Travel and Travail

Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World

Patricia Akhimie, Bernadette Andrea

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781496202260
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496210296
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World
• Part 1. Early Modern Women Travelers: Global and Local Trajectories
• 1. Desdemona and Mrs. Keeling
• 2. A Stranger Bride: Mariam Khan and the East India Company
• 3. Sailing to India: Women, Travel, and Crisis in the Seventeenth Century
• 4. Teresa Sampsonia Sherley: Amazon, Traveler, and Consort
• 5. The Global Travels of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Carmelite Relic
• 6. Gender and Travel Discourse: Richard Lassels’s “The Voyage of the Lady Catherine Whetenall from Brussells into Italy” (1650)
• 7. Advance and Retreat: Reading English Colonial Choreographies of Pocahontas
• 8. Lady Anne Clifford’s Way and Aristocratic Women’s Travel
• Part 2. Early Modern Women and the Globe: Gendered Travel on the English Stage
• 9. Mapping Women: Place Names and a Woman’s Place
• 10. Eroticizing Women’s Travel: Desdemona and the Desire for Adventure in Othello
• 11. Desdemona’s Divided Duty: Gender and Courtesy in Othello
• 12. From Adventure to Danger in the Travels of Desdemona and Miranda
• 13. Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex
• 14. Precarious Travail, Gender, and Narration in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World
• 15. Traveling Companions: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Book of Ruth
• 16. English Women, Romance, and Global Travel in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I
• Afterword: Looking for the Women in Early Modern Travel Writing
• Contributors
• Index