ENGLISH 647: STUDIES IN 17th-CENTURY LITERATURE

Revolutionary Subjects: Gender, Nation, and the English Civil War

Section B1: T 1000-1250

The political, religious, and military conflicts of the English Civil War both enabled and forced reimaginings of who and what "England" was. Very often, these reimaginings depended on ideologies heavily marked by gender. Republicans, for instance, argued for a virile state cleansed of the effeminzing effects of the King and his court. Puritans who saw England as the chosen godly nation that would lead the rest of the world into the Millennium began their "thorough reformation" with the a gendered division of labour in the household: the father leading family prayer while the mother instructed children and servants in the basic principles of religion.

The period of crisis also prompted at least some women to reimagine their own subjection to authority: whether the authority of the king, of Parliament and the army, of husbands and fathers, of God and the Bible. This course will chart these reimaginings, paying particular attention to the categories of gender and nation, through a series of representative texts from the 1640s and 1650s - the decades of war and of republican Interregnum, respectively. These two decades began with a dramatic increase in women's printed output (about tenfold) and together represent the period of greatest productivity in print for seventeenth-century women. Women also began to publish a greater generic range of writing. We will read women's petitions to Parliament, political visions and prophecies of radical sectarians like Anna Trapnel and Mary Cary, poetical commentaries like Anne Bradstreet's "Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the late troubles," and women's historiographical and autobiographical writings on war and its aftermath. We will read these diverse women's texts against each other, but also against texts by male prophets, sectarians, republicans, and royalists and against contemporary as well as more recent historians' accounts of the events of the Civil War. Our aim will be to reconstruct as full and complex an account as we can of the ways in which revisions of gender supported (or did not support) revolutionary accounts of nation and citizenship (and vice versa).

READINGS:

• Peter Davidson, Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish verse, 1625-1660 (Oxford University Press, 1998).
• Stevie Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution, 1640-1660 (Women's Press, 1998).
• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Penguin, 1975).
• Hilary Hinds, God's Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester University Press, 1996).
• -----. "Writing and Reaction: Seventeenth-Century Sectarian Englishwomen's Struggle for Authorship" (Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities Occasional Papers, University of Birmingham, 1993).
• Roger Hudson ed., The Grand Quarrel: Women's Memoirs of the English Civil War (Sutton, 2000).
• Ann Hughes, "Women, Men and Politics in the English Civil War," (Keele University Inaugural Lecture, 1997).
• D. E. Kennedy, The English Revolution, 1642-49 (Palgrave, 2000).
• Alison Plowden, Women All On Fire: The Women of the English Civil War (Sutton, 1998).
• Nigel Smith, Literature & Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale University Press, 1994).
• Xerox Packet.

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