Synopses & Reviews
Juxtaposing the insights of feminism with those of marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, this unique collection creates new common ground for women's studies and Renaissance studies. An outstanding array of scholars—literary critics, art critics, and historians—reexamines the role of women and their relations with men during the Renaissance. In the process, the contributors enrich the emerging languages of and about women, gender, and sexual difference.
Throughout, the essays focus on the structures of Renaissance patriarchy that organized power relations both in the state and in the family. They explore the major conequences of patriarchy for women—their marginalization and lack of identity and power—and the ways in which individual women or groups of women broke, or in some cases deliberately circumvented, the rules that defined them as a secondary sex. Topics covered include representations of women in literature and art, the actual work done by women both inside and outside of the home, and the writings of women themselves. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies that "marginalized" historical and fictional women, these essays counter scholarly and critical traditions that continue to exhibit patriarchal biases.
About the Author
Margaret W. Ferguson is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Maureen Quilligan is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nancy J. Vickers is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California.
Table of Contents
Series Editor's Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson
Acknowledgments
The Contributors
Introduction by Margaret W. Ferguson, with Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers
Part 1: The Politics of Patriarchy: Theory and Practice
1. Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images
Jonathan Goldberg
2. The Absent Mother in King Lear
Coppélia Kahn
3. Prospero's Wife
Stephen Orgel
4. A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form
Louis A. Montrose
5. Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask
Richard Halpern
6. Dalila's House: Samson Agonistes and the Sexual Division of Labor
John Guillory
7. Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed
Peter Stallybrass
Part 2: The Rhetorics of Marginalization: Consequences of Patriarchy
8. The Other and The Same: The Image of the Hermaphrodite in Rabelais
Carla Freccero
9. Usurpation, Seduction, and the Problematics of the Proper: A "Deconstructive," "Feminist" Rereading of the Seductions of Richard and Anne in Shakespeare's Richard III
10. The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture
Elizabeth Cropper
11. Spinsters and Seamstresses: Women in Cloth and Clothing Production
Merry E. Wiesner
12. A Woman's Place Was in the Home: Women's Work in Renaissance Tuscany
Judith C. Brown
Part 3: The Works of Women: Some Exceptions to the Rule of Patriarchy
13. Catherine de' Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow
Sheila ffolliott
14. Feminism and the Huamnists: The Case for Sir Thomas Elyot's Defense of Good Women
Constance Jordan
15. Singing Unsung Heroines: Androgynous Discourse in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene
Lauren Silberman
16. Stella's Wit: Penelope Rich as Reader of Sidney's Sonnets
Clark Hulse
17. Gender vs. Sex Difference in Louise Labé's Grammar of Love
Françoise Rigolot
18. City Women and Their Audiences: Louise Labé and Veronica Franco
Ann Rosalind Jones
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index