- Title
- Patterns of print: women's textual patronage in the "early" early modern period
- Creator
- Pender, Patricia
- Relation
- The Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World p. 88-103
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315613772
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Women’s patronage of print culture in early modern England commences with a figure who is technically late medieval but whose activities challenge traditional demarcations of periodization in intriguing ways. Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII’s grandmother, is recognized as one of the most prominent patrons of early English books and her promotion of textual production provided a model of royal patronage from which later Tudor women, from both sides of the Reformation religious divide, would draw inspiration and authority. In this chapter, Ipresent Beaufort’s patronage program as an important precedent for the royal Tudor women who fol-lowed her, establishing her as a necessary if hitherto neglected figure in the history of early modern women’s textual production. While she has long been a prominent figure in medieval literary and book history, Beaufort’s significance for early modern scholarship in these fields has been largely overlooked.1 And while several recent studies have begun to consider her translations as part of the early women’s literary canon, Iargue here that Beaufort’s extra-authorial literary labor– in this case her patronage of print culture– needs to be fed into our emerging awareness of her signal position in the women’s literary tradition of the long early modern period.2By way of illustration, Iexamine two very different patronage projects undertaken by queens at each end of Henry VIII’s reign– Catherine of Aragon’s patronage of Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman (1523) and Katherine Parr’s patronage of the English translation of The Paraphrases of Erasmus Upon the New Testament (1548). Iexplore how the very different dynastic, political and religious agenda informing these projects could both be served by emulating the example, or “pattern,” of Henry VIII’s grandmother.
- Description
- 1st
- Subject
- medieval; periodization; tudor women; medieval literary
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1460234
- Identifier
- uon:45900
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781472479945
- Language
- eng
- Hits: 450
- Visitors: 450
- Downloads: 0