Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain [Hardcover]

This book reveals women writers' key role in constituting seventeenth-century public culture and, in doing so, offers a new reading of that culture as begun in intimate circles of private dialogue and extended along transnational networks of public debate.Crossing Borders: From Private Dialogue to Public Debate Feeding on the Seed of the Woman: Dorothy Leigh and the Figure of Maternal Dissent At 'Liberty to Preach in the Chambers': Sarah Wight, Henry Jessey, and the New-Modeled Community of Saints The Knowing Few: Katherine Philips and The Post-Courtly Coterie News from the New World: Anne Bradstreet and Pan-Protestant Poetics Gathering and Scattering in Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers

This impressive monograph is a significant contribution to seventeenth-century studies. - Literature and History

A book of meticulous scholarship, original insight, and sophisticated argument, Gray s Women Writers and Public Debate constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the period of the English Revolution - those decades in the mid-seventeenth-century that saw the proliferation of print and the entry of distinctive women s voices into print and public debate. Questioning the notion of women as separate subjects and of the private/public divide, she moves us towards a nuanced and powerful understanding of the efficacy of these women in forming counterpublic spheres that challenged dominant powers. - Achsah Guibbory, Barnard College, Columbia University

In this exciting and well-argued book, Gray shows how literate women who are marginalized in (or altogether absent from) most studies of seventeenth-century English political culture contributed decisively to what J?rgen Habermas controversially called the public sphere. Gray s innovative use the notion of the counterpublic developed by feminist Nancy Fraser invites the reader to historicize and rethink modern ways of distinguishing between - and gendering - public anl³J