Topics in the Renaissance: Gender, Love, and Liberty in the Age of Milton
Dr. Lauren Shohet
Spring 2015
SAC 463
English 8260-001 (GWS)
Lauren.Shohet@villanova.edu
Mon 5:20-7:20
office hours M 4-5 (SAC 463), W 11:30-12:20 (Honors Suite, Garey)
& by appt. Email any time.
This course explores how political, spiritual, and personal liberty are read and written in texts of
John Milton and his contemporaries. With Milton and Lucy Hutchinson as centers of gravity, we
also shall read texts of John Donne, Gerrard Winstanley, Amelia Lanyer, Katherine Phillips,
Anne Bradstreet, and Margaret Cavendish. Our primary focus will be on the gendered
dimensions of their poetics, political theory, and theology (with opportunities for students to
pursue other interests as well). Secondary readings will include theoretical, historical, and critical
engagements of the writing and the age.
Primary texts in bookstore:
Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed Shawcross (Doubleday)
John Milton: Prose, ed Loeweinstein (Wiley-Blackwell)
Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. Keeble (Everyman)
__, Order and Disorder, ed. Norbrook (Blackwell)
Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Fitzmaurice et al (Michigan)
Recommended: Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (Rutgers)
Primary texts available electronically
Anne Bradstreet, poems
John Donne, poems
Gerard Winstanley, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced
Secondary texts on Blackboard
Achinstein, Sharon. “Milton and the Fit Reader: Paradise Lost and the Parliament of Hell,”
Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton UP, 1994).
Coiro, Ann Baynes. “ ‘A Ball of strife’: Caroline poetry and royal marriage,” The Royal Image:
Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas Corns (CUP, 1999), 26-46.
Froula, Christine. “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy.” Critical
Inquiry 10 (Dec 1983).
Furey, Constance. “Relational Virtue: Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Puritan Marriage,”
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.1 (Winter 2012 ): 201-224.
Grossman, Marshall. “Divine Historian,” Authors to Themselves: Milton and the Revelation of
History (CUP, 1987).
Lewalski, Barbara. “Typology and Poetry.” Illustrious Evidence, ed. Earl Miner (California,
1975).
Marotti, Arthur. “Social Textuality and the Manuscript System.” Manuscript, Print, and the
English Renaissance Lyric. (Cornell, 1995.)
Matchinske, Megan. “History’s ‘Silent Whispers’: Representing the Past through Feeling and
Form,” in Attending to Early Modern Women: Conflict and Concord, ed. Karen Nelson
and Amy Froide (Newark: Univ. of Delaware P, 2013), 59-73.
Topics in the Renaissance: Gender, Love, and Liberty in the Age of Milton
McColley, Diane. “Eve and the Arts of Eden.” Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M.
Walker (Illinois, 1988).
Miller, Shannon. “Serpentine Eve: Milton and the Seventeenth Century Debate Over Women.”
Milton Quarterly 42:1 (March 2008): 44-68.
Nyquist, Mary. “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise
Lost, in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Ferguson and
Nyquist (Methuen, 1987), 99-127.
Raatschen, Gudrun. “Merely Ornamental? Van Dyck’s Portraits of Henrietta Maria,” in
Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage, ed. Erin Griffey (Ashgate, 2008), 139154.
Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth. “Margaret Cavendish as Editor and Reviser,” ch. 2 of Forms of
Engagement: Women, Poetry and Culture 1640-1680 (OUP, 2013).
---“Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley: Solitude, Dialogue, and the Ode,” ch 3 of Forms of
Engagement.
Smuts, Malcolm. “Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625-41,” in
Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage, ed. Erin Griffey (Ashgate, 2008), 13-38.
Wilcher, Robert. “Lucy Hutchinson and Genesis: Paraphrase, Epic, Romance,” English: The
Journal of the English Association 59.224 (2010 Spring): 25-42.
Wiznura, Robert. “Eve's Dream, Interpretation, and Shifting Paradigms: Book Four and Five of
Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 49 (2009): 108-123.
Requirements
Response papers/discussion questions
I will post a preliminary agenda for each class meeting on the course calendar, under the
“course tools” feature of Blackboard. Five times during the semester - three times before
spring break and twice afterwards, I ask that you post, on the “journals” tab of
Blackboard, a 1-2 paragraph response to some of the week’s reading (primary or
secondary) and/or a discussion question arising from it. These are due by midnight before
the course meeting. Please do NOT post as an attachment, but rather paste text into the
journal page. You are welcome to post additional discussion questions, as often as you
like.
discussion organization
I would like each of you to take primary responsibility for one of the following: the
Swetnam-Sowernam exchange, Phillips, Behn, Cavendish, Winstanley, Bradstreet. This
responsibility entails consulting with me 2 weeks in advance to recommend to the
seminar poems for particular emphasis, and undertaking some additional research in
recent scholarly writing about your figure. If you like, you may assign an additional
secondary reading for the seminar to engage. By one week before the meeting, please
submit one or more discussion questions for me to post on the course agenda for the
session you will begin by leading.
short paper
I ask you to write one 3-4 page paper that either expands a response, or takes up another
agenda item, or treats some other aspect of a course reading, due on February 23 (hard
copy).
Topics in the Renaissance: Gender, Love, and Liberty in the Age of Milton
seminar paper
There are two short assignments associated with your final paper.
Your proposal for the paper (due 4/6, by email) should include your topic, a
provisional thesis if possible, a textual passage you plan to read closely in service of your
exploration, and a preliminary bibliography of three well chosen works with a sentence or
two explaining the use you will make of them.
Your annotated bibliography with 2-3 page critical introduction (due Sat April 18,
by email) should comprise 6-10 items (normally including the three listed in your
proposal). At least half your critical sources should be post-1995, and you should include
at least two pre-1700 sources beyond your primary text. Your 2-3 page critical
introduction should explain what this group of texts tells us about the interests,
assumptions, theoretical and methodological norms, key texts, and current debates in the
field.
The completed paper (15-20 pages) is due May 6.
Tentative schedule of work. This is subject to change. Revised versions will be kept current on
Blackboard. In cases of discrepancy, the listing on the “calendar” feature should be taken
as definitive.
All Milton poetry is in Shawcross; all Milton prose is in Loewenstein
1/12 Introduction; Milton: "At a Vacation Exercise" lines 1-57, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso,"
"On the Morning of Christ's Nativity."
[1/19 MLK day]
1/26
2/2
Milton, “Lycidas,” epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, Mask Performed at
Ludlow Castle.
Donne, Song (“Go and Catch”), Song (“Sweetest Love”), Woman’s Constancy, Air and
Angels, The Good Morrow, Sun Rising, Canonization (please access through EEBO).
Wrightson, “Husbands and Wives, Parents and Children” (chapter 4 of English Society
1580-1680. On blackboard).
Recommended: other Milton poems in Shawcross Part I (1624-32); rest of Wrightson
Milton: sonnets in part 3 of Shawcross (1641-58), Apology against a Pamphlet (in
Loewenstein)
Swetnam and Sowernam (in Fitzmaurice).
Smuts, Coiro.
Recommended: rest of poems in part 2 of Shawcross (1632-41), Marotti
2/9
Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (in Loewenstein)
Nyquist
Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters (in Fitzmaurice)
Scott-Baumann, “Margaret Cavendish as Editor and Reviser”
2/16
Milton, Paradise Lost I-III, Ready and Easy Way (in Loewenstein)
Achinstein
Topics in the Renaissance: Gender, Love, and Liberty in the Age of Milton
2/23 Milton, PL IV-VIII, Tetrachordon (in Loewenstein)
Miller
Recommended: Wiznura, Grossman. short paper (3-4 pages) due
[3/2: spring break]
3/9
Milton, PL IX-XII
Froula, McColley
3/16
Milton, PL continued;
Katherine Phillips (in Fitzmaurice),
Scott-Baumann, “Katherine Philips”
3/23
PL continued
Anne Bradstreet (on Blackboard)
Furey
3/30
PL continued
Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, cantos 1-5
Wilcher
recommended: rest of Order and Disorder
[4/6: Easter Monday]
proposal for final papers due by email on 4/6
4/13
Aphra Behn, poems in Fitzmaurice
Milton, Samson Agonistes
annotated bibliography due, by email, midnight on Saturday April 18
4/20 Hutchinson, Memoirs (first half)
Matchinske
4/27 Hutchinson, Memoirs (complete)
final papers due May 6 (unless you’ve made other arrangements in advance)