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the dangers within: fears of imprisonment in enlightenment france
This article examines the changing nature of fear in Enlightenment France. While the growing power of the absolutist state reduced many traditional sources of insecurity, fears of state power proliferated during the eighteenth century, prompting leading figures of the French Enlightenment to turn their attention to the problem of political fear: its sources, its effects, and the means for overcoming it. One of the unifying aspects of the Enlightenment was its commitment to reducing the burden of fear in human existence. From that standpoint, however, political fear posed a particular challenge since the objects on which it focused could not be dismissed as purely imaginary. Unlike such traditional religious terrors as hell, purgatory, and the Devil, police agents, police spies, and prisons really existed. And yet political fears too were mediated—and magnified—by collective imaginaries. The fear of imprisonment stands out as a key example of such a phenomenon. Best-selling prison memoirs published in the early 1780s sought to mobilize public opinion against lettres de cachet (administrative arrest warrants) by evoking the horrors of imprisonment, and especially its psychological torments: solitude, tedium, uncertainty about the future, and the looming threat of insanity. In these works, prisoners inhabit a separate self-contained world, helpless before the omnipotent will of their jailers, who rule over them like " oriental despots. " The wide dissemination of terrifying images of the prison contributed to building the public pressure for the abolition of lettres de cachet during the Revolution, but the enormous commercial success of the memoirs suggests that some readers found the depictions of life behind prison walls darkly fascinating as well as terrifying. Much the same could be said of readers' responses to the exposés of Revolutionary prisons published after Thermidor, the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the fictional universe of the Marquis de Sade, all of which drew heavily on the carceral imaginary invented under the Old Regime. * I would like to thank Madeleine Dobie, Howard Brown, Andrew Curran, Carol Freedman, and Sophie Rosenfeld, as well as the anonymous readers for Modern Intellectual History, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 339
Narrow Confines: Marginalia, Devotional Books and the Prison in Early Modern Women’s Writing
Women's Writing, 2018
This essay examines sixteenth-century women's marginalia in devotional books as a mode of transmission, particularly in circumstances of where early modern women themselves were in circumstance of limited circulation, under house arrest or imprisoned. Recent work on prison literature has highlighted the importance of the prison as a crucible for writing in early modern England. However, it has focused less on the material cultures through which such texts were circulated, which for women writers in particular included marginal annotations to texts then circulated through domestic and coterie circles to a broader world. Anne Boleyn, Jane Dudley, Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart all circulated writing as marginalia while under forms of imprisonment, providing a means of political engagement through lamentation, critique and protest. This essay uncovers the ways in which such texts constructed and disguised their political objectives, as well as the material means through which these prison poems were transmitted, showing the ways in which material and rhetorical cultures operated together to make meaning in this neglected group of texts. Early modern women routinely annotated their books of hours and private prayer books with signatures, marks of ownership, notes on significant passages, short lyrics, letters, drawings and, more rarely, extended poetic and prose works. Largely overlooked in histories of early modern women's writing, the marginal material in these volumes comprises a diverse new corpus of early modern women's textual activity and, viewed collectively, indicates the importance of marginalia as a mode of transmission for women. Particularly in the case of queens and princesses held in a variety of carceral environments, including house arrest and confinement in the Tower of London, marginal annotation of devotional books becomes an orthodox means of textual circulation, a way of attaching the imprimatur of the devotional text to their own writing, and a way of continuing to assert their faith and their leadership of spiritual communities outside the narrow confines of their imprisonment. These forms of authorship foreground the material text to make their meanings: annotations are carefully positioned under images
SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1999
amously analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, the restructuring of the socio-symbolic economy of illegalities was a crucial element in the rise of the middle classes in eighteenth-century France (1979). In this essay I explore how art practices participated in this bourgeois "redistribution of illegalities" (Foucault 1979, 87). In my view, the cultural work of recoding criminality in France may be usefully understood as part of a larger cultural "project" of middle-class self-representation.' As the middle classes gained hegemony in eighteenth-century France, the urban poor, particularly the female domestic servant, were increasingly coded in new moral terms as the low other of the bourgeoisie. Middle-class opposition to violations of their own property rights found expression in new visual tropes of homo criminalis, which publicly circulated in paintings and engravings. In a complementary way, by the 1770s and 1780s, the moralizing and politicizing codes operating in bourgeois art practices tended to decriminalize certain acts committed against seigneurial and monarchical privilege.
This essay considers biographies of Catholic women written after their deaths, largely by priests who served as their confessors, and the saints' lives which these biographies took as their models. The purpose of this essay is twofold: to draw attention to a significant body of Catholic writing, and to use this material to shed new light on the one text of this group that has gained considerable critical attention , The Lady Falkland, Her Life , a biography of Elizabeth Cary by one of her daughters, a Benedictine nun. Considering the Life as a participant in a subgenre of Catholic biography reveals the tension between the conventions and precedents available to Cary's biographer, on the one hand, and her intractable subject, on the other. The Life , like other similar biographies, borrows from and verges on hagiography, but is particularly unsuccessful at transforming its subject into a saint. While criticism of Cary and her works continues to dwell on her as eccentric and exceptional, determined by the particularities of her own character and experience, she is as like other female subjects of Catholic biography and hagiography as she is unlike them. This can only be seen by attending to the kinds of texts that Cary and her daughter might well have read, and the parameters they set for writing an eminent Catholic woman's life. These texts figure reading and housework as the chief means by which Catholic women define and sustain their confessional identities in the hostile environment of post-reformation England.
The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers, 2007
In her discussion of the literary representations of seventeenth-century English Catholic women, the cultural critic Frances E. Dolan states that "Catholics provoked more prolific and intemperate visual and verbal representation and more elaborate and sustained legal regulation than any other group" (8). Although Catholics were not only the wealthiest, but also the largest minority group in post-Reformation England, the Protestant orientation of much seventeenth-and eighteenth-century histories and literary studies has tended to obscure the important role of Catholics in shaping British history and literature; only recently have critics taken on the work of examining this history as shaped by and as a response to Catholic women. 1 This essay considers the role that English Catholic nuns and their convents performed in the formation of a secular Catholic history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In spite of the Rule of the Clausura, which resulted in the implementation of architectural barriers between the cloister and the outside world, and the geographical dislocation that separated British Catholics from their cloistered relatives abroad, the textual histories of the secular accounts discussed here suggest that the boundary between laity and religious was quite permeable. 2 Both groups of women shared the same religious and political concerns and worked cooperatively to preserve a shared Catholic identity. 3 Furthermore, laywomen not only corresponded with their cloistered relatives, but also visited and lodged with them at their convents. As I argue, one important function of the English convents abroad was their preservation and legitimization of Catholic laywomen's narratives of political and religious resistance in England. Not only were the English cloisters safe houses for fleeing recusants from England: they also safely housed the heroic accounts that these recusants brought with them.