Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida

An examination of female same-sex desire in Chaucer and medieval romance.

This book is devoted to medieval Iberian women, readers and writers. Focusing on the stories and texts women heard, visually experienced or read, and the stories that they rewrote, the work explores women’s experiences and cultural practices and their efforts to make sense of their place within their familial networks and communities. The study is based on two methodological and interpretive threads: a new paradigm to represent premodern reading and, a study of women’s writing, or, more precisely, women’s textualities, as a process of creating words but also acts, social practices, emotions and, ultimately, affectus, understood here as the embodiment of the ability to affect and be affected.

We are fascinated by text and we are fascinated by reading. Is this because we are in a time of textual change? Given that young people always seem to be in the vanguard of technological change, questions about what and how they read are the subject of intense debate. Children as Readers in Children’s Literature explores these questions by looking at the literature that is written for children and young people to see what it tells us about them as readers. The contributors to this book are a group of distinguished children’s literature scholars, literacy and media specialists who contemplate the multiple images of children as readers and how they reflect the power and purpose of texts and literacy. Contributors to this wide-ranging text consider: How books shape the readers we become Cognitive and affective responses to representation of books and reading The relationship between love-stories and reading as a cultural activity Reading as ‘Protection and Enlightenment’ Picturebooks as stage sets for acts of reading Readers’ perceptions of a writer This portrayal of books and reading also reveals adults’ beliefs about childhood and literacy and how they are changing. It is a theme of crucial significance in the shaping of future generations of readers given these beliefs influence not only ideas about the teaching of literature but also about the role of digital technologies. This text is a must-read for any individual interested in the importance of keeping literature alive through reading.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell provides a comprehensive and authoritative review of current research into Purcell and the environment of Restoration music, with contributions from leading experts in the field. Seen from the perspective of modern, interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship, the companion allows the reader to develop a rounded view of the environment in which Purcell lived, the people with whom he worked, the social conditions that influenced his activities, and the ways in which the modern perception of him has been affected by reception of his music after his death. In this sense the contributions do not privilege the individual over the environment: rather, they use the modern reader's familiarity with Purcell's music as a gateway into the broader Restoration world. Topics include a reassessment of our understanding of Purcell's sources and the transmission of his music; new ways of approaching the study of his creative methods; performance practice; the multi-faceted theatre environment in which his work was focused in the last five years of his life; the importance of the political and social contexts of late seventeenth-century England; and the ways in which the performance history and reception of his music have influenced modern appreciation of the composer. The book will be essential reading for anyone studying the music and culture of the seventeenth century.