social networks--England.

Female friendship--England.

Female friendship.

Women and literature--England.

Women and literature.

Women in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (369 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 2023.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This collection of sixteen essays considers evidence for the varied forms of women's alliances in early modern England. Women, who were prohibited from direct participation in the institutional structures that shaped the lives of men, constructed informal connections with other women for survival, advancement, and creativity. The essays presented here consider a variety of communities--formed among groups as diverse as serving women, vagrants, aristocrats, and authors--in order to consider the historical traces of women's connections.

Contents:

Contents; Contributors; Introduction; Part I: Alliances in the City; 1 Maidservants of London: Sisterhoods of Kinship and Labor; 2 Women, Work, and Plays in an English Medieval Town; 3 Women's Networks and the Female Vagrant: A Hard Case; 4 ""No Good Thing Ever Comes Out of It"": Male Expectation and Female Alliance in Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho; Part II: Alliances in the Household; 5 ""A P[ar]cell of Murdereing Bitches"": Female Relationships in an Eighteenth-Century Slaveholding Household; 6 The Appropriation of Pleasure in The Magnetic Lady

7 Female Alliance and the Construction of Homoeroticism in As You Like It and Twelfth Night8 ""Companion Me with My Mistress"": Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and Their Waiting Women; Part III: Materializing Communities; 9 Tracing Women's Connections from a Letter by Elizabeth Ralegh; 10 Sewing Connections: Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Talbot, and Seventeenth-Century Anonymous Needleworkers; 11 ""Faire Eliza's Chaine"": Two Female Writers' Literary Links to Queen Elizabeth I; 12 Mary Ward's ""Jesuitresses"" and the Construction of a Typological Community; Part IV: Emerging Alliances

13 The Dearth of the Author: Anonymity's Allies and Swetnam the Woman-hater14 The Erotics of Female Friendship in Early Modern England; 15 Alliance and Exile: Aphra Behn's Racial Identity; 16 Aemilia Lanyer and the Invention of White Womanhood; 17 Afterword: Producing New Knowledge; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Z

Notes:

"Began as a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting of 1993 in Atlanta and the project continued to expand"--Foreword.

Previously issued in print: 1999.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-341) and index.

Derived record based on print version record and publisher information.

ISBN:

0-19-772508-2

1-280-47043-7

1-4237-5985-0

0-19-535359-5

1-60256-239-3

OCLC:

960165159