Item Details

abstract

This study tracks the way two seventeenth-century religious poets’ works respond to the traumatic social and legal changes at work in the wake of early capital, particularly where those changes dispossessed and disempowered women as legal subjects. In both cases, the narrative of Original Sin offers the poet a means of understanding alterity and resistance to a Law that does not capture or reflect the infinite mysteries of God’s grace. This narrative, consequently, acts as the site at which poetic and prophetic language can problematize and refute the privileged speech acts of the Law. Relying on queer and feminist theoretical lenses and Cultural Materialist approaches to contemporary political debate, this study argues that the prophetic troubling of language performed by Aemilia Lanyer, Milton’s Satan, and both poets’ representations of Eve serves also to queer the meanings of the Law as a product of language and point to (feminine) desires that the early modern State actively erases. By doing so, I conclude, the prophetic speaker insists on the present possibility of social and legal change that resists and reverses the violence to which women and other social groups had been subjected in the period.

subject

Early Capital

Early Modern

Law

Mysticism

Queer Theory

Women's Inheritance

contributor

Darrow, Geophrey Owen (author)

Hogan, Sarah (committee chair)

Valbuena, Olga L (committee member)

Harlan, Susan (committee member)

date

2019-05-24T08:35:51Z (accessioned)

2019-05-24T08:35:51Z (available)

2019 (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/93984 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

title

Prophetic Un-Speaking: The Language of Inheritance and Original Sin in Paradise Lost and Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

type

Thesis