The Life of Rachel Speght - Stringer, Helen M.; - Prospero Internet Bookshop

 
Product details:

ISBN13:9781837644797
ISBN10:1837644799
Binding:Hardback
No. of pages:230 pages
Size:239x163 mm
Weight:666 g
Language:English
Illustrations: 10 Illustrations, black & white
699
Category:

The Life of Rachel Speght

A Forward Woman
 
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Date of Publication:
 
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Publisher's listprice:
GBP 95.00
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48 079 HUF (45 790 HUF + 5% VAT)
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Long description:

In 1617, Rachel Speght caused a sensation when, at the age of nineteen, she published a polemic in defence of women under her own name. Daring to identify herself as a ?forward? woman, she repudiated the prevailing misogyny of her day. However, the power of her words died with her, and, for over 350 years, she was lost from view. Since the rediscovery of her works in the 1980s, Speght has become a familiar name in Renaissance literature. Nevertheless, almost fifty years after her re-emergence, the woman behind the works remains little known.

This book explores Speght?s life, from her formation in the turbulent world of Jacobean London to her last years as a displaced person within a Suffolk community torn apart by religious strife. Considering her as a writer and polemicist but also as a ?public housewife?, the book reveals a courageous thinker and protagonist. One of the defining authors of what Christina Luckyj has described as the ?radical politics of the female voice? in early-Stuart England, and one of the few clergy wives to speak out in defence of her faith amid the chaos of the Civil War, Rachel Speght emerges as one of the most compelling female personalities of her age.



?Written in a lively, engaging style, this book unearths new archival material to illuminate not only the life of a bold and original early woman writer but also the shifting and complex landscape of women, religion and politics in the early seventeenth century.? Professor Christina Luckyj, Dalhouse University

Table of Contents:
  1. 'Unto her Sex a faithfull friend': Introduction

  2. 'Crowning Citie': a London childhood (c.1597-c.1611)

  3. 'A Comet, that bodes Mischief': gaining an education (c.1611-16)

  4. 'I being out of all feare': A Mouzzell for Melastromus (1616-17)

  5. 'Off-spring of my indevour': Mortalities Memorandum (1617-21)

  6. 'This worlds Paradise': marriage and motherhood (1621-31)

  7. 'In a uncouth land': the first years at Stradishall (1631-c.1644)

  8. 'Raising or fomentinge ... faction': sequestration and protest (1644-47)

  9. 'Epilogue of life': death and an inconclusive ending

  10. 'Forward Writers, and criticall Readers': Conclusion