15th
16th
17th
A01=Margaret W. Ferguson
academia
academic
academics
analysis
aphra behn
Author_Margaret W. Ferguson
britain
Category=DSB
Category=DSBB
century
christine de pizan
clerical
conflict
cultural
culture
education
educational
english
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
era
europe
european
french
language
latin
learning
literacies
print
reader
reading
research
scholarly
speech
time period
uk
united kingdom
western world
women
womens issues
writer
writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780226243122
- Weight: 765g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jul 2003
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in "Dido's Daughters", this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The 15th through 17th centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Ferguson's aim in this work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido - builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome - Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt.
The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.
Margaret W. Ferguson is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry and coeditor of a number of books, most recently The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition.
