title: Performing early modern women
title: 1610-1680
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Capecchi, Maria Louise
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2024
Subjects: critical race theory
early modern
performance
prophecy
women
Poetry

description: “Performing Early Modern Women: 1610-1680” examines how women writers and performers leveraged performance, publication, and genre conventions to challenge hegemonic systems of power and expand existing gender norms. These women’s careers span the period between 1610-1680, a period in English history where the unsteady relationship between monarchical and religious authority exploded in a violent series of civil conflicts. I argue that these women’s performances of authorial, gendered selves through the mediums of poetry, print, prophecy, and drama were a means to achieve agency from within patriarchal hegemonic systems and to create a public space for their bodies and voices. I explore how Aemelia Lanyer, Lady Eleanor Davies, Anna Trapnel, and Aphra Behn utilized authorship, which I define as the creation of the book object as well as the creation of the authorial self, and performance, a concept I extend beyond aesthetic performance to include praxis intended to make meaning and change ways of being in the world.
description: I argue that scholarly conceptions of performance in the early modern period must shift from gendered, religiously- and politically-sanctioned productions to an understanding of theatricality and performance that embraces the ways in which women have always participated in acts of embodied performance in the public sphere. I assert that these women engaged in purposeful, overlapping modes of performance that have gone largely unrecognized and understudied in early modern studies. From the performance of authorship (through writing and publication); to textual performance (the interaction between the author, text, and reader/listener); to utilizing the book as a performing object (as a performance property, through annotations in the author’s hand, as a metaphor); to prophetic performance (both embodied and reperformed through writing and publication); to conspicuous aesthetic performance on the viii Restoration stage; these women’s performances created, made culture, and reinvented women’s ways of being in the world.
description: Further, my interrogation of early modern scholarship itself reveals a tendency to at once assert a progressive feminist ideology for early modern women writers while also failing to recognize the ways in which scholars perpetuate sexist notions of these women by mining their works for autobiography and treating their bodies and perceived sexual experience as critical apparatuses for close reading. My project extends existing premodern feminist and critical race scholarship by using an intersectional framework to consider the works of women writers and performers alongside their male counterparts in early modern society. I place these case studies in chronological order to identify how from 1610-1680, women used the religious and monarchical upheavals and their resulting cracks within England’s social hierarchy to create opportunities for female authorship, performance, and publication. This project opens with Lanyer’s bid for patronage in her poetry book Salve Deus Rex Judaorum (1611), follows Davies’s (fl. 1625-1652) and Trapnel’s (fl. 1642-1660) prophetic careers, and concludes with Behn’s rise to prominence on the Restoration stage at the end of the 1670s.
description: These women’s writings and performances show how they exploited the fractured English social structure created by the reign of female sovereign Elizabeth I, the splintering of Christian doctrine by the Protestant Reformation, the overthrow of the monarchy during the Interregnum, and practical legal changes made by the Star Chamber’s dissolution. As a woman of the middling sort, Aemilia Lanyer used her book of poems to actively seek patronage in a time where it was most culturally appropriate for noblewomen to translate poetry or write religious verse, and the majority of women’s poetry was published through coterie circles. As an aristocratic woman, Lady Eleanor Davies broke the bonds of social decorum that placed even ix women of the peerage below men’s authority through her public performances and writings, which defied the King and Archbishop, as well as through the illicit publication of her prophecies. Anna Trapnel refused to marry and live a life of domestic service. She instead dedicated her life to public prophesying, as well as writing and publishing her prophetic works. This project culminates with the advent of women actors on the Restoration stage, where Aphra Behn, the first woman to support herself as a writer, used her wit to entertain, exploring subjects like sexual desire and politics that were deemed inappropriate for women to write about. While this group is composed of exceptional women, considering their writing, performance, and publication as an exceptionality minimizes the ways in which their works are part of a wider cultural phenomenon where early modern women utilized performance and authorship to gain status within the early modern social hierarchy in seventeenth-century England.