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theses

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 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

ETD_7705

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Brian John Pietras

doi:10.7282/T3TB196S

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.