Description: 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. Speght's tract, A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), is at once a spirited answer to Joseph Swetnam's attack on women and a serious effort to stake women's claim to the prevailing Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis, in order to define a more expansive and more equitable concept of gender. Speght's volume of poems, Mortalities Memorandum with a Dreame Prefixed (1621)--printed, in part, to counter charges that her prose was actually her father's--includes a long memento mori meditation and an allegorical dream vision that recounts her own rapturous encounter with learning. Both texts vigorously defend women's education and promote women's 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 women's studies.
Review Quotes: "As is true in general of the editors in this series, Lewalski's edition of The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght is an informative and accessible text for both specialists and non-specialists. Her thoughtful commentary and notes open up the texts for scholars, providing insight into Speght's literary and social milieux and assistance with her vocabulary and sources. It is an important addition to the canon of pamphlets concerned with the formal controversy over woman in England during this period."--Seventeenth Century News
"Renaissance scholars and their students will welcome Barbara Lewalski's lucid introduction to Speght's works....Readers of Lewalski's earlier work will find the compressed rhetoric of the introduction compelling, appreciating the first appearance of this meticulously edited text. Her methodology is eclectic, drawing on formalist, generic, historical, and deconstructive terminology in the introductory material."--Renaissance Quarterly