Accounting for Time in Seventeenth-Century Women's Life Writings

Accounting for Time in Seventeenth-Century Women's Life Writings

Danielle Clarke (University College Dublin)

• Wednesday 18 March, 4.00-5:30pm
• 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne

Abstract

This paper argues that life writings by early modern women represent women’s capacity to manage time, both as a quotidian resource (the profitable use of time) and as a spiritual and long-term resource. This ability depends upon their mastery of a range of literacy skills and practices, but also asserts their centrality to family record keeping, which in turn is crucial to ideas of generation, genealogy and descent. I argue that questions of time are registered in these texts at the level of material production, which is iterative and recursive. I will demonstrate these points with reference to life writings by Martha Molesworth, Katherine Austen, Elizabeth Isham and Anne Clifford.

Danielle Clarke

Danielle Clarke is Professor of Renaissance Language and Literature at University College Dublin. Most of her research and writing has focussed on early modern women – looking at their textual output through the widest possible lens, but grounded in close readings of primary texts, poetry in particular. Most recently, she has been working on an edition of the poetry of Lady Anne Southwell (with Vicki Burke and Christina Luckyj). She is in the final stages of writing a monograph called Forms of Women’s Writing, 1550-1700: Quotidian Writing and Literary Production.