“Our Mother-Tongue”: The Politics of Elizabeth Elstob’s Antiquarian Scholarship

Abstract

This essay examines the heretofore neglected political context of Elizabeth Elstob's published defenses of Anglo-Saxon antiquities, evaluating her High Church Tory allegiances and uncovering the relationship between her own motives as a feminist antiquary and contemporary political debates that mixed partisan ideology with emergent cultural standards of patriotism and politeness. The essay's comparative investigation of Elstob's prefaces to her English-Saxon Homily (1709) and her Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715) shows Elstob shifting away from conventional antiquarian rhetoric and objects of study toward the polite discourse of literary criticism where she posits the patriotic instrumentality of the English monosyllable.

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