History Commons^™

Teaching Premodern Women And Gender, Lucy C. Barnhouse

Quidditas

In her influential History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Judith Bennett asked “Who’s afraid of the distant past?” Fifteen years after this book’s publication, the question remains relevant. Teaching the history of women and gender in the premodern world presents linked pedagogical challenges. Most students enter college with little to no background in premodern history. Many find premodern primary sources, when taught with the same pedagogical scaffolding as modern sources, inaccessible due to real or perceived strangeness. These challenges can be compounded by the challenges of teaching women’s and/or gender history. This roundtable addresses strategies for productive …

Pain For Pen: Gaspara Stampa's Stile Novo, Amy R. Insalaco

Quidditas

The Italian critic and scholar, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) dismisses Gaspara Stampa's Rime (1553) thus:

She was a woman; And usually a woman, when she is not given to ape men, uses poetry and submits it to her affections because she loves her lover or her own children more than poetry. The lazy practice of women is revealed in their scanty theoretical and contemplative power.

For him, Stampa’s poetry is somehow inferior to her male counterpart’s poetry because it lacks “theoretical and contemplative power.” This essay will analyze aspects of Stampa’s poetry which disprove this claim.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner: Anne Southwell, Metaphysical Poet, Hugh Wilson

Quidditas

T.S. Eliot has remarked that "[n]ot only is [it] extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but [it is] difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses." Although the terminology was initially ad hoc, post hoc, and somewhat hostile, the adjective has been transvalued and it “stuck.” But ever since John Dryden accused John Donne of affecting “the metaphysics,” and “perplexing the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy,” and long before Samuel Johnson wrote that the metaphysical poets were “men of learning,” there has been a tacit assumption that women did not …

Review Essay: Susanne Woods. Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, Nancy Gutierrez

Quidditas

Susanne Woods. Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xvi + 198 pp.

1997 Allen D. Breck Award Winner: A Woman's Life As Ancillary Text: The Printed Texts Of The Biography Of Elizabeth Tanfield Caary, Jesse G. Swan

Quidditas

As the first woman to write and publish an original play in English, Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland, has become the subject of increased attention and appreciation over the last few decades. Since a major reason for studying Cary has been the feminist motivation to document women's contributions to the English language and its literature and culture, biographically informed criticism has naturally drawn much attention. With Cary, biographically informed criticism has been fostered by the existence of the Life of Cary, a biography written within a couple of decades of her death primarily by one of her four conventual daughters, …

Review Essay: The Other Voice In Early Modern Europe, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius. Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. Trans. and ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996. xxxii + 109 pp. $33.00.

Cereta, Laura. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. Transcribed, trans. and ed. Diana Robin. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997. xxvii + 216 pp. $45.00/$19.95.

Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo). The Worth of Women. Wherein is Clearly Revealed their Nobility and their Superiority to Men. Trans. and ed. Virginia Cox. The Other Voice in …

Review Essay: Dorothea Kehler And Susan Baker, In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives On Renaissance Drama, James Fitzmaurice

Quidditas

Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker, In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, Scarecrow Press, 1991, vi, 345 pp., biblio., index, $37.50.

Marginality As Women's Freedom: The Case Of Floripe, Marian Rothstein

Quidditas

When Jean Bagnyon chose to rewrite Fierabras for his contemporaries at the dawn of the printed book, strong fictional women who participated in their own name in the world, women not limited to domestic, advisory, or intercessory functions, were rare. Their scarcity did not end then. The interest of what follows must lie, at least in part, beyond Bagnyon's text and beyond Floripe herself. The purpose of subjecting the case of Floripe (sister of Fierabras) to close reading is in part to understand how this example of an active woman functions. My scrutiny of this text is also intended to …

Review Essay: Mary Erler And Maryanne Kowaleski, Eds., Women And Power In The Middle Ages, Joan M. West

Quidditas

Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages, University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Women And Marriage In The Medieval Spanish Epic, Marjorie Ratcliffe

Quidditas

Medieval Spanish literature offers only three extant epic texts, Roncesvalles, the Cantar de Mio Cid and the Mocedades de Rodrigo. Knowledge of the Spanish heroic genre has been further extended by considering the thirteenth-century Poema de Fernán González, a reworking of a much earlier poem, as well as the similarly re-elaborated fragments of the stories of Rodrigo, the last Visigothic monarch; of Bernardo del Carpio; of the seven sons of Salas; of the traitorous countess; of prince García and the Cantar de Sancho Il y el cerco de Zamora. These texts will all be considered in …

Gawain's "Anti-Feminism" Reconsidered, S. L. Clark, Julian N. Wasserman

Quidditas

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the protagonist survives the return blow for which he had contracted with the Green Knight but finds to his dismay that he has unwittingly failed a more significant test. As the awareness comes to Gawain that the Green Knight and his Yuletide host share one identity, that it was upon Bercilak's instructions that his wife attempted to seduce him, and that Morgan la Fée had, in effect, master-minded the whole plan, Gawain reacts with bursts of anger which, wen analyzed, speak not only to the Pearl-Poet's skill at characterization but also …