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BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES: HISTORICAL DISCOURSES IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING by JESSICA ANNE WALKER (Under the Direction of Frances Teague) ABSTRACT The English Renaissance is a period of interest in historiography and national consciousness, as well as a period in which women were starting to make their voices heard, despite the unacceptability of women's writing and public discourse. This dissertation seeks to explore the effect of historiography and national consciousness on women and how their writing fits into (or how women find their places outside) important cultural and literary developments between the Protestant Reformation and the Restoration of the English monarchy following the English Civil War. It establishes the sixteenth-century historiographical, literary, and gender contexts that contributed to the development of seventeenth-century women's historiography and life writing and explores how the limitations of women's education in the sixteenth century cut them off from participation in discourse about national identity and history and how those discourses began to evolve and change throughout the Stuart period. In order to uncover how these issues are at work in seventeenth-century women's life writing, this dissertation examines the diaries, memoirs, and literary output of Anne Clifford, Anne Halkett, Ann Fanshawe, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish. The simultaneous experiences of war, which encourages women to speak of important events in their lives, and exile, which drives them beyond the strictly enforced boundaries of home and nation, undermine the dominant discourses of silence and enclosure that had discouraged women's writing. As a result, these women write across multiple points of fracture: disunity within the English state; the problem of writing national experience from outside the bounds of the nation; and the tension between urge to record and analyze their experiences for public consumption and the discourse that forbids them from doing so. INDEX WORDS: Historiography, Early Modern Writing, Women’s Writing, Biography, Autobiography, War, Life Writing, Memoir, Diary, Drama, Speculative Fiction, Oratory, Epistolary, Reformation, Restoration, Renaissance BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES: HISTORICAL DISCOURSES IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING by JESSICA ANNE WALKER B.A., University of West Georgia, 2001 M.A., University of Georgia, 2003 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 Jessica Anne Walker All Rights Reserved BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES: HISTORICAL DISCOURSES IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING by JESSICA ANNE WALKER Major Professor: Frances Teague Committee: Christy Desmet Elizabeth Kraft Miranda Pollard Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2009 iv DEDICATION To my supportive parents, inspiring sisters, amazing nieces and nephews, and dear husband, William Harris. Your love and support helped bring this project to fruition. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been privileged to work with many distinguished scholars who have guided me along my way. In particular, I would like to thank my committee, Dr. Frances Teague, Dr. Christy Desmet, Dr. Elizabeth Kraft, and Dr. Miranda Pollard, for their support and inspiration over the years; Dr. Andrew Hartley and Dr. Coburn Freer, for their guidance through my early years as an early modern scholar; Dr. Sujata Iyengar, Dr. Anne Williams, and Dr. Tricia Lootens, for leading me through the wilds of feminist theory; Dr. Cynthia Camp and Dr. Erin Kelly, for helping shape my work as a scholar of historiography; and the Early Modern Union of Scholars and my wonderful colleagues in the University of Georgia graduate English program, for all your friendship and support. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 Sixteenth-Century Contexts..........................................................................................1 Works Cited ............................................................................................................30 2 Seventeenth-Century Contexts....................................................................................35 Works Cited ...........................................................................................................57 3 “At this time I fell directly in to the green sickness”: Crossing Boundaries in Anne Clifford’s Early Life Writing.....................................................................................60 Works Cited ...........................................................................................................82 4 “Loyalty being the principle”: Divided Duty and Narrative Shaping in Anne Halkett’s Memoirs .....................................................................................................84 Work Cited..........................................................................................................107 5 Dead Mothers and Hoyting Girles: Terror, Adventure, and Gender in Ann Fanshawe’s Memoirs ................................................................................................109 Work Cited.........................................................................................................131 6 “Which is certainly true, but we knew not how to interpret it”: Making Sense of History and Place in Lucy Hutchinson’s Life Writing ............................................132 Work Cited..........................................................................................................166 7 “If you be killed, you die unconquered”: Fear and Fame in Margaret Cavendish’s vii Work ........................................................................................................................167 Work Cited.........................................................................................................211 8 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................213 1 Chapter 1: Sixteenth-Century Contexts During the English Renaissance, interest in historiography and national consciousness increased in response to cultural change. With increased learning among the laity and middle classes came increased access to historical knowledge, and a new sense of English identity, fueled by the Protestant Reformation, both sprang from and created a demand for English historical narratives (Burke 18-19; Rackin ix, 5). In addition to these social changes, the Renaissance also marked a time of increased access to literary discourses through education and Reformation for women as well as men. If women did not “have a Renaissance,” as Joan Kelly- Gadol famously argued, they certainly lived through one, but their participation in such discourses was severely limited. As English historiography progressed from the national narratives of the sixteenth century to the life writing of the seventeenth, how did historiography and national consciousness affect women, and how did they fit into, or find themselves ostracized from, important cultural and literary developments of the period between the Reformation and the Restoration? A close examination of women's historical texts, through the lenses of both early modern historiography and the study of early modern Englishwomen's writing culture, reveals how women gradually came to express their places in history and how their contributions to historiography and life writing fit into a broader context of the development of literature from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine five cases of seventeenth- century women's life writing to show how these women writers used language to cope with 2 anxieties about space, genre, authorship, and trauma. In order to fully understand the pressures and opportunities with which history and historiography presented these women, we must first understand the social and literary contexts which preceded and surrounded them. Therefore, this chapter will examine the rise of English historiography, nationalism, and women's writing during the sixteenth century, while the second will explore how changes wrought by the seventeenth century helped bring about the forms of women's self-expression with which this dissertation is concerned. The chief change that characterizes Renaissance historiography is an increased interest in “second causes,” the “effects of political situations and the impact of human will and capabilities” (Rackin 6). The role that human beings—specifically, men—played in shaping their own history was of paramount importance to understanding the unfolding of events. In a time of jarring social and religious change, history offered important lessons to its students, who believed it could “inspire the living, reveal the secrets of statecraft, teach the details of military tactics, expose the deceits of fortune, and illuminate the ways of providence” (Rackin 3). As the disparate loyalties of the feudal era became increasingly unified under a centralized government, and a sense of nationalism increased through events such as the Reformation, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and colonial expansion into Ireland and the New World, the English turned to their history to shape national identity,