Women Writing in a Time of War, 1642-1689

Women Writing in a Time of War, 1642-1689 explores the stereotype of the apolitical woman who was nevertheless valuable as a messenger or secret agent during the English civil wars, not least because her imagined lack of political acumen obscured her partisan behaviour. It examines the interconnections between early modern men and women’s cultural production, analyzing the secret writing and communication strategies employed by agents and spies during the wars and arguing that an attention to clandestine modes of writing provides new insights into women’s literary production during the conflict. Encouraging us to understand such literary production differently, Britland offers a new history of early modern political writing, one deeply imbricated in-but by no means exclusively focused on-the literary work and experiences of women, the non-elite, and the racially marginalized in early modern England and its colonial trade networks.

An attentiveness to the narrative strategies deployed by women writers during the English civil wars also helps us to think about the long histories subtending our own reading and writing practices. Not only does the relative invisibility of female agents in our own historiography reveal a persistent tendency in contemporary criticism to overlook women’s contributions to major historical events, but, the book argues, the early modern instrumentalization of women’s bodies-particularly the bodies of women from non-elite backgrounds who acted as couriers within elite communication networks-acts as a caution against adopting contemporary methods of reading (particularly computer-aided reading) that can downplay or ignore the contributions of women and non-elite people. This book makes a case for not separating our discussions of women from those of men, nor for privileging analyses of the rich over those of the poor, at the same time as it remains deeply embedded in the literary, material, and merchant cultures of later seventeenth-century England.

Karen Britland, Halls-Bascom Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Karen Britland is Halls-Bascom Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published widely on early modern drama and women’s writing, most recently on the early life of the playwright Aphra Behn. She is a general editor for the Revels Plays series and has also edited a number of early modern plays. She is currently working on an edition of Shakespeare’s Richard II for the Arden Shakespeare series.