Anne Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Manuscript

Abstract

V arious economies of writing operate in the early part of the seventeenth century, some involving money, others not, all of them primarily male-oriented, and therefore operating in a distinctive way for individual early modern women. “Constantia Munda,” in authoring the satiric pamphlet The Worming of a mad Dog , shows herself to be in a unique relationship to male-dominated literary culture: that is, if the feminine pseudonym conceals a female author. There are few candidates for the identity of “Constantia Munda”: she had a knowledge of Latin and possibly Greek, an extensive familiarity with the formal gender debate, and a facility in the satiric mode. 1 Anne, Lady Southwell, is probably one of the best we have, and this article begins with a consideration of her qualifications for authorship of The Worming of a mad Dog . Her elite education, confidence as an author, and interest in the gender debate are manifest in her manuscript poetry: but Anne Southwell also outlines in her manuscript work a previous career in “flouting,” which is rhetorically configured scorn, and is Esther Sowernam’s derogatory description of Joseph Swetriam’s pamphlet—in other words, exactly the kind of writing in The Worming of a mad Dog . 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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