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UID:24616
DTSTAMP:20260917T222030Z
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20261111T130000
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LOCATION:Taylor A36
SUMMARY:Fires in the House-top: Early Modern Women Writers, Milton & the Manosphere
DESCRIPTION:Dr Helen Lynch  (Aberdeen, LLMVC, in person and online) 11 November 2026

Fires in the House-top: Early Modern Women Writers, Milton & the Manosphere

This paper grows out of a larger project, which applies new approaches from social and cultural history, political theory and literary criticism to illuminate a key period in the emergence of early modern women’s writing and education, one which resonates strongly with current debates around social media, misogyny and the ‘manosphere.’ Taking the three female-identifying respondents to Joseph Swetnam’s 1615 polemic, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, as its starting-point, the research focuses on six writers from very different backgrounds and political and religious affiliations: Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Anna Trapnell, Margaret Fell, Bathsua Makin and Mary Astell. Rather than viewing these women writers as individual anomalies, expressing a limited form of ‘proto-feminism’, this paper explores their shared preoccupations and sets them alongside contemporary male political pamphleteers to probe the ways in which they not only intervened in public discourse but constituted what Hannah Arendt terms a ‘proto-public realm’ of their own. Taking the Arendtian premise that public utterance is essential to identity and find fulfilment for the citizen, I attempt to unpick a crucial paradox in Renaissance understandings of rhetoric: namely, that ‘oratory,’ citizenship and republican  ‘virtù’ are firmly gendered male, while metaphors for the skill and imaginative seductions of persuasive speech, poetic narrative fiction and even language itself – embroidery, flower-gardening and applying cosmetics – are coded ‘feminine.’ Seeing how women responded to this contradictory ‘manosphere’, in their working lives or in writing – using this paradoxical imagery of public discourse to challenge biblical history and assert their own rightful access to the public sphere – may enable us to examine the interface between lived experience and metaphor, and to re-evaluate this pivotal moment in the history of feminism.

Helen Lynch is Reader in Early Modern Literature & Creative Writing. Her research centres on seventeenth-century poetry, politics and gender and she also writes short fiction. She spent several years teaching in Poland, as well as founding and organising the WayWORD Festival as Creative Director 2019-24 at the 51cg. Visit /cems/news-events/events/24616 for further details about this event.
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