"Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not.
Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as ""an absent presence."" The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home."
Afterword by:
Mary C. Fuller
Edited by:
Patricia Akhimie,
Bernadette Andrea
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781496202260
ISBN 10: 1496202260
Series: Early Modern Cultural Studies
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 01 January 2019
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea Part 1. Early Modern Women Travelers: Global and Local Trajectories 1. Desdemona and Mrs. Keeling Richmond Barbour 2. A Stranger Bride: Mariam Khan and the East India Company Karen Robertson 3. Sailing to India: Women, Travel, and Crisis in the Seventeenth Century Amrita Sen 4. Teresa Sampsonia Sherley: Amazon, Traveler, and Consort Carmen Nocentelli 5. The Global Travels of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Carmelite Relic Bernadette Andrea 6. Gender and Travel Discourse: Richard Lassels’s “The Voyage of the Lady Catherine Whetenall from Brussells into Italy” (1650) Patricia Akhimie 7. Advance and Retreat: Reading English Colonial Choreographies of Pocahontas Elisa Oh 8. Lady Anne Clifford’s Way and Aristocratic Women’s Travel Laura Williamson Ambrose Part 2. Early Modern Women and the Globe: Gendered Travel on the English Stage 9. Mapping Women: Place Names and a Woman’s Place Laura Aydelotte 10. Eroticizing Women’s Travel: Desdemona and the Desire for Adventure in Othello Stephanie Chamberlain 11. Desdemona’s Divided Duty: Gender and Courtesy in Othello Michael Slater 12. From Adventure to Danger in the Travels of Desdemona and Miranda Eder Jaramillo 13. Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex Ruben Espinosa 14. Precarious Travail, Gender, and Narration in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World Dyani Johns Taff 15. Traveling Companions: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Book of Ruth Suzanne Tartamella 16. English Women, Romance, and Global Travel in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I Gaywyn Moore Afterword: Looking for the Women in Early Modern Travel Writing Mary C. Fuller Contributors Index
Patricia Akhimie is an assistant professor in the English Department at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. Bernadette Andrea is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature and The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture.
Reviews for Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World
Travel and Travail, a collection of essays on early modern women's travel, is a timely and much-needed contribution to the scholarship of women's travel writing and women's mobility. The sixteen essays in this book collectively offer fresh insights into historical women travellers in the early modern world as well as literary representations of female travel on the English stage. -Yoojung Choi, Review of English Studies -- Yoojung Choi * Review of English Studies * These stories place women in the context of larger issues surrounding the early modern world-beyond their local cities and, what was considered at the time, domestic spaces. -Arazoo Ferozan, Renaissance and Reformation -- Arazoo Ferozan * Renaissance and Reformation * Packed with fascinating case studies, this collection reveals overlooked evidence of early modern women traveling between England, Persia, India, and the Americas, alongside illuminating accounts of how dramatists characterized traveling women. Essential reading for students and scholars of travel writing. -Gerald MacLean, professor emeritus of English literature, University of Exeter -- Gerald MacLean By focusing on women, this book compellingly changes the way scholars will understand the nature and scope of travel in the early modern period. While offering impressive rereadings of fictional representations of women travelers, Travel and Travail is also rich in archival discoveries, unearthing surprising accounts of seventeenth-century women who traveled within and far beyond the British Isles. Akhimie and Andrea have orchestrated an original and important contribution to Early Modern studies. -Jean E. Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University -- Jean E. Howard An important collection for the field of travel writing and early modern women's and gender studies more broadly. The collection seeks to establish a canon of women travelers in the period, and through the reoccurrence of certain key figures across the volume, both historical and fictional, it goes a long way towards doing so. -Julia Schleck, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln -- Julia Schleck
