Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance

Elizabeth Hodgson

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139942379

Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance anatomizes the era's powerful but troubling links between the forgettable dead and the living mourners who are implicated in the same oblivion. Four major women writers from 1570 to 1670 construct these difficult bonds between the spectral dead and the liminal mourner. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, reinvents the controversial substitutions of aristocratic funerals. New Protestant ideologies of the sainted dead connect devotional mourning and patronage in Aemelia Lanyer's writing. Mary Wroth's verse enacts a uniquely exalted, imaginative melancholy in which Jacobean subjects dissolve into their mourning artifacts. Among the precarious political mourners of the later half of the period, Katherine Philips's lyric verse plays the shell game of private grief. Forgetting, being forgotten, and being dead are risks that the dead and the living ironically share in these central texts by the English Renaissance's most illustrious women writers.

'… notable for the sensitivity of its close readings …'

Scott Wayland Source: Notes and Queries

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Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance

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Contents

Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance - Half title page
pp i-ii

Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance - Title page
pp iii-iii

Copyright page
pp iv-iv

Dedication
pp v-vi

Contents
pp vii-vii

List of illustrations
pp viii-viii

Acknowledgments
pp ix-x

Introduction
pp 1-21

Chapter 1 - Inheriting loss: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
pp 22-49

Chapter 2 - The golden chain: Aemelia Lanyer
pp 50-71

Chapter 3 - “This testament of me”: Mary Wroth’s melancholic sonnets
pp 72-99

Chapter 4 - “In every breast her monument”: Katherine Philips
pp 100-127

Postlude
pp 128-142

Notes
pp 143-179

Bibliography
pp 180-194

Index
pp 195-196

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Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance

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