Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England

Rhetoric is a well established field of enquiry and critical methodology within Renaissance studies, yet it is still generally discussed as if it were confined to a male, educated, professional elite, and as if its primary purpose were to fashion compliant subjects. There is an emerging awareness, however, of a need to reformulate our understanding of rhetorical culture to encompass women. Transforming the study of Renaissance rhetoric by redefining the relationship between gender, politics and the art of speaking, this book fills an important gap in the field. Questioning the belief that women were necessarily precluded from exercising rhetorical agency and challenging the model of political discourse which has been used to perpetuate this assumption, leading experts ask a range of questions including: What rhetorical strategies and examples might enable women to intervene in or connect with political issues? And In what ways were they inhibited from such intervention? This book also considers how political discourses appropriated the 'feminine' as a trope for certain modes of speech in ways that might either denigrate female articulation, or unsettle contemporary conceptions of the polis and its membership.Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, was published 2006 under ISBN 9780415385268 and ISBN 0415385261.