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Book Cover
Book
Author Orlin, Lena Cowen.

Title Private matters and public culture in post-Reformation England / Lena Cowen Orlin
Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1994

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  941.06 Orl/Pma  AVAILABLE
Description xiii, 309 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Series ACLS Humanities E-Book (Series)
Contents Ch. 1. The Place of the Private. Alyce Ardern's Rapes -- Ch. 2. Patriarchalism and Its Discontents. Patriarchalism in Practice -- Ch. 3. Virtue and Domestic Interest. The Key and the Cogito -- Ch. 4. Domestic Abdications. Impertinent Tragedies
Summary According to Holinshed's Chronicles, Thomas Arden was murdered by his wife, her lover, and several accomplices in 1551. Holinshed apologizes for including in his state history what seems to be "but a private matter," although at the same time he asserts that the "horribleness" of the act justifies public retelling. Alice Arden's crime was popularized in Arden of Feversham (1592), a play that initiated the genre of domestic tragedy and thrust private conflict onto the stage of public discourse
Weaving a complex tapestry out of intellectual history and literary analysis, Lena Cowen Orlin examines how the private issues of contentious marital relations and household governance became public - through conduct manuals, sermons, political tracts, and philosophical treatises, as well as domestic tragedies - in the culture of post-Reformation England. Orlin first draws on rich archival evidence in telling the story of the Ardens. Although Arden of Feversham fulfilled the conservative project of confirming patriarchal authority in the home at a time of social upheaval, Orlin finds that later domestic tragedies such as A Woman Killed with Kindness and Othello were less predictable in their aims
And while other forms of public literature provided blueprints for ordering the household, domestic tragedies continued to reveal the tensions lying under the surface there: inconsistencies in the prescribed role of women, contradictions within patriarchal ideology, conflicts between political and economic interests in the household, inadequacies in the old ideals of friendship and benefice, and anxieties about the control of material possessions
Analysis Culture History
England
Notes Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [271]-297) and index
Notes English
Subject Arden, Thomas, -1551 -- Drama.
SUBJECT Arden of Feversham. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n83234896
Subject Public opinion in literature.
Privacy in literature.
Property -- England -- History.
Privacy -- England -- History.
Patriarchy -- England -- History.
Domestic drama, English -- England -- History and criticism.
Reformation.
Domestic drama, English -- History and criticism.
Patriarchy -- England -- History -- 16th century.
Property -- England -- History -- 16th century.
Privacy -- England -- History -- 16th century.
Reformation -- England.
SUBJECT England -- Social life and customs -- 16th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85043321
Genre/Form Drama.
Author American Council of Learned Societies.
LC no. 94001035
ISBN 0801428580