The Polemics & Poems of Rachel Speght (Women Writers in English 1350-1850)

About this book

Rachel Speght was the first Englishwoman to identify herself unmistakably and by name as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. This edition includes her foray into the Jacobean gender wars and her collected poems. Speghts tract A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) is at once a spirited answer to Joseph Swetnams attack on women and a serious effort to stake womens claim to the prevailing Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis in order to define a more expansive and more equitable concept of gender. Speghts volume of poems Mortalities Memorandum with a Dreame Prefixed (1621)--printed in part to counter charges that her prose was actually her fathers--includes a long memento mori meditation and an allegorical dream vision that recounts her own rapturous encounter with learning. Both texts vigorously defend womens education and promote womens talents. This latest addition to the Women Writers in English series should find a ready audience among scholars and students of early seventeenth-century literature history and religion as well as among those in womens studies.