Monograph Project

Dressing Authority: The Politics of Fashion in English Women’s Writing, 1616-1676
Dressing Authority considers literary and nonfiction representations of unusual, innovative, and even imaginary clothing in seventeenth century women’s writing, ranging from stomachers made from a local swan and worn by “sheriffess” Lady Anne Clifford to the unexpected “tinsel” and “scarlet” that poet and biographer Lucy Hutchinson describes in her account of her husband. As this project shows, these forms of resistant dress represented strategic political speech, targeted against their own political cohorts. I examine drama, poetry, and autobiography by Clifford, Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Wroth, and Mary Carleton, women writers writers who faced contested political status during their careers, wielding substantial influence through political connections, colonialist networks of goods, and public fame, but also facing resistance on the basis of their genders. As this study shows, all used these discordant discourses of dress to express forms of intra-party dissent, rejecting royal, Cromwellian, or courtly hegemonies, and putting forth their own claims of power based in local, aristocratic, and coterie political authority.

Peer Reviewed Work

“To Suffer Satans Buffets”: Temptation and Public Worship in the Diary of Margaret Hoby
In Women and Communal Worship: Performing, Shaping, and Writing the Christian Liturgy, 1500-1750, ed.Jaimie Goodrich and Micheline White
University of Delaware Press, Forthcoming
This essay considers the relationship between Satanic temptation and representations of public, Puritan spirituality in Lady Margaret Hoby’s well-known diary (1599-1605). While early scholarship on Hoby’s diary often characterized it as a “private” document of Puritan spirituality that gradually yields to the secular demands of Hoby’s life, the diary in fact weaves together individual devotional practices (like “praier” and “examination”) with various forms of public worship: Sunday services, daily “lector” at public prayers, and sacraments performed at these services, including baptism. And I argue that the cycles of temptation and “release” in Hoby’s text perform closely related work. Considering Hoby’s temptation cycles as not just an element of internal Puritan struggle, but rather as one of many devotional experiences that link two related sides of faith–public and private–I show how Hoby’s cyclical temptations reflect a textually-marked struggle against the devil that intertwines with her publicly-performed faith. I place her rhetorical methods of spiritual combat alongside theological literature important to her sacramental practice, including the writings of William Perkins, Richard Greenham, and John Udall, and examine how Hoby’s repeated accounts of spiritual combat intersect with public prayer, communal reading, the sacraments, and even her public duties as member of the Yorkshire gentry. Through Hoby’s use of temptation rhetorics, we can see a public-facing Puritan theology that figures the devil as an integral part of life for the elect individual, one who must be combatted but (perhaps beneficially) will never be entirely vanquished.

Singular Modes: The Politics of Dress in Cavendish, Evelyn, and Hutchinson
English Literary Renaissance, 2024
Margaret Cavendish’s and Lucy Hutchinson’s sartorial presentations have often been regarded as largely apolitical: Cavendish’s a part of her eccentric public persona, and Hutchinson’s a badge of puritanism and wifely sobriety. This essay argues instead that Cavendish and Hutchinson deploy politically charged (and surprisingly comparable) rhetorics of dress in their writings, both harnessing the power of fashionable singularity to express intra-party dissent. Examining two of Cavendish’s plays, A Piece of a Play and A Comedy of the Apocriphal Ladies, and Hutchinson’s biography of her husband, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, this analysis shows how both writers push back against a politic of modish copying as expressed by writers such as John Evelyn, whose Tyrannus imagines standardized fashion as a way to underscore the power of bureaucratic gentry regulators after the Restoration. Analyzing the ways that Hutchinson and Cavendish both harness discordant dress as a form of political critique (albeit to disparate political ends) reveals how powerful rhetorics of dress travelled across seventeenth-century political divides, and helps push our understanding of the sartorial sensibilities of both writers beyond the frameworks of austere puritan wife or extravagant dresser.

“A veil of obscure mourning”: Widow’s Attire and Political Authority in Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo and True Relation
Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2021

Visualizing the Widow Self: Politics, Agency, and Androgyny in Lady Anne Clifford’s Great Picture
Clio, 2020

Chapters, Reference Articles, and Book Reviews

“A Serving-Man to become a Queen”: Digitized Woodcuts and the Gender/Class Slide in “The Famous Flower of Serving-Men”
Early Modern Criticism and Politics in a Time of Crisis, 2022