We have been taught by feminist scholarship that women are constrained by family structures; we have taken this as a foundational principle of arguments for the liberation of women, at least in part because we have so poorly understood the activities women have actually undertaken within kinship structures in traditional societies. If, however, we understand that traditional family and kinship structures may be radically different from our own, we may see how family rank could work to empower highly placed women rather than to limit them. In the sixteenth century the family dynasty became far more pivotal in political arrangements...

The English Reformation was a very different affair from continental forms of the movement, for it took shape as an act of royal will. Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church specifically over an issue of incest. Catherine of Aragon’s failure to produce a male heir was proof to Henry that he had sinned by marrying Catherine, who had been his deceased elder brother Arthur’s wife. Henry argued that the pope had clearly had no authority to grant the dispensation of the taboo which had years earlier allowed Henry to marry within the prohibited degrees. The current pope (who happened...

In 1579—the fateful year when Queen Elizabeth, aged forty-six, seemed seriously to be considering marriage to a royal Catholic, the Duke of Anjou, a man half her age—the young Sir Philip Sidney famously clashed with Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, on the tennis courts at Whitehall and wrote a letter advising the queen not to marry the Frenchman. By looking at the historical events of 1579 from the point of view of the traditional “traffic in women,” we can better sense why Sidney took the risk he did in challenging a royal match both by quarreling with...

Announcing at the close of a poem that she is the “Sister of that incomparable Sidney,” Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, chose to identify herself as an author through a claim of kinship.¹ Of her few extant original poems, three have her older brother as their subject matter. The translation of the Psalms, which scholars have agreed to call her major literary achievement, she and Sidney coauthored: she completed the work after his death, including the 107 Psalms he had left untranslated. No other Renaissance woman writer is so identified with a brother—save, perhaps, for Marguerite de Navarre....

Like many of Shakespeare’s comic heroines, Spenser’s Britomart exercises immense agency while dressed as a man. She travels without being traded; she goes into battle, rescuing both women and men; she is neither silent nor obedient. And she is doing everything in her considerable power to locate the man who will put a proper end to her chastity. So full and “modern” does her agency seem that for neophyte readers of Spenser it is often difficult to read “allegorically.” She seems to inhabit an ontological space very different from the Redcrosse Knight or Guyon, whose existence as characters fades before...

It seems almost inevitable that the first large verbal construct created solely by a woman in the English Renaissance should be in the genre of romance. This is not only because women were avid readers of romance and therefore writing in the genre did not feel alien to them. As I also hope to show, romance as a genre is also focused on the traffic in women in such a way that it allows a discussion of female agency and its connection to endogamy or incest more easily than other genres.¹

Lorna Hutson has argued that the romance narratives of...

Against the authority of all the sources of King Lear, Cordelia dies at the end of the play. Bale’s use of her in the preface to his edition of Elizabeth’s Glass (1548 ) as an exemplum indicating women’s fitness to rule had followed the traditional story about Lear: Cordelia outlived her father and reigned alone for a time after he died.¹ Readers have long complained of the peculiar cruelty of her death. Samuel Johnson for one found the pain of reading the scene so great that he had to force himself to read it a second time when he was...

To take up Milton’s Eve in relation to Cordelia is to juxtapose a quintessential daughter with a wife. But Eve is also Adam’s—and God’s—daughter, and as the bizarre nuclear family of Sin, Satan, and Death makes clear, incest dogs, as it were, female sexuality in the poem. Minaz Jooma has brilliantly but problematically argued for the complicated connections between Eve’s transgressions of eating the forbidden fruit and the rebellions of incestuous sons (Satan, Adam) against the Father.¹ Building on Mary Douglas’s anthropological argument about the linkage among physical bodily orifices for representing the transgression of boundaries in the...