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©2016 Brian John Pietras ALL RIGHTS RESERVED EVANDER’S MOTHER: GENDER, ANTIQUITY, AND AUTHORSHIP IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND by BRIAN JOHN PIETRAS A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Jacqueline T. Miller And approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Evander’s Mother: Gender, Antiquity, and Authorship in Early Modern England By BRIAN JOHN PIETRAS Dissertation Director: Jacqueline T. Miller This dissertation traces how the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient women writers led to the emergence of new theories and practices of English vernacular authorship. In the sixteenth century, Greco-Roman women writers became famous for writings that were largely fragmentary, of dubious origin, or entirely lost. Indeed, a number of these purported female authors—such as Carmentis, the mother of Evander in the Aeneid— were purely legendary. My dissertation argues, however, that this lack of surviving texts was precisely what made ancient women so useful to early moderns. Vested with the prestige of classical antiquity but untethered from any concrete body of writing, ancient female authors functioned as what I call a “canon without a corpus” in Renaissance England. The first three chapters of Evander’s Mother show how sixteenth-century male writers appropriated figures from this now-forgotten female canon to decisively reshape inherited models of authorship: how Thomas Elyot employed the rebellious historian Zenobia to defy the humanist emphasis on classical imitation; how John Donne and John Fletcher experimented with non-Petrarchan forms of love lyric through fantasies of Sappho; and how William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser reworked the role of the divinely inspired poet by evoking legendary female prophets known as the sibyls. The fourth chapter examines how Mary Wroth drew on the first-century historian Pamphila to ii expose the long history of textual loss that made such appropriations possible. Finally, the epilogue explores how, by the late seventeenth century, ancient female authors shifted from serving as figures for humanist-trained male writers to providing a history for English women writers. In charting this shift, my dissertation historicizes the very concept of “women’s writing” as a distinct field. At the same time, however, Evander’s Mother demonstrates that, prior to the seventeenth century, authorship was theorized along much less strictly gendered lines. While scholars often argue that the “birth of the author” entailed a constitutive repudiation of women and femininity, my dissertation reveals that strategies of cross-gendered (and cross-temporal) identification were crucial to the development of vernacular models of authorship. Moreover, in recovering the importance of England’s canon without a corpus, my dissertation both employs historicist methods of literary study and critiques them—demonstrating that early modern studies requires a historicism attuned to the oddly generative nature of textual loss and fragmentation. This more nuanced model of historicism, Evander’s Mother shows, could powerfully reshape our understandings of gender, antiquity, and authorship in Renaissance England. iii Dedication For my grandparents iv Acknowledgements As all students of Renaissance romance know, the English word “error” derives from the Latin errare, to wander. Oddly, perhaps, I took a certain amount of comfort in this etymology as I wrote my dissertation, hoping that my wanderings through old books would eventually produce something worthwhile. If they have, it is largely due to the help and encouragement of my friends, family, and teachers. My interest in scholarly work began during my undergraduate years, and I want to thank the many mentors who first fed my curiosity and modeled what the life of the mind might look like: first at Canisius (Amy Wolf, Joseph Grossi, and Judith Dompkowski) and then at Bennington (Sonia Pérez Villanueva, Jonathan Pitcher, Brad Verter, Becky Godwin, and Marguerite Feitlowitz). The wonderful friends I made during those years deserve thanks, as well—including Marti Verso, Keith Eyrich, Russell Melia, Esther McPhee, Luna Galassini, Audrey Shulman, and the legendary Sarah McAbee. (Chrissy Osmulski, I wish so much you could have been here to see me finish; we miss you every day.) Rutgers has been an incredible place to pursue graduate study, and for years my friends and colleagues have made me a smarter scholar and a better person. Many thanks are due to Anne Terrill, Tasia Milton, and April Graham (the MGC!); precious Michael Monescalchi and Amy Cooper; Joseph Bowling and Kristina Huang; Alex Mazzaferro and Kelly Sullivan; and Erin Kelly, Stephanie Hunt, Mimi Winick, Becca Klaver, Andrew Carlson, Chris Kempf, and Alex Duym. My final year or so of dissertation writing was considerably enlivened by the marvelous appearance of Scott Harris, Emily Banta, Maria Vreck, Jenny Lalli, Alex Leslie, Nani Durnan, and Ariel Martino. I’ve also v benefited from the mentorship of several older students in the program (many of whom are now professors!), including Sarah Balkin, Josh Gang, Debapriya Sarkar, Kat Williams, Amanda Kotch, Naomi Levine, Greg Ellerman, Manuel Betancourt, Scott Trudell, and Colleen Rosenfeld. Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack remain some of the kindest and most helpful people I know; Murray Hall is very lucky to have them. In terms of institutional support, I must thank the English Department and the Graduate School for generously funding my project at various stages of its existence; I’d also like to thank the Folger Institute for a grant-in-aid to participate in its 2013-14 seminar, “Constructing and Representing Authorship in Early Modern England.” The faculty at Rutgers is a remarkably generous group, and I am very grateful to Tom Fulton, Emily Bartels, and Stacy Klein for their incisive feedback on my work. My committee deserves special attention here. Ann Baynes Coiro has helped to guide me since I first arrived at Murray Hall, encouraging me—and sharpening my work—with every year that passed. Henry Turner consistently shows me how to frame my ideas in the biggest and most compelling ways. Thanks are due as well to Julie Crawford, who was an insightful and inspiring outside reader. But of everyone at Rutgers, I am most grateful to Jackie Miller, who read not only countless drafts of my dissertation, but everything else, as well—from my very first conference paper abstracts to proposals for travel grants and fellowships. No matter what it was, Jackie always gave me the great gift of her careful, patient scrutiny, and for that I will always be grateful. vi Most pressingly, I need to thank my family. My father, my mother, my sister, and my aunts and uncles have all given me so much love and support over the years that I’ve been in graduate school, and I am so, so grateful to them. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my grandparents, Henry and Dorothy Pietras. Neither was able to go to college, and I think that, if they could read these pages, the project would make little sense to them. But I like to think that they would somehow feel a different kind of truth: that their love helped make every word possible. vii I say someone in another time will remember us. —Sappho, Fragment 147 viii Table of Contents Abstract ii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents ix Introduction: A Canon Without a Corpus 1 1. Leontium’s Babble and Zenobia’s Chains: Gender, Eloquence, and Auctoritas in Early English Humanism 26 2. Echoes of Sappho: Petrarchan Authorship and Female Desire 73 3. Author’s Pen, Sibyl’s Voice: Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Vates 130 4. Pamphilia’s Past: Wroth, Literary History, and the Fate of Women Writers 178 Epilogue: Ancient Sisters, Modern Rivals 219 Bibliography 230 ix 1 Introduction A Canon Without a Corpus “It may be said that the people called the Latines lent us much learninge, but it must be saide that a woman named Nicostrata first taught them their letters.” — George Pettie, A petite pallace of Pettie his pleasure (1576) Midway through the first edition of John Donne’s Poems (1633), a remarkable vision of authorship emerges: one that brings together ancient and modern, female and male. In “A Valediction: of the Booke,” the speaker urges his beloved to “write our Annals,” and, in so doing, …out-endure Sybills glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose helpe Lucan is not lame, And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name.1 Donne’s speaker invokes in miniature a catalog of ancient women, all of them famous— in his time, if not in ours—for their writing. In quick succession, the speaker alludes to the sibyls, who were believed to have predicted the coming of Christ in prophetic verse; to Corinna, who reportedly bested Pindar during several poetic competitions; to Lucan’s wife Polla Argentaria, who was credited with helping him to compose his works; and finally to Phantasia, an Egyptian woman who some texts suggested was the true author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Elsewhere in his Poems Donne takes on the voice of Sappho, the most famous woman writer of antiquity; here, however, his speaker evokes an ancient 1 John Donne: The Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 106, lns. 12, 5-9. 2 world populated by numerous female authors who rivaled their male peers. But this is no simple tribute. The speaker at once piques the reader’s curiosity over these ancient female authors and refuses to provide their names. He both celebrates and occludes them—a double movement that draws attention to the request that the speaker makes of his beloved.

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