Early Modern Women in Conversation

To converse is, in its most fundamental sense, to engage with society. The potency of conversation as an early modern social networking tool is complicated, however, both by its gendered status in the period and by its conflation of verbal and physical interaction. Conversation was an embodied act that signified social intimacy, cohabitation, and even sexual intercourse. As such, conversation posed a particular challenge for women, whose virtuous reputation was contingent on sexual and verbal self-control. Early Modern Women in Conversation considers how five women writers from the prominent Sidney and Cavendish families negotiated the gendered interrelationship between conversation and the spatial boundaries delimiting conversational encounters to create opportunities for authoritative and socially transformative utterance within their texts. Conversation emerges in this book as a powerful rhetorical and creative practice that remaps women's relationship to space and language in early modern England.

Katherine R. Larson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in journals including English Literary Renaissance, Milton Studies, the Sidney Journal, and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, as well as in a number of essay collections. She is also the co-editor of Re-Reading Mary Wroth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (2014).

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Note on Texts and References
1. Introduction
2. Beyond the Humanist Dialogue: The Textual Conversations of Early Modern Women
PART I: GENDERING CONVERSATION AND SPACE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
3. 'Intercourses of Friendship': Gender, Conversation, and Social Performance
4. Markets and Thresholds: Conversation as Spatial Practice
PART II: THE SIDNEYS IN CONVERSATION
5. Speaking to God with 'a cloven tongue': The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter
6. Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Mary Wroth's Love's Victory and Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost
PART III: THE CAVENDISHES IN CONVERSATION
7. 'The language of friendship and conversation': Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's Conversational Alliances
8. The Civil Conversations of Margaret Cavendish and Ben Jonson
9. Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index