Politics, Literature, and Early Modern Women

This entry addresses both the modern history of early modern political thought—a field stubbornly, even mysteriously, resistant to acknowledging the crucial role that women, both actual and analogical, played in early modern political life and theory—and the literary texts that put the lie to the historical elision. Starting with the foundational story of the rape of Lucretia, it argues that Tudor humanists, including Thomas Elyot, Juan Luis Vives, and Cornelius Agrippa, penned defenses of women not only to defend actual women—notably Catherine of Aragon—but also to argue for limits on the monarch’s personal prerogative. As writers ranging from Elyot and Jane Lumley in the 1530s to Rachel Speght and Aemilia Lanyer in the early Stuart era and Margaret Cavendish in the late, argued, the “counsel of a wife is not to be despised.” Early modern writers engaged the long history of the querelle des femmes, particularly legends of good women and defenses of resistant ones, for a wide range of political ends, perhaps the least of which was concerned with their own authorship.