Saturday, October 8, 2011

"My Name Was Martha": A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem by Martha Moulsworth.

"My Name Was Martha": A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem by Martha Moulsworth. Feminist scholarship and cultural studies scholarship haveproduced an admirable list of recent books that apply historical rigor rigor/rig��or/ (rig��er) [L.] chill; rigidity.rigor mor��tis? the stiffening of a dead body accompanying depletion of adenosine triphosphate in the muscle fibers. and materialist models to enable new ways of studying actualwomen's lives, literary and non-literary portrayals of women, andwriting by women. Just a few of these are Frances E. Dolan'sDangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England1550-1700; Gail Kern Paster's The Body Embarrassed: Drama and theDisciplines of Shame in Early Modern England; and the collection ofessays edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, Women,"Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period. These workscall into question previous distinctions between public and private,between the so-called political and domestic arenas, and show ways inwhich these domains influenced each other and transcended boundariesthat we have often artificially or anachronistically a��nach��ro��nism?n.1. The representation of someone as existing or something as happening in other than chronological, proper, or historical order.2. imposed. They alsourge us to imagine new models for the way power works in early modemsocieties, which are usually more complex and multivalent than we haveacknowledged. Belonging to this trend of questioning and complicating ourhistorical constructs by using material evidence, the books under reviewconsider the lives and bibliographies of nine English women writers(Lewalski); undertake an examination of what might be ascertained abouta recently discovered text by a woman (Evans and Wiedemann); and callinto question earlier models of the stage's relation to dominantideologies and social change (Howard). Each of these books responds tothe recent debates within academia, and between academics and the publicat large, over the purposes and goals of cultural, historical, Marxist,and feminist criticisms. In particular each book considers, with varyingdegrees of success, why we ought to examine, and how we should go aboutexamining, these aspects of early modern English Early Modern English refers to the stage of the English language used from about the end of the Middle English period (the latter half of the 15th century) to 1650. Thus, the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare both belong to the late phase culture that untilrecently have been hidden or ignored. The first of these, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's Writing Womenin Jacobean England, provides good surveys of texts by the seconddiscernible wave of English woman writers (the first being Tudor); thesetexts are likely to have been unexplored heretofore by the majority ofscholars, because most of them had been previously excluded from thecanon and, therefore, lacked good editions. Lewalski's excellentbibliography and generous notes, both on individual writers and on earlymodern women's writing in general, also serve to point out editingand other scholarly work that needs yet to be done, and help to makethis book an important first source for scholars researching andteaching about these women and their writing. Lewalski brings solidscholarship to the biographies, rendering vivid pictures of thefamilial, financial, religious, and political exigencies that likelyshaped each woman's life and work. In describing her process, Lewalski insists that "these textsneed to be situated within many contexts -- biographical, historical,literary, theoretical" via "feminist, Marxist, and newhistoricist theory, but with all these writers I begin empirically, withan attempt to find and marshal whatever scanty information exists aboutthem and their texts" including using techniques of formalist for��mal��ism?n.1. Rigorous or excessive adherence to recognized forms, as in religion or art.2. An instance of rigorous or excessive adherence to recognized forms.3. analysis to begin a consideration of them in aesthetic as well aspolitical terms" (10). Lewalski also questions new historicistparadigms that she feels have been accepted too uncritically (JeanHoward B. Ernestine Mahoney (October 13, 1910]] - March 20, 2000) was an American actress.A former Ziegfeld girl and a Goldwyn Girl, Howard studied photography at the Los Angeles Art Center. agrees, as we will see): "by attending to the several kindsof resistance inscribed in these women's texts, we may be led torecognize important aspects of early modern literature and culture thatthe overused new historicist formula, subversion and containment, mayobscure. My emphasis here will be clear enough: I have more interest inresistance than subjugation SubjugationCushan-rishathaim Aramking to whom God sold Israelites. [O.T.: Judges 3:8]Gibeonitesconsigned to servitude in retribution for trickery. [O.T.: Joshua 9:22–27]Ham Noahcurses him and progeny to servitude. [O. , more interest in attending carefully towhat these women manage to express than in reading through them (again)the all-too-true story of what the culture managed to repress re��pressv.1. To hold back by an act of volition.2. To exclude something from the conscious mind. . . . .Obviously these Jacobean women did not and could not change their world,but they were able to imagine and represent a better one" (11).Lewalski argues, sometimes against earlier readers, that the textsrepresent their authors' attempts to reinvision a world more shapedby female viewpoints and authority, more conducive to female influence. At least two of the writing women Lewalski considers mostculturally influential wielded their influence primarily as patrons whocommissioned court entertainments and who supported poets and otherartists. Lewalski's accounts of the writing lives of Queen Anne Queen Anne?n.The style in English architecture and furniture typical of the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714).Queen AnneAdjective1. andLucy Countess of Bedford explore their strategies as patrons and theissues that motivated them. As Queen Anne ceased her (frequentlythwarted) efforts at more overt involvement in State politics, shebecame busy with "progresses, entertainments, attending thetheater, dancing and games with her ladies, architectural planning, andmasques -- activities which allowed her some scope for self-affirmation,for affecting Jacobean culture, and for resistance" (26-7).Lewalski asserts that "Queen Anne made her chief contribution toJacobean culture through her early patronage of Ben Jonson and InigoJones, and her participation in the creation and development of thecourt masque masque,courtly form of dramatic spectacle, popular in England in the first half of the 17th cent. The masque developed from the early 16th-century disguising, or mummery, in which disguised guests bearing presents would break into a festival and then join with their ," even to the extent of representing not only themonarchy but her place in it, perhaps one greater than she enjoyed inreal life (28). Lewalski credits Lucy Countess of Bedford, also aformidable patron, with being at least "one Jacobean lady who laidclaim to considerable political power and cultural status, and got awaywith it" (123). Lewalski's book is important in part for its willingness andrigor in considering a variety of genres and circumstances through whichthese women affected their society. Two other writing women, ElizabethElectress Palatine and Arbella Stuart, have earned this designationprimarily through elaborate letter-writing campaigns and the personaethey created or allowed to be created around their plights. Lewalskiexamines the cult that grew in England and Europe around Elizabeth the"Winter Queen" as her father James I James I, king of Aragón and count of BarcelonaJames I(James the Conqueror), 1208–76, king of Aragón and count of Barcelona (1213–76), son and successor of Peter II. refused to aid her andher husband's claims to the throne of Bohemia. ArbellaStuart's life was also constrained by James I, who feared her claimto his throne, and Lewalski chronicles her attempts to change hercircumstances through pretense of madness and other schemes. Among the other women covered by Lewalski are Rachel Speght Rachel Speght (1597 - ?) was a poet and polemicist. She was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, by name, as a polemicist and critic of gender ideology. Speght, a feminist and a Calvinist, is perhaps best known for her tract, A Mouzell for Melastomus (London, 1617). , thefirst known female participant in the English pamphlet debate over thenature of women and author of an additional book of poetry, and AemiliaLanyer. Both Lewalski's book and the recent edition of AemiliaLanyer's Salve salve(sav) ointment. salven.An analgesic or medicinal ointment.salve v.salveointment. Deus Rex Judaeorum by Susanne Woods rescue Lanyerfrom her unfortunate association with Shakespeare's Dark Lady andtreat her poetry seriously for its religious content and for its othergroundbreaking generic applications. In her final chapter, an excellentintroduction to Lady Mary Sidney Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke n��e Mary Sidney (27 October 1561 – 25 September 1621), was one of the first English women to achieve a major reputation for her literary works, translations and literary patronage. Wroth wroth?adj.Wrathful; angry.[Middle English, from Old English wrth; see wer-2 in Indo-European roots. , Lewalski reads the Urania Urania(yrā`nēə): see Aphrodite; Muses. Uraniamuse of astrology. [Gk. Myth. as anappropriation of both lyric and romance genres for the purpose ofcritiquing court culture and erotic life; she regards Wroth as the mostcreative and prolific writer among these women. Many of the women's lives and writing (especially those ofAnne Clifford and Elizabeth Cary Elizabeth Cary may refer to: Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, early modern poet and playwright Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (n��e Cary), founder of Radcliffe College Elizabeth Cary, modern poet and Sobe green tea enthusiast , a convert to Catholicism at muchpersonal risk to herself and long acknowledged as the first known womanplaywright of the Renaissance) chronicle the pervasive and frequentlymisogynist mi��sog��y��nist?n.One who hates women.adj.Of or characterized by a hatred of women.Noun 1. misogynist - a misanthrope who dislikes women in particularwoman hater influence of James I and the even more pervasive influencesof institutionalized patriarchal advantage in curtailing thesewomen's autonomy during their lives, in the loss or garbling garbling,v in herbal medicine, to separate the useable part of the plant from any irrelevant matter, including dirt or other plant parts. oftheir texts, in the misattributions of their texts to men, in theobscurity or loss of information about their lives, and in thedown-playing of women's cultural influence. Lewalski's bookdoes not as readily call attention to the even greater disadvantages tolives and to writing that were likely to be experienced by women oflower class, lesser means, and more meager education. Lewalskiacknowledges that, of the nine women under consideration, "all buttwo are royal or noble, and those two are gentlewomen with some courtconnections" (4) but writes that she has chosen these women becausethey constitute "a smaller group of highly articulate women whoseresistance takes various but striking forms: defining an oppositionalrole vis-a-vis patriarchal institutions; claiming rights, status, andpower not usually accorded women; projecting in literary texts fantasyof overt resistance and rebellion, of dominant or separate femalecommunities, or of feminist politics and values; claiming genres andrewriting literary discourses for women's voices and stories.Several of these women found impressive literary means to contest theplaces assigned them in Jacobean patriarchal culture" (4). Thewomen Lewalski has chosen are indeed crucial for study because theirinfluences were felt and acknowledged in their own time, but there aremany more culturally influential women yet to be studied and recoveredfrom obscurity. Having observed how difficult it has been for Lewalski to trackdown biographical information about these mostly privileged womenwriters, it will be no surprise how much mare difficult it has been andwill be for scholars to trace details of women who did not have thewealth or personal influence that kept a place for these nine women inthe historical record. A good example of a less-privileged woman writerof late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England is MarthaMoulsworth, whose recently-discovered manuscript "The Memorandum ofMartha Moulsworth Widdowe" is edited with extensive commentary byRobert C. Evans and Barbara Wiedemann in "My Name was Martha":A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem. In order to studypreviously lost or heretofore noncanonical writing and to develop a morecomplete understanding of the past, it will be crucial for scholars toproduce editions that preserve such material and put it into context.Moulsworth's brief poem certainly deserves this kind of treatment.Written on the occasion of its author's fifty-fifth birthday, it isthoughtful, devout, sometimes wry, and always carefully rendered.Although Evans and Wiedemann seem to work too hard to claim that thepoem is a particularly early call for educational institutions forwomen, or an unusually early autobiographical statement by a woman, thepoem is important for its perspective on the life of a woman who seemsto have been well-educated but not to have enjoyed aristocratic orcourtly court��ly?adj. court��li��er, court��li��est1. Suitable for a royal court; stately: courtly furniture and pictures.2. Elegant; refined: courtly manners. status. The strengths and weaknesses of the edition are instructive atthis time of change and debate over the purposes and methods of earlymodern cultural materialist studies and during an upsurge of interest inthe profession to extend the canon. Editors Evans and Wiedemann havemade the right decisions regarding their treatment of the text of thepoem, presenting the text typographically ty��pog��ra��phy?n. pl. ty��pog��ra��phies1. a. The art and technique of printing with movable type.b. The composition of printed material from movable type.2. as close to its manuscriptform as possible, without modernizing spelling or punctuation orinterfering with the poem's ambiguities, which they value highly asa matter of aesthetics (leaving aside the question of whether this poemwould have held such ambiguity for its author or contemporary readers).Problems occur within the larger editorial context, in the unansweredquestions regarding the poem's provenance and its relation to othertexts in the commonplace book commonplace bookn.A personal journal in which quotable passages, literary excerpts, and comments are written.Noun 1. commonplace book - a notebook in which you enter memorabilia in which it was found. With our growingrecognition that early modern writing needs deeper and broadercontextualizing in order to improve our knowledge, it is worth wonderingwhy the entire commonplace book wasn't edited and published.Readers of Moulsworth's poem need to know the commonplacebook's provenance and dates, and titles and analysis of the"other texts... political in nature" (3) that precedeMoulsworth's poem in the compilation. It is particularly importantfor readers to be able to consider what ideological or materialaffiliations may exist between this poem and the other texts. Theeditors' dismissal of the preceding texts as "political"both implies that they are entirely irrelevant to Moulsworth'sdomestic poem and falsely dichotomizes these arenas. Moulsworth's editors seem concerned that theircontextualization Contextualization of language useContextualization is a word first used in sociolinguistics to refer to the use of language and discourse to signal relevant aspects of an interactional or communicative situation. of the poem might detract from detract fromverb 1. lessen, reduce, diminish, lower, take away from, derogate, devaluate verb 2. its aesthetic merit, orthat their editing project leaves them open to the charge of valuing thepoem unduly simply because it was written by a woman. The book is fullof statements trying to discourage this accusation: "Rather thantreating the poem first and foremost as a biographical, historical,sociological, political, or discursive document, the first chapterattempts to treat it as a highly complex work of art. By doing so, thatchapter hopes to pay Moulsworth the compliment of treating her notsimply as a woman writer, or as a woman who happened to write, but as askillful skill��ful?adj.1. Possessing or exercising skill; expert. See Synonyms at proficient.2. Characterized by, exhibiting, or requiring skill. writer who happened to be a woman" (xii). The twenty pagelong section explaining the poem's formal qualities via anextremely close reading of syntax and imagery ("The Poem as a Workof Art") precludes whatever attempts at unlocking it that a readermight make, undermines the editors' previously-stated goal ofmediating as transparently as possible between the poem and its readers,and leaves them open to charges of protesting too much ("Its toneis complex but never chaotic or confused, and Moulsworth'sachievement -- as a poet and person -- seems all the more impressiveconsidering the constraints she faced as a writer who was also a woman.However, one needn't apologize for the poetic quality of her work:it stands as a worthy and accomplished text, firmly embedded in concretehistorical contexts which it nevertheless in many ways transcends"[33]). This constant apologizing and justifying may very well be simplyan automatic response to the backlash against feminist scholarship inrecent years, but it is nevertheless discouraging that the editors feelit must be done. The edition includes a survey of the poem in three followingchapters vis a vis women's historical contexts, the genre ofautobiography, and "feminist contexts." The editors'concern here is to demonstrate that Moulsworth's poem merits thetreatment they give it and that it conforms to our expectations for sucha text based Also called "character based," it refers to handling text and not graphics. Simple charts and illustrations may be drawn, but they are limited to a set of special characters that are strung together to make up lines and shades (see OEM font). on recent scholarship: "Anyone who did readMoulsworth's poem [they assume, probably correctly, that it was notwidely circulated] could not help but notice how clearly if implicitlythe work exemplifies (and in some cases subtly modifies) many of theideals championed by Renaissance advocates of worthy wives andmarriages" (55). The edition would benefit from fullerconsideration of Moulsworth's "modifications." Theeditors rightly acknowledge that, although she argues for women'seducation ("Two Vniuersities we haue of men / o thatt we had butone of women then/ O then thatt would in witt, and tongs surpasse / Allart of men thatt is, or euer was" [ll. 33-36]), Moulsworth alsoreveals elements of "patriarchal thinking" in her attitudestowards her father and three husbands (25). It would have beenpreferable, however, had they pointed out more often that the ideas ofwomen in the past don't necessarily fit our notions of consistency. These three chapters rely heavily on secondary sources. Thechapter on "Historical Contexts" is concerned chiefly withsecondary material on women's education and women's"roles" in relation to men: daughters, wives, widows. Theeditors consider what the poem "suggests" about her marriage(i.e., "that she was never really dominated or oppressed by any ofher mates" [54]) and speculate about Moulsworth's personality.Other than some historical records about her father, a clergyman, andabout her third husband, very little material on Moulsworth's lifeseems to remain; this regrettably makes materialist criticism moredifficult, but not impossible. The chapter on "The Poem as Autobiography" gives usefulsources on autobiography and biographical theory, and surveysautobiographies by seventeenth century men and women. Psychoanalyticreadings dominate both this chapter and the chapter on "FeministContexts;" although the latter chapter begins by distinguishingbetween American and French feminisms, its perspective is decidedlypsychological rather than material or political. An important editingproject, "My Name was Martha" is unfortunately too apologeticfor its subject and does not give it the honor of a rigorous criticalreading. More comfortable with challenging our assumptions aboutwomen's lives and their relation to social structures and power isJean Howard's The Stage and Social Struggle in Early ModernEngland. Howard provides a crucial corrective to Marxist readings thatforget gender and to new historicist readings that don't accountfor the workings of power in more than one direction simultaneously(18). She considers theatrical practice and material circumstances aswell as dramatic texts to explore "clusters of texts in which therepresentation of the theater or of theatricality is a central issue andfrom this

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