17thc – Page 6 – Women's Studies Group 1558

Reminder: WSG seminar September 2021

The first seminar of the year takes place on Saturday, 25 September 2021.

This seminar will take place on Zoom. Please be aware, you must be a member of the WSG to gain access to the Zoom sessions. The links are distributed through our WSG mailing list 24-hours before the event. Becoming a member means you will be able to attend the Zoom and in-person seminars for the 2021-2022 season.

Valerie Schutte

Anachronistic Representations of Edward Underhill

Upon Queen Mary I’s accession on 19 July 1553, Edward Underhill, a Gentleman Pensioner under Henry VIII and Edward VI, was arrested for producing an anti-Catholic ballad, interrogated by the Privy Council, and served one month in prison. Yet he went on to serve as a Gentleman Pensioner during Wyatt’s Rebellion and at Mary’s wedding. In 1561, he wrote a memoir of his life beginning with this arrest. His memoir received much historical attention in the mid-nineteenth century, as it was reproduced several times in both extracts and its entirety. This culminated in two high-profile publications in the 1840s, one historical and one fictional. The first of which was William Harrison Ainswoth’s novel, The Tower of London (1840). In this novel, Ainsworth emphasizes Underhill’s zealous religious convictions. He is an outspoke supporter of Jane Grey, who eventually gets burnt at the stake on Tower Green for his beliefs. Five years later, the Strickland sisters mention Underhill in their Lives of the Queens of England.

In this presentation, I will offer a textual transmission of Underhill’s memoir from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, as well as analyze the memoir for Underhill’s service to the crown. I will focus my time on the anachronisms employed by Ainsworth in his presentation of Underhill. Ainsworth describes Underhill as an “enthusiast,” which would have held distinct meaning for his Victorian audience, suggesting an extravagance applied to dissenting religion. Ainsworth carefully crafted Underhill’s character through religious anachronism to show his disapproval of religious fanaticism, for both Protestant extremism, as well as Mary’s Catholicism. In Ainsworth’s depiction, Underhill is the first victim of religious persecution in Mary’s reign and is a symbol of all that was to come.

Hampton Court Conference 1604

First, The Church of England since the abolishing of Popery hath ever held and taught, and so doth hold and teach still, That the Sign of the Cross used in Baptism, is no Part of the Substance of that Sacrament: For when the Minister dipping the Infant in Water, or laying Water upon the Face of it (as the manner also is) hath pronounced these Words, I baptize thee in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, the Infant is fully and perfectly Baptized: So as the Sign of the Cross being afterwards used, doth neither add any thing to the Vertue or Perfection of Baptism, nor being omitted, doth detract any thing from the Effect and Substance of it.

Secondly, It is apparent in the Communion Book, that the Infant Baptized is by Vertue of Baptism, before it be signed with the Sign of the Cross, received into the Congregation of Christ’s Flock as a perfect Member thereof, and not by any Power ascribed unto the Sign of the Cross. So that for the very remembrance of the Cross, which is very precious to all them that rightly believe in Jesu Christ, and in the other respects mentioned, the Church of England hath retained still the Sign of it in Baptism: following therein the Primitive and Apostolical Churches, and accounting it a lawful outward Ceremony and honourable Badge, whereby the Infant is dedicated to the Service of him that died upon the Cross, as by the words used in the Book of Common Prayer it may appear.

Lastly, The use of the Sign of the Cross in Baptism, being thus purged from all Popish Superstition and Error, and reduced in the Church of England to the primary Institution of it, upon those true Rules of Doctrine concerning things indifferent, which are consonant to the Word of God, and the Judgments of all the ancient Fathers: We hold it the part of every private Man, both Minister and other, reverently to retain the true use of it prescribed by publick Authority, considering that things of themselves indifferent, do in some sort alter their Natures, when they are either commanded or forbidden by a lawful Magistrate; and may not be omitted at every Man’s pleasure contrary to the Law, when they be commanded, nor used when they are prohibited.

Helen Leighton-Rose

Women’s Subversion of the Scottish Church Courts 1707-1757

My quantitative and qualitative analysis of eighteenth century Scottish Kirk Sessions had shed light on Scottish women’s subversive and consistent challenges to patriarchal control. Numerous women argued against the judgement of these sessions and petitioned the Presbytery courts. The paper will highlight some illuminating examples of women’s subversion including the subversion of the Scottish Kirk by Isabel Clinckscales who irregularly married Thomas Lyon, unknown to her to be a thrice bigamist. Over eighteen months Isabel was called before the Kirk Sessions and ordered to perform penance as an adulteress which she consistently refused. She subverted the kirk authority to such a degree she was placed under the penalty of lesser excommunication. There is no record of Thomas Lyon receiving any rebuke. On the 25th January 1722 Elders of Duns Kirk deem

‘..after all the serious dealings with Isabel Clinkscales she still persisted in her obstinacie, he therefor this day according to the recommendation did lay the said Isabel Clinkscales under the sentence of the Lesser excommunication’.

My paper will raise the profile of the richness of archival material for Scottish border towns.

Matthew Reznicek

Healing The Nation: Women, Medicine, and the Romantic National Tale

The National Tale, a literary attempt to understand and reconcile the 1800 Act of Union, was dominated by early nineteenth-century women writers, including Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Germaine deStaël; using gendered embodiments of various national identities, the National Tale imagined socio-political union through the union of individuals. For roughly the past thirty years, scholars the Romantic period have understood the National Tale in terms of marriage, whether a shotgun marriage, an arranged marriage, or a forced marriage. What this focus on marriage has overlooked is the repeated pattern in which National Tales alsodepend upon an act of healing before the marriage can take place. Surprisingly, this medical aspect of the National Tale and its narrative of social cohesion has been ignored and unrecognized. By exploring the role of illness and healing in the National Tale, the medical metaphors not only help diagnose and mark as different the foreign body, but the act of healing fundamentally restores the newly formed body politic to its new and healthy condition. This analysis reveals a pattern in which women perform the medical care that heals these diseased populations, allowing them to achieve full membership in the social body. Despite the long-eighteenth-century belief that men and medicine were responsible for national well-being, the National Tales of Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson undermine this medical and political narrative by having a diseased or unwell male body stand in for the nation and a female physician or healer work to heal and restore the national body to health. Thus, the medical role of women in the National Tale reveals the interconnections between illness, healing, and the narrative form of the National Tale. To provide a small iteration of this pattern, I will attend to the moments of medical anxiety and fever in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809), and briefly Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) to render visible the political and social role that healing women play in the National Tale.

Norena Shopland

Women Dressed as Men

Much of women’s history has been dominated by exclusion – but where exclusion exists there will always be those who challenge that state. A History of Women in Men’s Clothes sets out to show how women utilised clothes banned to them to escape domestic violence; to earn money when the man had died or left the family and women’s wages were not enough to live on; to find a man who had deserted them; to avoid being sexually accosted when travelling; so those we would today recognise as lesbian and trans could live freely; and many more.

During the late 18th-early 19th centuries so many women had become female sailors and soldiers that newspapers were complaining there would be no room for men. While books exist on both groups they are placed in an ‘other’ category of sexual orientation and/or gender identity when in truth it was common among all women. Similarly, in the theatre, actresses were being forced to sign contracts that they would appear ‘in male attire’ as managers sought to exploit this highly lucrative market. Leaving the odd situation of men forcing women to appear as men for the heterosexual male gaze.

Research for the book realised around 4,000 worldwide articles, most of them unpublished outside their original source and only 10% was used for the book. As this research was conducted in English and stopped when enough material had been gathered it can be imagined how much more there is to discover. But one thing is clear, thousands upon thousands of women across the world refused to be constricted by what clothes they were told they could wear – and women’s history now needs to recognise this.

For further information, see our seminars page. To join the WSG, see our membership page.

Reminder: WSG seminar September 2021

The first seminar of the year takes place on Saturday, 25 September 2021.

Speakers:

Valerie Schutte. Anachronistic Representations of Edward Underhill

Helen Leighton-Rose. Women’s Subversion of the Scottish Church Courts 1707-1757

Matthew Reznicek. Healing The Nation: Women, Medicine, and the Romantic National Tale

Norena Shopland. Women Dressed as Men

For further information, see our seminars page. To join the WSG, see our membership page.

Reminder: WSG seminar March 2021

The sixth seminar of the year takes place on Saturday, 1pm (GMT), 20 March 2021.

This meeting will be delivered on Zoom. All meetings will start promptly at 1pm GMT (with arrivals from 12.30 onward to allow for necessary preparations and administration). We aim to finish by 3.30pm. If you would like to attend, please make sure your membership is up-to-date to receive the Zoom link.

March 20, 2021
Cheryll Duncan: ‘Much want of judgment’?: new evidence concerning the singer Jane Barbier.

The contralto Jane Barbier enjoyed a long and illustrious career on the London stage, performing in Italian and English operas, masques, pantomimes and afterpieces at leading theatres between 1711 and 1740. Her personal life was subject to some colourful contemporary comment, particularly in response to her reported elopement in 1717. This paper presents a number of archival discoveries which significantly expand Barbier’s known biography; these include new information about her family, the man with whom she eloped, her financial activity and details of the contract for her final season at Covent Garden. The findings prompt a reassessment of Barbier’s reputation and allow a more nuanced portrait of the singer to emerge.

Maria Clara Pivate Biajoli: Understanding Current Readers’ Reception of Jane Austen through Fan Fiction.

Over the last two decades, mostly due to the “Austenmania” encouraged by several TV and movie adaptations of Jane Austen’s work during the 1990s, an overwhelming amount of sequels, variations, and modern retellings have been produced by fans who were not satisfied with the six completed novels Austen has left us. They constantly bring their favorite characters back to life by giving them new stories, new settings, new problems to solve, but never missing the chance to relive all the emotions created by their happy ending. Since Pride and Prejudice is, today, Austen’s most popular novel, it should be no surprise that it is also the one with the greatest number of sequels and variations. Fans have taken Elizabeth and Darcy from adventures with pirates to a shelter for the homeless in Canada, always making sure that their love would conquer it all.

Although the happy ending is indeed the destiny of all of Austen’s heroines, it is difficult to say for sure that it was the main purpose of their journey in the novels. On the contrary, many critics have argued that there are complex issues present in Austen’s text that we risk disregarding when we look only at the love story. Although Austen has probably never been more popular than today (a “global brand”, according to Janet Todd), this phenomenon was built on a very specific image of the author – the writer of romantic and naïve novels. Since the love story is exactly what current fan fiction focuses on, it can be said that they are both part of the cause and the consequence of the loss of other “Austens” in the public’s mind, such as her social criticism and acute perception of gender roles in her society.

This paper will address then the paradoxical question of how current fan fiction helps to promote Austen’s long-term popularity and, at the same time, her death. By presenting examples from sequels, variations, and modern adaptations, I will explore how the analysis of fan fiction can further our understanding of the current reception of Austen’s work. My premise is that fan-authors rewrite the novels according to their interpretation of the story, highlighting aspects they like, seeking repetition of the pleasures of the first reading, and changing or excluding aspects they didn’t like. In this sense, fan fiction could be a strategic source of information to answer the famous question “Why Austen”.

Miriam al Jamil: The Grand Duchess of Tuscany’s Birth Days: Weary and Waiting at the Florentine Court.

The late eighteenth-century Court of Leopold II, Arch Duke of Tuscany does not receive much scholarly attention in its own right. Leopold’s wife Maria Luisa attracts even less interest. Described as gentle and kind, she fades into the background of the wider political picture, as she quietly fulfils her duty and produces children destined for strategic dynastic Hapsburg marriages.

However, archival research into the State Papers records between Whitehall and Sir Horace Mann, British Resident in Florence, has enabled an unanticipated focus on Maria Luisa’s life through Mann’s regular reports and observations on the Ducal Court. His presence there for the frequent birth days of Maria Luisa’s children, together with details of her health and birthing practices offer insights which are unavailable elsewhere. His comments also counter the assumption that Maria Luisa did not participate in Court functions and ceremony.

This paper both charts the Ducal couple’s lives together and celebrates the potential for archival material to contribute to a range of hitherto untapped historical inquiry.

Reminder: WSG seminar February 2021

The fifth seminar of the year takes place on Saturday, 1pm (GMT), 20 February 2021.

February 20, 2021
Sarah Ailwood: ‘In justice to myself’: Legal and Textual Subjectivities in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Memoirs.

Costas Douzinas identifies the modern legal subject as both subjectum – the subject of the law – and subjectus – or subject to the law: simultaneously participating in law’s authorial creation, and obedient to its command.^[1] Historically, however, women have occupied a status that is more subjectus than subjectum: as placed under the law’s authority with few opportunities to participate in its creation or authorisation. In this paper, I explore how, from the mid-eighteenth century, women began to contest their status as subjectus to the law through the writing, publication and dissemination of memoirs that interrogated their experience of the substance and process of law. Although women’s memoirs addressing the law and justice questions by the so-called ‘scandalous memoirists’, actresses and celebrities have received some scholarly attention, memoirs by comparatively little-known women that explicitly targeted law have been overlooked. Yet these memoirs offer a rich opportunity to explore relationships between gender and legal and textual subjectivities in the context of burgeoning print culture in eighteenth-century England.

From mid-century, women appropriated the newly emerging genre of the published memoir to publicise their experience of the law and justice system, to contest the subjectivity constructed of them and authorised as ‘fact’ by legal process, and to counter the representation of this subjectivity within the newspaper and periodical press. The published memoir offered women an opportunity to discursively construct an alternative self framed through reference to legal ‘norms’ as well as the emerging conventions of the memoirs genre. In this paper I will particularly focus on two memoirs that reveal women’s discursive negotiation of legal and textual subjectivities: The True State of the Case of Sarah Rippon (1756), by Sarah Rippon, a middle-class widow who published her memoir after a protracted series of law suits triggered by her husband’s death, to contest both the injustice she experienced through the court system and her representation as a litigant within wider public culture; and The Memoirs of Mrs Anne Bailey (1771), in which a woman living on the social margin details the violence inflicted upon her by high-profile men and her experiences of summary justice and the bridewell. If, as is widely argued, legal subjects are produced and imagined through language and law, memoirs by these and later eighteenth-century women reveal the centrality of the published memoir genre not only to women’s construction of textual subjectivity, but also to their conceptualisation of legal subjectivity and its relationship to power.

^[1] Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century (Hart Publishing 2000) 216–22.

Daisy Winter: “I who am but dust”: mortal fear in Elizabeth Delaval’s ‘Memoirs and Meditations’.

Known as a memoirist and Jacobite, Lady Elizabeth Delaval (1648? -1717) left a manuscript volume of memoirs and meditations that provide a fascinating insight into the often-unhappy life of a devout seventeenth-century gentlewoman. Biographies of Elizabeth have largely focused upon her failed romances and later, loveless marriage. While these real-life events certainly contributed to her unhappiness and induced her to write, this paper will instead consider Elizabeth’s expressions of anxiety in relation to a persistent, psychological trigger: her fear of the passage (and therefore, loss) of time. In the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries, the mode of recording time increasingly “called attention away from endpoints and invested it in middles” (Stuart Sherman, Telling Time, 1996). ‘Memoirs’ responds to this trend for recounting the “middle” of one’s life, and Elizabeth records daily events and actions in detail. However, her fixation with time goes beyond the daily – thanatophobic paranoia often overwhelms her writing. Trying to make sense of her usage of time is, for Elizabeth, as much a reflection of her anxiety over her mortal “endpoint” as an urge to record. In a close reading of two key moments of Elizabeth’s manuscript, the chronophobic poem ‘Upon the singing of a lark’, and a morbid account of parasitic infection, this paper will explore the ways in which Elizabeth’s writing confronts the ephemerality of life and the inevitability of her own mortality.

Valentina Aparicio: Maria Graham’s Journal of a residence in Chile (1824): a transnational community of women.

Maria Graham became a widow in 1822, on her way to Valparaiso as the wife of the captain of HMS Doris. When arriving at Valparaiso, Graham decided to stay in Chile for a year and live by herself in the port in a rented cottage. She spent her time writing her Journal, as she travelled central regions of the newly independent country. In the ‘Preface’ of the journal, she expressed that she hoped to fill a gap in knowledge with her publication. She considered most of the accounts on Chile to be tainted by political interests. She, on the other hand, wished to show that ‘there is so much of good in that country, so much in the character of the people and the excellence of the soil and climate’ (iv). As a widow, British traveller, artist, and female intellectual, Graham found herself able to socialise with people of different social stations, providing a variety of very complete accounts of Chilean life. Her positive depictions of people in Chile cover from countryside workers to the half-Irish president of the country, Bernardo O’Higgins. Graham’s accounts are particularly interesting regarding other women, their occupations, and education. My paper will focus particularly on this subject. Graham’s Journal provides several sympathetic descriptions of the life of women in the early republic of Chile – a subject ignored by male writers of the period, both European and South American. Graham’s Journal sheds light on the lives of women from creole aristocracy, creole lower classes, and women of indigenous backgrounds. While an inequality of power is inevitably present in these accounts, Graham’s work creates a remarkable sense of a community of women with her Chilean peers – including herself, the female pottery-makers of Pomaire, the high-society creole women of Santiago, the indigenous wife of the cacique of Yupeo, amongst many others. I will argue that the rich accounts of Chilean women found in Graham’s work provide a glimpse into an early nineteenth-century sense of female solidarity and understanding that goes beyond imperial divisions, as Graham places both herself and her peers in one shared space of female-centred dialogue.

For further information including abstracts, see our seminars page. To join the WSG, see our membership page.

Reminder: WSG seminar January 2021

The fourth seminar of the year takes place on Saturday, 1pm (GMT), 23 January 2021.

January 23, 2021
Megan Shaw: Looking towards a cultural history of Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham (1603-1649).

This paper will explore how Katherine Villiers (neé Manners, 1603 – 1649), Duchess of Buckingham harnessed portraiture – in miniature and in large – and epistolary exchange as devices for affection, commemoration and self-preservation at the Stuart court. Katherine was the wife of George Villiers, 1^st Duke of Buckingham (1592 – 1628), the royal favourite to both James VI & I and Charles I of England. This paper is contextualised through painted portraits and by analysing the highly emotive, and often distressing, letters which the duchess wrote to her “dear heart” throughout their marriage. The Duke of Buckingham was assassinated in September 1628 which prompted a visual display of grief and a reassertion of loyalty in Katherine’s mourning portraits painted by Anthony van Dyck and Henri Beaubrun. These poignant portraits featured her husbands’ likeness in miniature. Connections will be drawn between the functions of the portrait miniature as devotional objects which could be privately concealed, displayed or activated in public at the will of their owner or wearer. I argue that their presence in the duchess’ mourning portraits conveyed a public message of her loss, and furthermore reinforced the political leverage of remembrance and the renegotiations – and even performance – of power that commemoration offered.

Gillian Beattie-Smith: Catherine Helen Spence: a consideration of her feminist and transnational agency.

Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910), born in Melrose, Scotland, emigrated to Australia as a girl with her family. Spence was a novelist, journalist, a leader in the international suffragist movement, a Georgist, and a proponent of proportional representation. She was a public intellectual, who addressed audiences across Australia, America and Britain, and was a widely-respected social reformer. Her life is commemorated in a statue, Australian currency, and place names, and memorialised in her extensive body of writing.

Spence’s novels have been compared with those of Eliot and Gaskell, and positioned in the development of European realist fiction, and the international tradition of feminist writing. The body of literary critique and biographical record has grown on Spence in recent years, enabling alternative discourses of settler women writers as cultural agents in Australian foundational history.

This paper reflects on Spence’s feminist and transnational agency in her life and work.

Kate Stephenson: Lawyers, Débardeuses and Pages; Women Masquerading as Men.

Masquerades became popular in Britain in the early-18th century, finding a home at theatres as well as pleasure gardens such as Ranelagh and Vauxhall. These provided the opportunity for attendees to dress up in a huge variety of creative costumes and this tradition continued into the 19th century with fancy dress balls. Contemporary reports suggest that a not insignificant number of women used these events to subvert established gender norms and dress as men. This led to contemporary anxieties regarding the transgression of moral and social boundaries and the suggestion that cross-dressing, as well as fancy dress events more generally, could lead to homosexuality, sexual liaisons (and consequently pregnancy and venereal disease) and the breakdown of established social structures. This work-in-progress paper will examine women’s costume choices at masquerades and masked balls in the long 18th century with a focus on cross-dressing, investigating what kinds of women cross-dressed, what costumes they chose and how their choices changed over time.

For further information including abstracts, see our seminars page. To join the WSG, see our membership page.