Margaret W. Ferguson

Moderation and Its Discontents: Recent Work on Renaissance Women

http://www.jstor.org Review: Moderation and Its Discontents: Recent Work on Renaissance Women Author(s): Margaret W. Ferguson Review by: Margaret W. Ferguson Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, Womens Agency: Empowerment and the Limits of Resistance (Summer, 1994), pp. 349-366 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178156 Accessed: 08-08-2015 22:02 UTC

Introduction: Feminism and Postmodernism; Or, The Way We Live Now

It may seem odd to echo Trollope in the introduction to a collection whose domain appears to be at the farthest remove from the vanished certainties of the world of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Yet, the boldness of Trollopes title can also serve to mark a strong boundary line for our own volume-in a quite simple sense, the awkward pairing formed by linking feminism and postmodernism is a description of our lives. The feminism practiced, theorized, and lived by many women (and men) today is set against, or arises within, the vicissitudes of a transforming postmodernity-as a set of practices, an arena of theory, and a mode of life. This may not be a comfortable dwelling place, but it does make up a world, a form of life (shifting the echoes to those notions of Heidegger or Wittgenstein which are apt here), with which feminism necessarily conjures. The animating idea of this issue is that postmodernism is, indeed, a name for the way we live now, and it needs to be taken account of, put into practice, and even contested within feminist discourses as a way of coming to terms with our lived situations. This is not to say that postmodernity is to be

Literacies in Early Modern England

Literacy, in the sixteenth century, was construed as multiple, variable, subject to redefinition by edict from above and by practices from below. The importance of regulating changes in skills and behaviors, in particular, increased reading of the Bible, was hotly debated as the Reformation got underway. In England, the Tudor state intervened erratically, first encouraging the reading of the English Bible for all, then forbidding its reading to all but a privileged few. In 1538, every parish church was required by a royal injunction to purchase an English Bible and place it in the choir.1 The Great Bible, published in 1540 with a new preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, stressed the ideal of an England peopled by ‘all manner’ of readers of Scripture in the vernacular: ‘Here may all manner of persons, men, women, young, old, learned, unlearned, rich, poor, priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants, and mean men, virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, and all manner of persons, of what estate or condition soever they be, may in this book learn all things’.2 Only three years later, however, in 1543, the selfvauntingly named Act for the Advancement of True Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary attempted to undo that opening of the floodgates by lowering them again to allow for only a trickle of elite readers to have access to Scripture. Reading the Bible in English was prohibited outright for women, artificers, journeymen, serving-men of the rank of yeoman and under, husbandmen and laborers; noblewomen and gentlewomen could read the Bible silently; only noblemen, gentlemen, and merchants were permitted to read it aloud to others.3 The contradictions of that early effort to police reading and writing, the contentitiousness of it signaled by backtracking on earlier initiatives, provide a window onto the topic of this special issue of Critical Survey and its theme of literacies in early modern England.

Feminism in Time

L ike the White Rabbit, those of us addressing you from the pages of this special issue on “feminism in time” are late, quite late, for what remains (arguably) a very important date—with a highly enigmatic figure whose continued existence is subject to debate in these and other (related) sets of pages written shortly before and shortly after the turn of the millennium. As a figure, feminism has multiple, changing, and disputed referents. The name in the dominant modern sense given by the Oxford English Dictionary —“advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of equality of the sexes)”—came rather belatedly into English: 1894–95, according to the OED’s entries for the substantive and adjectival forms of the word. This philological fact may surprise you (it did me), since many students of feminism, including one in this collection (Laura Mandell), date the birth of feminism in its modern form to the European Enlightenment. Yet more specifically, but also more partially, with reference to the coordinates of “national” language and geography as well as to those of linear time, feminism’s “birth” has been (and is here too) provisionally located in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, in particular her famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). “Birth” is in quotation marks because the contributors to the present issue recognize not only that the entity we are calling feminism has multiple incarnations but that even the historical variant best known to Anglophone cultural historians—the feminism of “equality,” or “liberal” feminism—is contested and knowable only in relation to other historical constructions, including the ideals of “liberté, égalité, frater-

The authorial ciphers of Aphra Behn

“Aphra Behn has always been an enigma,” Paul Salzman observes at the outset of his introduction to a new edition of her novella Oroonoko. The wild fluctuations in her literary reputation, tied to changing sexual mores, changing views of women writers, and changing moral and political judgments of the Restoration period itself, comprise one part of this enigma. Another (and related) part is comprised of the problem of her biography. This problem arises from the many shady moments in her life story, moments that have teased readers from her own time to ours to fill in and thus to “master” the gaps. The problem this poses for the critic has both theoretical and strategic implications: how much and what kind of attention should the serious student of her writing expend on the story (or rather, competing stories) of her life?

The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry.@@@The Lady Falkland: Her Life. By One of Her Daughters.

The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is the first original play by a woman to be published in England, and its author is the first English woman writer to be memorialized in a biography, which is included with this edition of the play. Mariam is a distinctive example of Renaissance drama that serves the desire of todays readers and scholars to know not merely how women were represented in the early modern period but also how they themselves perceived their own condition. With this textually emended and fully annotated edition, the play will now be accessible to all readers. The accompanying biography of Cary further enriches our knowledge of both domestic and religious conflicts in the seventeenth century.