Mother’s Advice Books

Mother’s Advice Books
Author: Susan C. Staub
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351964429

A form of courtesy literature, Mother's Advice Books were texts written by mothers to instruct their children in religious, educational, and occasionally wordly matters. The three texts included in this volume, Elizabeth Richardson's A Ladies Legacie to her Davghters, Susanna Bell's The Legacy of a Dying Mother To Her Mourning Children, and the unattributed The Mothers Blessing, offer interesting alternatives to the many published male views of the family from the period. Indeed, this volume features an appendix with two much shorter portions of predominantly male-authored texts: Mary Pennyman's letter to her children, published as part of John Pennyman's Instruction to his Children, and Elizabeth Walker's 'For my Dear Children, Mrs.Margaret Walker and Elizabeth Walker', included in Anthony Walker's The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker. The fact that these women were mothers gave them an authority to write that other women were not easily granted, and it is clear that many of these works were written with publication in mind. In addition to giving women public status as authors, these books also enabled them to enter political and religious debates under the guise of offering advice to their children. The Mother's Advice Book is, then, an intriguing genre that simultaneously violates and yet replicates early modern patriarchy.

Elinor James

Elinor James
Author: Paula McDowell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-03-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351941216

This volume makes available for the first time the complete surviving works of the London printer-author Elinor James (c.1645-1719). Uniquely in the history of early modern women, James wrote, printed and distributed more than ninety pamphlets and broadsides addressing political, religious and commercial concerns. Written over a period of 35 years, her works provide us with a running commentary on the major national events of a tumultuous period such as the Revolution of 1688, the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, and the Jacobite uprisings in 1715-16. During her lifetime, England saw the succession of six different monarchs. James petitioned all of them and claimed to have obtained audiences with three. In 1689 she was gaoled in Newgate prison, accused of disseminating seditious material condemning William III for accepting the English crown. James's texts address a staggeringly broad range of concerns. She petitioned Parliament concerning legislation affecting the printing trades and petitioned fellow printers concerning labour relations in London printing houses. She petitioned City authorities on issues such as the enforcement of bylaws or who to vote for in City and parliamentary elections. It is hoped that by making available all of James's known works, this volume will inspire the collective efforts of scholars from many different disciplines to decipher her references to contemporary events, issues and persons, as well as prompting further discoveries of as yet unidentified works.

Amey Hayward

Amey Hayward
Author: Amey Hayward
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2003
Genre: Christian life
ISBN: 9780754630968

The Females Legacy is the only surviving work of Amey Howard about whom very little is known. While rarely political or even topical, The Females Legacy generally conforms to much of the same militantly Protestant ideology of the sort Harris spent his life advocating. The volume contains twenty-six devotional poems nearly all of which feature a male speaker. Some are 'meditations' in which the speaker considers the import of an Old or New Testament narrative. Others are 'dialogues' between speakers who grapple with a sudden realisation of their own sinful natures and a biblical figure who introduces them to Christ's redemptive majesty. Interspersed amongst these two kinds of verse are a few other poems which directly address women or deploy them as protagonists. This edition reproduces the sole surviving copy of The Females Legacy held in the British Library.

Miscellaneous Short Poetry, 1641–1700

Miscellaneous Short Poetry, 1641–1700
Author: Robert C. Evans
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351917242

This volume reproduces twenty short texts written by named and unnamed women in the years 1641-1700. These texts, selected and introduced by various hands, are grouped in thematic clusters for the reader's ease - poetry on religion, on politics, on society, on domestic/social affairs and on mourning. The poems are arranged chronologically within each cluster. The volume closes with Anne Wentworth's pamphlet England's Spiritual Pill.

Writings on Medicine

Writings on Medicine
Author: Lisa Forman Cody
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 632
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351870734

The four works in this volume are the only known exclusively medical texts written by women during the Restoration. Their importance is denoted by their dramatic challenge to the generalisations once made about medical practice and female healers in this period. Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book was the first and only midwifery manual to be printed in English before 1700, and continued to be influential into the early eighteenth century. The principal focus of Elizabeth Cellier's To Dr.--- (1688) is the attempt to legitimate the notion of a female corporation of midwives through historical precedent. To Dr.--- was in fact borne out of a previously unpublished effort, 'A Scheme for the Foundation of a Royal Hospital', sent to James II in 1687. In the document, Cellier outlined a specific scheme for training female midwives and supporting poor, pregnant women and abandoned children. Mary Trye began practising 'chymical physic' at her father's side in London in 1663. Her only known work, Medicatrix, was published in 1675. Trye claimed female medical authorship to be unique, in that women observed nature truly and administered genuine medical solutions to the sick. The writings of Sharp, Cellier and Trye have helped to overturn historians' assumptions about a woman's role in medicine and healing. These texts reveal their female authors to be as learned in the humanities and sciences as they were in medical matters.

Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England

Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England
Author: Randy Robertson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2015-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271036559

Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.” This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of this “censorship contest” and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.

Print Culture and the Early Quakers

Print Culture and the Early Quakers
Author: Kate Peters
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2005-02-24
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780521770903

The early Quaker movement was remarkable for its prolific use of the printing press. Carefully orchestrated by a handful of men and women who were the movement's leaders, printed tracts were an integral feature of the rapid spread of Quaker ideas in the 1650s. Drawing on very rich documentary evidence, this book examines how and why Quakers were able to make such effective use of print. As a crucial element in an extensive proselytising campaign, printed tracts enabled the emergence of the Quaker movement as a uniform, national phenomenon. The book explores the impressive organization underpinning Quaker pamphleteering and argues that the early movement should not be dismissed as a disillusioned spiritual remnant of the English Revolution, but was rather a purposeful campaign which sought, and achieved, effective dialogue with both the body politic and society at large.

Eleanor Davies, Writings 1641–1646

Eleanor Davies, Writings 1641–1646
Author: Teresa Feroli
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 683
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351941291

In 1625 Lady Eleanor Davies' life took a dramatic turn when, by her account in 1641, a "Heavenly voice" told her "There is Ninteene yeares and a halfe to the day of Judgement, and you as the meek Virgin". That same year she published her first treatise, A Warning to the Dragon, initiating her controversial career as a writer of prophetic tracts. Between 1641 and 1652 she would produce some 66 of them, using the Bible to gauge the cosmic significance of events, great and small, taking place in her nation and in her personal life. They focus on a complex of personal and political events that Lady Eleanor thought indicated the fast approach of the "last days" foretold by the biblical prophets Daniel and John of Patmos. A complement to Teresa Feroli's facsimile edition of Eleanor Davies' pre-1640 texts (Ashgate, 2000), this pair of volumes reproduces 60 texts from the corpus of 66 printed between 1641 and 1652.

Anna Hume

Anna Hume
Author: Thomas P. Roche Jr.
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN: 9780754631064

Life Writings I

Life Writings I
Author: Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351922211

Early modern men and women represented their lives very differently from twentieth-century autobiographers, sharing none of the current preoccupation with individuality and the unique self. The writers represented in this two-volume collection sought connections between particular events in their lives and the larger pattern of Christian salvation. The texts reproduced here are united in the way they interconnect personal experiences and feelings with scriptural passages in an attempt to understand daily life in spiritual terms. Almost all the women whose works appear in these volumes would have been considered religious radicals by their contemporaries. Living through the turbulent times of the English Revolution (1642-1660) it is unsurprising that their life writings are marked by a sense of persecution. Many of them spent time in prison: Katherine Evans, Sarah Cheevers and Barbara Blaugdane were all imprisoned for preaching the faith of The Society of Friends, while Mary Rowlandson spent several months as a captive of North American Indians. In her introduction to these writings, Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler provides brief biographical sketches of these writers, together with details of the publication history of each text. With the exception of Rowlandson's works, the writings in these volumes are the first complete, unabridged editions in modern times.