Description
Book SynopsisPopular 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, and often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fibre.
Trade Review"This edited collection is a meaningful contribution to the literature concerning the movement and travel of women during the Age of Exploration. Up until this point, the literature has either fully ignored the movement of these women or marginally presented the travels of elite women post-eighteenth century. Therefore,
Travel and Travail serves as a corrective, describing the very literal and very common travels of women during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."—Dyese Elliott-Newton,
Comitatus"
Travel and Travail produces important feminist knowledge and fills a lacuna in our understanding of the expanding global enterprise and women's place in it. It is marvelously written, a pleasure to read."—Mira'Assaf Kafantaris,
Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinay Journal"
Travel and Travail, a collection of essays on early modern women's travel, is a timely and much-needed contribution to the scholarship of women's travel writing and women's mobility. The sixteen essays in this book collectively offer fresh insights into historical women travellers in the early modern world as well as literary representations of female travel on the English stage."—Yoojung Choi,
Review of English Studies"These stories place women in the context of larger issues surrounding the early modern world—beyond their local cities and, what was considered at the time, domestic spaces."—Arazoo Ferozan,
Renaissance and Reformation"
Travel and Travail is a celebration of interdisciplinary research. . . . This work challenges historians, digital humanity scholars, and collegiate learners to look anew at their own understandings of women travelers in the early modern world."—Gina G. Bennett,
Terrae Incognitae"
Travel and Travail is a thrilling statement of a field in its emergence and will become a touchstone in scholarship on early modern women, early modern travel and colonialism, and early modern drama."—Gavin Hollis,
Early Theater“Packed with fascinating case studies, this collection reveals overlooked evidence of early modern women traveling between England, Persia, India, and the Americas, alongside illuminating accounts of how dramatists characterized traveling women. Essential reading for students and scholars of travel writing.”—Gerald MacLean, professor emeritus of English literature, University of Exeter
“By focusing on women, this book compellingly changes the way scholars will understand the nature and scope of travel in the early modern period. While offering impressive rereadings of fictional representations of women travelers,
Travel and Travail is also rich in archival discoveries, unearthing surprising accounts of seventeenth-century women who traveled within and far beyond the British Isles. Akhimie and Andrea have orchestrated an original and important contribution to Early Modern studies.”—Jean E. Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
“An important collection for the field of travel writing and early modern women’s and gender studies more broadly. The collection seeks to establish a canon of women travelers in the period, and through the reoccurrence of certain key figures across the volume, both historical and fictional, it goes a long way towards doing so.”—Julia Schleck, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World
Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea
Part 1. Early Modern Women Travelers: Global and Local Trajectories
1. Desdemona and Mrs. Keeling
Richmond Barbour
2. A Stranger Bride: Mariam Khan and the East India Company
Karen Robertson
3. Sailing to India: Women, Travel, and Crisis in the Seventeenth Century
Amrita Sen
4. Teresa Sampsonia Sherley: Amazon, Traveler, and Consort
Carmen Nocentelli
5. The Global Travels of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Carmelite Relic
Bernadette Andrea
6. Gender and Travel Discourse: Richard Lassels’s “The Voyage of the Lady Catherine Whetenall from Brussells into Italy” (1650)
Patricia Akhimie
7. Advance and Retreat: Reading English Colonial Choreographies of Pocahontas
Elisa Oh
8. Lady Anne Clifford’s Way and Aristocratic Women’s Travel
Laura Williamson Ambrose
Part 2. Early Modern Women and the Globe: Gendered Travel on the English Stage
9. Mapping Women: Place Names and a Woman’s Place
Laura Aydelotte
10. Eroticizing Women’s Travel: Desdemona and the Desire for Adventure in Othello
Stephanie Chamberlain
11. Desdemona’s Divided Duty: Gender and Courtesy in Othello
Michael Slater
12. From Adventure to Danger in the Travels of Desdemona and Miranda
Eder Jaramillo
13. Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex
Ruben Espinosa
14. Precarious Travail, Gender, and Narration in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World
Dyani Johns Taff
15. Traveling Companions: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Book of Ruth
Suzanne Tartamella
16. English Women, Romance, and Global Travel in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I
Gaywyn Moore
Afterword: Looking for the Women in Early Modern Travel Writing
Mary C. Fuller
Contributors
Index
