The childbirth metaphor adopts imagery from female bodies carrying and delivering children to describe the effort and relationship of a poet to his/her poem. This was a commonly used trope in the renaissance, particularly by male authors. This thesis examines the way early modern woman poet, Aemilia Lanyer uses the childbirth metaphor in her poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Lanyer ultimately considers not only the physical realities of childbirth in her use of the metaphor, but also the emotional, social, and theological consequences. By doing so, I argue that Lanyer reclaims the metaphor from her male contemporaries in order to justify women's participation in literature and theology. Lanyer adopts a position analogous to the Virgin Mary as she "births” her poem. As she situates all women as powerful procreators, she claims a poetic priesthood through motherhood.

Hana Havlůjová: Czech modern women and the Orient in the first half of the 20th century: Challenging both gender and colonial dichotomies from the margins of Europe Abstract In regards to both Czech and international research context my thesis has two main objectives. Firstly, it aims to explore various Czech sources, be them written or visual, in order to examine their potential for cultural history-based research on Czech modern women's (re)presentations of the Orient in the first half of the 20th century. Secondly, it uses a perspective 'from the margins of Europe' in order to challenge traditional dichotomies that prevail in a majority of research on gender and nationalism as well as colonialism worldwide. Therefore, my analyses of Czech modern women's (re)presentations of the Orient focus mainly on the interplay of three modern discourses - feminism, nationalism and orientalism. The first part of the thesis First impressions: Three Czech modern women in the Orient comprises three case studies on Pavla Dušková, Ludmila Matiegková and Vlasta Kálalová Di- Lotti, who travelled to and stayed in the Near East (Egypt, Palestine, Iraq) in the 1920s and 1930s. Their personal papers (e.g. family correspondence, unpublished travelogues) as well as published works (e.g. academic pieces of writing, popular novels)...

<p>In seeking to explain why male authors assumed female pseudonyms in seventeenth-century literature, this dissertation explores male-to-female cross-dressing in Jacobean drama, effeminizing representations of parliament in Civil War propaganda, and parodies of women’s sexualized, political speech during the Interregnum and Restoration periods. My dissertation concludes that the sexualized female persona evolved over the course of the seventeenth century as a vehicle through which male authors could critique rival iterations of patriarchal hierarchy forwarded by Stuart kings and by parliament without challenging their own positions of masculine privilege within those hierarchies.</p> <p>My first chapter explores the political critiques of Jacobean absolutism embedded in the cross-gender performance narratives of Ben Jonson’s <em>Epicoene </em>(1609)<em> </em>and the anonymous play <em>Swetnam the Woman-Hater </em>(1620). In my second chapter I link male-to-female drag’s ability to critique an absolutist patriarchal paradigm to the satirical attacks on parliamentary models of polyvocal patriarchal rule in 1640s print. My final chapter investigates how female authors often find themselves shut out of the political discussions that female impersonations spark by taking up Sarah Jinner’s almanacs of 1658-60. Jinner’s almanacs combine predictions of rampant sexual wantonness with a critique of the waning Protectorate regime. I examine how the pseudonymous response to those almanacs from “Sarah Ginnor” depoliticizes Jinner’s sexual commentary on the Protectorate government.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The early modern period of a time of religious renewal and upheaval that resulted in a wealth of new religious orders, particularly those for women. During this period of change, Catholic women responded to the threat of Protestantism by adapting the convent to their own needs. One of the most successful orders for women was the Congregation of the Visitation, founded by Jeanne de Chantal and François de Sales. The history of the Visitation tends to focus on de Sales rather than its cofounder de Chantal. This thesis attempts to reconcile this omission, detailing de Chantal's ability to demonstrate and enact her authority through the mode of letters. In doing so, this paper enters into a conversation on religious revival in the early modern period by illustrating the porous nature of the early modern convent and the role women had in shaping early modern religiosity. / History

‘The Ophelia Versions: Representations of a Dramatic Type from 1600-1633’ interrogates early modern drama’s use of the Ophelia type, which is defined in reference to Hamlet’s Ophelia and the behavioural patterns she exhibits: abandonment, derangement and suicide. Chapter one investigates Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet, finding that Ophelia is strongly identified with the ballad corpus. I argue that the popular ballad medium that Shakespeare imports into the play via Ophelia is a subversive force that contends with and destabilizes the linear trajectory of Hamlet’s revenge tragedy narrative. The alternative space of Ophelia’s ballad narrative is, however, shut down by her suicide which, I argue, is influenced by the models of classical theatre. This ending conspires with the repressive legal and social restrictions placed upon early modern unmarried women and sets up a dangerous precedent by killing off the unassimilated abandoned woman. Chapter two argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amplifies Ophelia’s folk and ballad associations in their portrayal of the Jailer’s Daughter. Her comedic marital ending is enabled by a collaborative, communal, folk-cure. The play nevertheless registers a proto-feminist awareness of the peculiar losses suffered by early modern women in marriage and this knowledge deeply troubles the Jailer’s Daughter’s happy ending. Chapter three explores the role of Lucibella in The Tragedy of Hoffman arguing that the play is a direct response to Hamlet’s treatment of revenge and that Lucibella is caught up in an authorial project of disambiguation which attempts to return the revenge plot to its morality roots. Chapters four and five explore the narratives of Aspatia in The Maid’s Tragedy and Penthea in The Broken Heart, finding in their very conformism to the behaviours prescribed for them, both by the Ophelia type itself and by early modern society in general, a radical protest against the limitations and repressions of those roles. This thesis is consistently invested in the competing dialectics and authorities of oral and textual mediums in these plays. The Ophelia type, perhaps because of Hamlet’s Ophelia’s identification with the ballad corpus, proves an interesting gauge of each play’s engagement with emergent notions of textual authority in the early modern period.