Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England

The ten essays in this collection explore the discrete yet overlapping female spaces of privacy and domesticity in early modern England. The texts discussed in the volume include plays not only by Shakespeare but also Ford, Wroth, Marvell, Spenser and Cavendish, among others. Through the lens of literature, contributors consider the unstructured, fluid quality of everyday female experience as well as the dimensions, symbols, and the ever-changing politics and culture of the household. They analyse the complex habits of female settings - the verbal, spatial, and affective strategies of early-modern women's culture, including private rituals, domestic practices, and erotic attachments - in order to provide a broader picture of female culture and of female authority. The authors argue - through a range of critical approaches that include feminist, historical, and psychoanalytic - that early modern women often transformed their confinement into something useful and necessary, creating protected and even sacred spaces with their own symbols and aesthetic.