Full Description
Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not.
Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Traveling/Travailing Women: Early Modern England and the Wider World - Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea
Section One: Early Modern Women Travelers: Global and Local Trajectories
CHAPTER 1: Desdemona and Mrs. Keeling - Richmond Barbour
CHAPTER 2: A "Stranger" Bride: Mariam Khan and the East India Company - Karen Robertson
CHAPTER 3: Sailing to India: Women, Travel, and Crisis in the Seventeenth Century - Amrita Sen
CHAPTER 4: Teresa Sampsonia Sherley: Amazon, Traveler, and Consort - Carmen Nocentelli
CHAPTER 5: The Global Travels of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley's Carmelite Relic - Bernadette Andrea
CHAPTER 6: Gender and Travel Discourse: Richard Lassels's "The Voyage of the Lady Catherine Whetnall from Brussells into Italy" (1650) - Patricia Akhimie
CHAPTER 7: Advance and Retreat: Reading English Colonial Choreographies of Pocahontas - Elisa Oh
CHAPTER 8: Lady Anne Clifford's "Way" and Aristocratic Women's Travel - Laura Williamson Ambrose
Section Two: Early Modern Women and "the Globe": Gendered Travel on the English Stage
CHAPTER 9: Mapping Women: Place Names and a Woman's Place - Laura Aydelotte
CHAPTER 10: Eroticizing Women's Travel: Desdemona and the Desire for Adventure in Othello - Stephanie Chamberlain
CHAPTER 11: Desdemona's "Divided Duty": Gender and Courtesy in Othello - Michael Slater
CHAPTER 12: "She loved me for the dangers I had passed": From Adventure to Danger in the Travels of Desdemona and Miranda - Eder Jaramillo
CHAPTER 13: "In th'habiliments of the goddess Isis": Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex - Ruben Espinosa
CHAPTER 14: Precarious Travail, Gender, and Narration in Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World - Dyani Johns Taff
CHAPTER 15: Traveling Companions: Shakespeare's As You Like It and the Book of Ruth - Suzanne Tartamella
CHAPTER 16: English Women, Romance, and Global Travel in Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, Part One - Gaywyn Moore
AFTERWORD: Looking for the Women in Early Modern Travel Writing - Mary Fuller
Notes on Contributor
