cross-channel connections: early modern english noblewomen's familiarity with continental...

Cross-Channel Connections: Early ModernEnglish Noblewomen’s Familiarity withContinental Women’s Literary and PerformancePractices

Julie Campbell*Eastern Illinois University

Abstract

In this article, I consider studies that allude to or explore connections betweenlearned, English noblewomen and Continental women during the mid-sixteenthto mid-seventeenth centuries. With the recovery of many women’s works fromthis period, scholars have long recognized that fascinating parallels existed betweenthe cultural milieux of learned English and Continental women. Beyond simplyrecognizing parallels, scholars are now interested in exploring the points of contactand sources of influence between these milieux. They find that English noblewomen’sfamiliarity with Continental women, both of noble and lower classes, was facilitatedin large part by the journeys of learned travelers, Continental players, dance masters,and musicians. In particular, I focus on works that illustrate ways in which tutors,ambassadors, scholars, and courtiers assisted in the spread of knowledge about learnedEnglish and Continental women, as well as how elements of dramatic entertainmentsfeaturing women, both for the court and the public stage, crossed national borders.Key questions in the study of early modern English women that interest scholarsare, how much did English women know about their Continental counterparts,and what were their frames of reference? This article surveys scholarship thataddresses these questions.

Scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England are becomingincreasingly interested in considering what, in essence, is Continental aboutliterary and performance practices for English noblewomen. While Englishpolitical and religious concerns clearly leave their marks on such culturalpractices, it is important to keep in mind the larger international context,in which, as Peter Stallybrass reminds us, England was seen as a marginaloutpost of Western Europe.1 Although few direct references to Continentalwomen exist in the works of English women there is a growing body ofscholarship that examines parallels and connections between the practicesof English and Continental women and their respective scholarly and literarymilieux. Moreover, a related area of study is the dramatic performancepractices of Continental women of which English women would have had

© 2007 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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knowledge from theater-going and participation in court masques. In thefirst part of this article, I note studies that discuss the spread of knowledgeabout the literary practices and educations of English and Continental womenfrom the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. In the second part, Ilook at those that explore the channels through which English women wereexposed to Continental dramatic performance practices for women.

Regarding English women who made direct references to learnedContinental women in their works, it is clear that the Seymour sisters andElizabeth Tudor knew much about Marquerite de Navarre, as the Seymours’distichs in memory of Marguerite, published in the Hecatodistichon (1550),and Elizabeth’s translation of Marguerite’s Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (1544)for her stepmother, Catherine Parr, illustrate. Much later in the period, inher ‘Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen’ (1673), theeducator Bathsua Makin mentions several learned Continental women,including Olimpia Morata, Anna Maria von Schurman, Christina, Queenof Sweden, and Lorentia Sforza.2 During the span of years between theworks of Elizabeth, the Seymour sisters, and Makin, numerous Englishwomen with elite educations wrote, translated, took part in literary circles,and acted as literary patrons, just as did their female contemporariesabroad. That the educations and literary activities of Continental womenwere of interest to such English women is certain, whether or not Englishwomen made textual reference to them.

In ‘Women Writing Literature in Italy and France’ (2000), Pamela Bensonpoints out that

[i]n theory, any published work by an Italian or French woman writer wasavailable to her English counterpart who was literate in Italian or French, butinformation about which books were physically present in England is limitedand discovering who among the English women writers had access to these booksis extremely difficult. (69)

She adds that ‘Veronica Franco’s name appears on John Florio’s list of bookshe consulted in writing his entries for A Worlde of Wordes (1598)’ and thatthe ‘first printed catalog of the Bodeleian Library at Oxford (1605) includesvolumes by [Vittoria] Colonna and [Tullia] d’Aragona’ (69). She also notesthat the second edition (1620) includes Isabella Andreini’s Lettere. Suchtantalizing references to the presence of books by Continental women inEnglish collections suggests that English women did have some access tothe actual works of Continental women, but, as Benson states, specificknowledge about access to such books is difficult to find; thus, scholars turnto comparative analyses of English and Continental literary practices.

A good starting point for consideration of parallel literary practices byEnglish and Continental women is The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyricin Europe, 1540–1620 (1990), by Ann Rosalind Jones. In it Jones analyzesways in which women poets’ works exhibit similar practices of negotiationregarding the poets’ places in their literary milieux. Basing her analysis upon

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the central Marxist cultural notion of negotiation, Jones assesses the‘give-and-take’ between

two complex institutions: the mixed gender ideologies produced by political andsocial transformations in early modern Europe, and the network of classical, earlyRenaissance and contemporary texts composing the discursive territory ofsixteenth-century love poetry. (2–3)

In the process, she examines poetry by Isabella Whitney, Catherine desRoches, Pernette du Guillet, Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, MaryWroth, Louise Labé, and Veronica Franco, providing insightful comparisonsbetween the works of these writers and the ways in which they negotiatedthe social and cultural strictures of their times. This study has inspired muchinterest in exploring the historical connections that made possible the spreadof these literary notions and practices for women writers.

Knowledge of learned women and their accomplishments spread througha variety of print sources, as well as the correspondence and conversationof tutors, ambassadors, scholars, and courtiers, who moved in courtly circlesboth in England and on the Continent. While few studies cover thisphenomenon as a primary topic, several allude to it in their discourses aboutwomen’s writing, education, and fame. Those selected for this survey,including Jane Stevenson’s Women Latin Poets (2005), Brenda M. Hosington’s‘England’s First Female-Authored Encomium: The Seymour Sisters’Hecatodistichon (1550) to Marguerite de Navarre’ (1996), Jan van Dorsten’s‘Literary Patronage in Elizabethan England: The Early Phase’ (1981),Stevenson and Peter Davidson’s Early Modern Women Poets (2001), DonaldCheney and Hosington’s Elizabeth Jane Weston: Collected Writings (2000),and my Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe (2006), are usefulresources for consideration of what learned English and Continental womenknew about each other.

In Women Latin Poets, Jane Stevenson notes that the ‘English were makingpolitical capital of their countrywomen’s reputation for learning by as earlyas 1550’, and she cites John Coke’s Debate betweene the Heraldes of Englandeand France in which Coke praises the women of Sir Thomas More’shousehold (255).3 Stevenson especially attributes the international fame ofthe More daughters and foster-daughter Margaret Gigs Clements to ThomasMore’s friendship with Desiderius Erasmus, who widely praised the Morehousehold, as well as corresponded with Margaret More Roper and‘broadcast her fame in his writings’ (256–7). As for Continental influenceupon the education of such young English women, Stevenson points outthat it was possibly Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Fernando andIsabel, ‘who provided the model for the new style of educated woman’(253). Stevenson also reminds us that Queen Elizabeth herself was ‘one ofthe most scholarly members of her court’, noting that she received ‘a fullhumanist education in Latin, Greek, and modern languages’ and that she‘spoke extempore in Latin on a number of . . . occasions’ (261). Elizabeth,of course,was the most famous learned English woman and, as noted above,© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 751–765, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00449.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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was no doubt cognizant of the reputations of learned women on theContinent, of which we shall see more below. Additionally, Stevensonaddresses the international fame of the Cooke and Seymour sisters, youngProtestant Latinists who followed the Catholic More sisters in the successionof widely advertised learned English women (258–68). Regarding thedaughters of Sir Anthony Cooke and Continental connections, Stevensonnotes that it is

particularly interesting to find that Cooke, father of famously learned daughters,was in friendly contact with Coelius Secundus Curio, who educated his daughters,spoke strongly in favor of women’s education, and edited the works of his closefriend Olimpia Morata. (261)4

Stevenson recounts Mildred,Anne, and Elizabeth Cooke’s facility with Latinand notes that Charles (Karel) Utenhove of Ghent, a Protestant scholar,tutor, and ‘son of a personal friend of Erasmus’, circulated Mildred CookeCecil’s letters in Paris (266). Regarding the Seymour sisters, Stevenson alsoconsiders the circulation of their work in Paris by their tutor Nicolas Denisot(258–60) in conjunction with his orchestration of the publication of theirdistichs upon the death of Marguerite de Navarre, a topic that BrendaM. Hosington takes up at length in ‘England’s First Female-AuthoredEncomium: The Seymour Sisters’ Hecatodistichon (1550) to Marguerite deNavarre’.

In her article, Hosington provides a detailed discussion of how Denisot,the French tutor, poet, and, most likely, spy, facilitated connections betweenthe household of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and esteemed Frenchliterary circles, including that of Antoinette de Loynes and her husband Jeande Morel, hosts of the famous Morel humanist salon in Paris.5 Via theirverse, which he had published in the Hecatodistichon of 1550, he introducedAnne, Margaret, and Jane Seymour to Loynes and her daughters. Loynes,in turn, wrote a laudatory poem about these English sisters and translatedinto French some of their distichs for Le Tombeau de Marguerite de ValoisRoyne de Navarre (1551).6 As Hosington notes, the list of contributors for LeTombeau ‘reads like a directory of the Pléiade, and the volume includes somepieces, those of Ronsard, Du Bellay and Dorat, in particular, that would berepublished in later collections of poetry’ (118). Such distinguished attention,Hosington suggests, is due to the Hecatodistichon causing ‘a stir in Paris literarycircles’, and she notes that Charles de Sainte-Marthe ‘used it to launch anappeal to French poets to rise up and write poems in honor of Marguerite’(118).7 The women of the Morel family, Antoinette and her daughters,Lucrèce, Diane, and especially the renowned Camille, were among thelearned Continental women most familiar to noble, learned English womenduring this period. That familiarity, as others also demonstrate, was a resultof the journeys and correspondence of tutors and other learned travelers.

Two other sources of importance regarding such travelers are Jan vanDorsten’s ‘Literary Patronage in Elizabethan England: The Early Phase’ and,again, Stevenson’s Women Latin Poets. Dorsten notes that the members of



the Morel salon, Daniel Rogers, a well-known neo-Latinist, and Utenhove,who was a tutor to the Morel children,8 were also visitors to the home of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and comments on their activities as‘go-betweens’ between the Morel and Cecil households (195). Stevensonpoints out that Utenhove encouraged Jean de Morel to allow his daughterCamille to enter into a literary correspondence with Lord Burghley’s wife,Mildred Cooke Cecil, although it is not clear that the two actually exchangedletters.9 Moreover, Stevenson observes that Utenhove facilitatedcorrespondence between Camille and Johanna Otho, another youngneo-Latinist in Belgium (Women Latin Poets, 190, 239).10 The circulation ofinformation about the Seymour, Cooke, and Morel women facilitated bytutors is mirrored in similar connections between female scholars and theGerman poet and classicist, Paul Melissus.

The introductions to poetry in Stevenson and Davidson’s Early ModernWomen Poets contain much contextualizing information pertaining to thespread of knowledge about learned English and Continental women. In theentries for Elizabeth I and the English expatriate Elizabeth Weston inparticular, the editors note that Melissus corresponded with Elizabeth I anddedicated poetry to her. He was, moreover, an intimate of the Weston circlein Prague, a city that ‘provided an environment relatively friendly to womenwriters and scholars’ (133). In an older source on the topic, ‘Elizabeth I asa Latin Poet: An Epigram on Paul Melissus’ (1963), James E. Philips pointsout that Sidney, Rogers, and George Gilpin were ‘intermediaries betweenthe Queen and Melissus’ (294). He traces the history of Melissus’s friendshipswith these men, especially Sidney, and discusses Melissus’s positive receptionfrom Elizabeth (296–8). Another view of Melissus’s broad network comesfrom the entry for Camille de Morel in Women Latin Poets. Stevenson pointsout that Melissus pursued Morel in hopes of exchanging verse with her,after having been made acquainted with her work by Utenhove. Stevensonalso notes that in addition to his links to Morel, Elizabeth I, and Weston,Melissus befriended several other women Latinists, including Johanna Otho,Johanna and Anna von Pallandt, Anna Utenhovia, Margaretha Bock vanGutmansdorf, Petronia Lansenberg, Mildred Cecil, Rosina Schede, andMaria Thou (240). Clearly, as his connections with these female scholarsand numerous male scholars of the period suggest, Melissus’s correspondencewas a key conduit for the spread of knowledge about learned women.

Regarding the international fame of Weston, or ‘Westonia’, in theirintroduction to Elizabeth Jane Weston: Collected Writings (2000), Cheney andHosington note that in addition to her friendship with Melissus, Westonwas in contact with several other learned men who were part of her circleand promoted her work. Especially of note is the Silesian aristocrat GeorgMartinius von Baldhoven.11 Cheney and Hosington write that through the‘indefatigable Baldhoven [Weston] became known to other internationalfigures mentioned in Parthenica, such as the scholar-poets Daniel Heinsiusand Justus Lipsius’ (xvi). They also explain that she had admirers ‘across



northern and central Europe, as well as in England’ (xvi), listing the Dutchhumanist scholars Jan Dousa and Joseph Scaliger among her correspondents.Regarding her connections in England, they point out that Westoncorresponded with Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to Rudolf ’s court, StephenLesieur, and the English courtier Edward Dyer, a close friend of PhilipSidney (xvi). Her connections with illustrious men facilitated by Baldhoven’sefforts to advertise her talents, in addition to her own exchanges of poetryand letters with them, aided the spread of Weston’s international scholarlyreputation.

To continue the illustration of the rather small world of connectionsbetween courtly learned women in England, Prague, and Paris during thisperiod, Stevenson notes that thanks to the efforts of such men as Utenhoveand Melissus, Weston and her circle were also familiar with the work ofCamille de Morel. She further traces knowledge of Morel in England bypointing out that the ‘would-be courtier’ Gabriel Harvey solicited versefrom Morel to be presented to Queen Elizabeth in his GratulationesValdinenses (1578).12 Finally, to emphasize the knowledge of learnedContinental women available to the Queen, Stevenson notes that ‘whileElizabeth was normally served by English noblewomen, her entourage atvarious times included Helena Snakenburg, a Swede, and Mary Yetswiert,a Belgian . . . ;’ thus, it is ‘not unrealistic or impossible that she might haveemployed Camille either as a foreign language tutor/secretary, or at somefuture point,had she married . . . as a tutor to a daughter’.13While the namesof Camille de Morel, her mother Antoinette de Loynes, and her sistersLucrèce and Diane were no doubt familiar to Queen Elizabeth, as well asto the Seymour, Cecil,Weston, and Sidney circles, information about learnedwomen of other Parisian literary salons would also have been available tothem, thanks to the peregrinations of scholarly travelers.

In particular, the Sidney circle would have had intimate access to suchknowledge via the travels of family members. In Literary Circles and Genderin Early Modern Europe (2006), I comment on ways in which Philip Sidney’searly association with the Cecil family could have facilitated his knowledgeof the Morels, as well as how his travels on the Continent provided himopportunities to become acquainted with members of the salons ofClaude-Catherine de Clermont, the maréschale de Retz, and Madeleine deL’Aubespine, Madame de Villeroy (135–8). These salons especially flourishedfrom the early 1570s through the 1590s and were frequented by the leadingliterary figures of the period, as well as members of the court, the latterparticularly in the case of the more highly placed Retz family.14 Loynes,Clermont, and Villeroy were well-known among their circles for theirscholarship, translations, and poetry. They mainly circulated their work inmanuscript, so, unfortunately, little of their work is extant. I note that Sidneywould have encountered habitués of their salons among the nobles, royals,and poets of the French court, as well as during his visits to Vienna.15

According to Sidney’s biographer James Osborn, the group with which



Sidney and his entourage were associated dined at the Retz home on June18, 1572 (41). Moreover, Sidney’s friendship with Jean de Vulcob,ambassador to Vienna 1570 –76, provides a connection with the Villeroycircle. Vulcob was a cousin of Madeleine d l’Aubespine, and his poetryappears in Bibliothèque nationale ms. fr. 1718, one of the manuscriptsbelonging to the Villeroy group (Campbell 137). In general, Sidney’s grandtour provided him numerous opportunities to become familiar withContinental salon culture, and he apparently shared his knowledge of suchmilieux with his family and circle of friends in England.

It would seem that Mary Sidney Herbert learned much about Continentalwomen’s literary practices from Philip Sidney’s experiences in elite literarysociety in Paris,Vienna, and Prague. Soon after he returned from his grandtour and his ambassadorial trip to Prague in 1577, and Mary became theCountess of Pembroke, something resembling a Continental literary circleemerged in Sidney’s group of family, friends, and protégés, and Mary’s rolein it greatly recalled those of Continental hostesses and patronesses (136–8).Her brother Robert, too, the father of her niece Mary Wroth, hadopportunities to learn about the activities of courtly French women and passsuch knowledge along to Herbert. He was an ambassador to the court ofHenri IV from January to April of 1594, during which period, as JosephineRoberts notes, he ‘developed a close friendship with Gabrielle d’Estrées,the king’s mistress’.16 Herbert, her kinswoman Lucy Harington Russell, andher niece Mary Wroth, along with several other courtly English women,participated in English literary society in ways that reflect Continentalinfluence, such as providing patronage for poets, writing their own works,translating the works of others, and participating in manuscript circulationof their works. Although such practices for English women were clearly invogue in courtly circles, they were not universally lauded.

Another important facet of English women’s familiarity with Continentalwomen was the negative ‘press’ that Continental women received inEngland. The English Querelle des femmes incorporated the use of Continentalwomen as negative exempla, and writers such as John Harington, John Lyly,and Edward More discouraged English women from imitating them (94–5,123–9). In ‘To his Wyfe of womens verteues’, Harington criticizes courtlyEnglish women who ‘entertayn great princes’ and ‘have lerned / Thetongues, toyes, tricks, of Room, of Spain, of Fraunce’ (lines 291– 2). InEuphues Glasse for Europe, Lyly chides the ‘Gentlewomen’ of Italy and Greecefor using ‘sonnets for psalmes’ and ‘pastymes for prayers’ and claims thatthey often read love letters when they should be reading the ‘Gospell of ourLord’ (2:198–9). In contrast, he holds up virtuous English women who ‘usetheir needle to banish idleness, not the pen to nourish it’, and he asserts thatthey do so, ‘Contrarie to the custome of many countries, where filthiewordes are accompted to savour of a fine witte’ (2:201). More decries Romanwomen as ‘proner to offend and to venery’ than are English women in ALittle and Brief treatise called the defense of women (1560), and he blames their



faults on Italy’s hotter climate (qtd. in Henderson and McManus 13). Suchevident anxiety on the part of some English male writers regarding learnedContinental women’s literary practices also carried over into derisivecomments about Continental women’s performance practices, especiallythose of professional actresses.

Thomas Nashe famously pronounces the popular Italian actresses whoplayed the roles of learned, elegant innamorate and wiley servants ‘whoresand common courtezans’ in Pierce Penilesse (1592).17 His comments, takeninto consideration with Shakespeare’s and others’ incorporation of Italianatecharacters, locations, and literary sources into their plays, suggest that thepractices of Italian players and playwrights were popular enough to makethe native literati and dramaturges a bit insecure. In particular, theperformance practices of Continental women that began to invade theEnglish stage prompted such comments as those of Nashe, as well as,paradoxically, a host of mimetic characters in English plays.

In their introduction to Women Players in England, 1500–1660, PamBrown and Peter Parolin note,

In the alternative playing areas of the street, alehouse, market square, parish green,manor house and court, women could be found performing; connecting theseplaces were female spectators, patrons, and traveling entertainers. (1)

English noblewomen, of course, were especially likely to see such entertainersin plays, in manor houses, and at court. English noblewomen themselveswere also performing at court during this period in court masques that werestrongly influenced by those at European courts. Like Madame de Retz,who performed in entertainments for the French court, including the famousBallet Comique de la Reine (1581), Russell and Wroth were popular performersin court masques during the Jacobean period. Russell performed in suchproductions as Samuel Daniel’s Vision of Twelve Goddesses (1604) and BenJonson’s Hymenaei (1606) among others, including his Masque of Blacknesse(1605) and Masque of Beautie (1608), in which Wroth also danced. In‘Women/“Women” and the Stage’, Ann Thompson points out that the‘standard edition of Ben Jonson gives a list of forty-five women who appearedin Jonson’s masques alone’ (106). English women, then, had two sources ofinformation about the dramatic performance practices of Continental women:the public stage and the dance roles they learned for masques.

Studies that address dramatic performance practices and images ofContinental women to which English women would have been exposedinclude the essays in Women Players in England, 1500–1660, edited by PamelaAllen Brown and Peter Parolin (2005), ‘Italian Actresses in Shakespeare’sWorld: Flaminia and Vincenza’ (2000) and ‘Italian Actresses in Shakespeare’sWorld: Vittoria and Isabella’ (2001), by Frances Barasch, and ‘TheCounterfeit Innamorata or The Diva Vanishes’ (1999), by Pamela AllenBrown. Also, In ‘Women/“Women” and the Stage’ (1996),Ann Thompsonprovides an extensive overview of connections between English womenand the stage in the seventeenth century and includes mention of Continental



female performers. Regarding English women’s participation in courtmasques, Clare McManus comments on masquing in the Stuart Court andtraces its Continental roots in Women on the Renaissance Stage (2002). In ‘TheQueen’s Courts: Anna of Denmark and her Royal Sisters – Cultural Agencyat Four Northern European Courts in the Sixteenth and SeventeenthCenturies’, Mara Wade observes the ways in which Anna of Denmark andher three sisters ‘made an indelible mark on the arts and learning at the courtsof London, Dresden,Wolfenbüttel, and Gottorf ’ (49). Finally, in ‘ “Not asMyself ”: The Queen’s Voice in Tempe Restored’ (2003), Melinda Goughexamines French precedents for the performances of Henrietta Maria andher ladies in Tempe Restored. These studies cover a wide range of connectionsbetween English women and dramatic performance practices of Continentalwomen.

Some essays in Women Players in England specifically refer to those byBarasch and Brown, which examine the impact of the Italian prima donnaupon the English theater scene, and the volume as a whole showcasesscholarship that illustrates Continental influence upon the English stage,takes into account the effects of play-going on female audience members,and explores English women’s performances in court masques and amateurplays in France and England. In her two articles on ‘Italian Actresses inShakespeare’s World’, Barasch details what is known about Flaminia ofRome, Vincenza Armani, Vittoria Piisimi, and Isabella Andreini and theeffects that roles for such actresses had on female characters in Shakespeare’splays. Brown elaborates on this information in ‘The Counterfeit Innamorataor The Diva Vanishes’. She notes that in addition to travelers sending toEngland ‘word about Italian companies and their women players’, Italianactors were ‘regularly called to the courts of Elizabeth, James, and Charles’(404). She observes that

Italian women acrobats appeared at Elizabeth’s court in 1566; Italian players atcourt collaborated with Ferrabosco on a comedy in 1576; Angelica Martinelliand her husband Drusiano and their company performed before Elizabeth in1577–8; a Masque of Amazons was translated for Italian players in 1579; and Italiantroupes toured England in 1577 –8 and again in 1603 . . . French troupes withwomen players appeared at Blackfriars, Red Bull, and Fortune in 1629, and atthe Phoenix in 1635. (404)

Moreover, she writes that ‘Shakespeare created simulacra of the diva foraudiences that couldn’t hope to see her’, pointing out that in the

later years of Elizabeth’s reign, just as Isabella Andreini,Angelica Martinelli,and Diana Ponti were playing leading roles with elaborate speeches, cross-dressing . . . , feigning death, and going mad, or pretending to be . . . ,Shakespeare was writing As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Much Do About Nothing,Merchant and Hamlet. (408–9)

These circumstances regarding performances by and representations ofperformances by Continental actresses inform much of the work in WomenPlayers in England.© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 751–765, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00449.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


Especially in Parts Two,Three, and Four of Women Players, ‘Beyond theEnglish Channel’, writers focus on the influences of professional performancesby Continental actresses, as well as courtly performances by Continentalnoble and royal women. Bella Mirabella surveys the phenomenon of femalemountebanks appearing in England in ‘ “Quacking Delilahs”:Female Mounte-banks in Early Modern England and Italy’ (89–105). In ‘Reading the Actressin Commedia Imagery’, M. A. Katrizky examines the textual and pictorialrecords of Italian actresses, and includes numerous comments from Englishsources such as Nashe, Thomas Norton, Ben Jonson, John Day, FynesMoryson, and Thomas Coryat (128–9, 136, 139–40). In ‘ “Merry, Nimble,Stirring Spirit[s]”: Academic, Salon and Commedia dell’arte Influence on theInnamorate of Love’s Labour’s Lost’, I point out that this comedy appears in1594–95, placing it in the midst of the period during which Italian actresseswere en vogue, and I consider the ways in which its female characters exhibitthe performative practices of Italian actresses as well as the académiciennes andsalonnières associated with the French court (145–7). In ‘ “Pleaders,Atturneys,Petitioners and the Like”: Margaret Cavendish and the Dramatic Petition’,Julie Crawford points out that Cavendish’s ‘sense of the impact of womenperformers was honed in her time by Henrietta Maria’s court . . . and byher experience with women players in Antwerp’ (241–2, note 1).

The essays of Melinda J. Gough and Peter Parolin in Women Playersprovide a transition to consideration of the influences of courtly amateurtheatricals, with their Continental roots, on English women performers. In‘Courtly Comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women’s Stage Playsin France and England’, Gough considers connections between the courtof Charles I and ‘professional women actors, including actresses from Italy’(193). She persuasively argues that the

most logical influence on Henrietta Maria’s own acting . . . was a cosmopolitanFrench court milieu deeply sensitive to international fashion and in which,underthe aegis of Henrietta Maria’s mother Marie de Medici, elite young womenactively participated in amateur theatricals by modeling themselves on travelingprofessional actresses. (194)

Parolin, in ‘The Venetian Theater of Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel’,presents an assessment of how the Countess of Arundel, having performedin court masques in England,‘drew on their tropes and techniques to defendherself years later when she was accused of involvement in the Foscariniscandal’ in Venice (223). He notes that the countess also likely drew upon‘her experience in Italy, where women were celebrated for their participationin the professional theater’, and he concludes that the ‘world of Italianperformance thus offered Lady Arundel examples of women who occupiedcenter stage, garnered adulation, and exercised institutional power in thetheater’, all of which ‘could have enhanced the Countess’s confidence inconfronting the Foscarini affair’ (226–67). These essays in Women Players allspeak to aspects of Continental performance practices for women to whichEnglish women were exposed.



In ‘Women/“Women” and the Stage’ (1996),Ann Thompson notes thatbefore 1660, when English women began playing female characters on stage,there were foreign female performers in England. She writes that in 1511,‘two Flemish women piped, danced and played before Henry VIII’, andthat ‘some Italian women shocked Thomas Norton with their “shamelessand unnaturall tumbling” at Elizabeth’s court in 1574’. She also points outthat ‘French actresses were included in the companies that visited the courtof Charles I in 1629 and in 1635’ (104). She observes that during theCommonwealth period, women performed regularly on the Continentalstage and ‘would have been seen there by Royalists in exile’ (105), and sheincludes Margaret Cavendish’s remarks on watching a female actor whileshe was abroad. Finally, she notes that court performances by English womenespecially became prevalent under the influence of Anna of Denmark andHenrietta Maria (106).

Regarding English court masques, a genre of entertainments profoundlyinfluenced by Continental precedents, Clare McManus examines the impactof women’s performance by following the course of Queen Anna’s ‘careersin the Danish, Scottish, and English courts of the late sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries’ in Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmarkand Female Masquing in the Stuart Court 1590–1619 (1–2). Especially in theher first chapter, McManus comments on dance step and masque traditionsas they appear in Continental dance manuals and masque descriptions,as well as in English performances. She notes in particular that from therecords of Continental dance sources available, ‘scholars have identified apan-European elite dance discourse and practice defined in opposition tonon-courtly dance . . .’, one ‘disseminated through the pan-European cultureof courtly entertainments, ambassadors’ reports, and European travel andtravellers’ texts’ (22).Clearly, notions about women’s participation in courtlydance spread in the same ways that information about their literary andeducational practices did. Regarding specific examples of Continentalperformances that influenced English masques, McManus discussescharacteristics of the Ballet Comique de la Reine (1581) and the Ballet deMonseigneur de Vandosme (1610) (39–46).

Especially in her section on Anna, Queen of Scotland and England, in‘Anna of Denmark and her Royal Sisters . . .’, Wade discusses Anna’sinfluences upon women and performance practices in England. She looks,for example, at Anna’s patronage of Jonson and Inigo Jones and suggeststhat the ‘context of the elite cultural production at the Danish and alliedGerman courts serves to deepen the arguments which can be made forAnna’s own considerable contributions to English Renaissance culture’ (61).She then explores connections between Anna’s innovations at the Englishcourt and performance practices at the Danish court. She specifically notesthat ‘the conceit of the Masque of Blackness – that the Queen and her ladiesappear as blackamoors – was considered entirely unprecedented’ in England;however, in 1596, her brother Christian IV had appeared in



his own ‘masque of blackness’, an entertainment consisting of a dance by Moorsand Roman heroes . . . Thus, some of the highest levels of Danish nobility, muchlike the high-ranking English ladies in Anna’s Masque of Blackness, [had worn]black-face for a court entertainment. (61–2)

In the article as a whole,Wade examines how royals, nobles, musicians, andEnglish itinerant troupes of players traveled between the courts in Scotland,England, Dresden, Wolfenbüttel, and Gottorf, acting as ‘cultural conduits’that were especially linked to female cultural agency (51, 63, 66–7).

Continuing the discourse of Continental influence on women’s perfor-mances at the English court, in ‘ “Not as Myself ”: The Queen’s Voice inTempe Restored’, Gough examines ‘gendered casting practices on both sidesof the channel’, as well as ‘those French court ballets that provide precedentsfor the female characters and feminine allegorical personages found in TempeRestored’ (50). Considering French influences upon the performances ofQueen Henrietta Maria and other ladies of the court, Gough notes that inFrance, ‘by the second decade of the seventeenth century, . . . professionalacting companies not only in the provinces but also in Paris had begun regularlyto include women actors’, and she further points out that in ‘amateur plays,moreover, especially pastorals, French royal women and female courtiersmight speak or sing’ (51). Against this background of French performancetraditions for courtly women, Gough considers the interactions of femaleperformers, including their spoken and singing voices, in Tempe Restored.

As this select overview of studies suggests, numerous cultural links existedbetween English and Continental women during the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, thanks to the journeys of scholars, courtiers, troupes of comedians,musicians, and dance masters, not to mention queens, who traveled betweenthe courts and scholarly milieux of Europe and Britain.What such womenknew of each other’s educational achievements and literary and performancepractices is an area of early modern women’s history that scholars arebeginning to mine in earnest, and their findings reveal fascinating informationabout women’s participation in scholarly and literary circles. Their researchalso illustrates numerous ways in which English noblewomen had access toknowledge about dramatic performance practices for Continental women.These areas of study are ripe for further exploration, as are such related topicsas the practices of such women as patrons and playwrights. The emerging pictureof English and Continental women’s activities in all of these areas illustratesthe ways in which women scholars, writers, patrons, and performers were criticallyimportant agents of cultural and artistic development during this period.

Short Biography

Julie D. Campbell is Associate Professor of English at Eastern IllinoisUniversity. Her areas of study are Renaissance and seventeenth-centuryliterature with a specialization in the works of Continental and Englishwomen writers. She is the editor and translator of Isabella Andreini’s pastoral



tragicomedy, La Mirtilla (MRTS 2002) and the author of Literary Circles andGender in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate 2006). She has also contributed workto Women Players in England, 1500–1660 (Ashgate 2005),Comparative CriticalApproaches to English Prose Fiction, 1520 –1640 (Dovehouse 1998), ReadingEarly Women (Routledge 2004), Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance(ABC-Clio 2007), and the Brown Women Writers Project, RenaissanceWomen Online (1999). She has received a National Endowment for theHumanities Summer Stipend to support her research, as well as participatedin the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, ‘ALiterature of Their Own: Venice, Paris, London’. She holds a Ph.D. inEnglish from Texas A&M University where she was a research assistant forthe World Shakespeare Bibliography.

Notes

* Correspondence: Eastern Illinois University – English, 600 Lincoln Avenue, Charleston, Illinois61920-3099, USA. Email: [email protected].

1 See Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marginal England: The View from Aleppo’, Center or Margin: Revisionsof the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin,The Apple-ZimmermanSeries in Early Modern Culture (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 31.2 See Makin 115, 116, 117, 125.3 Another useful text on women writing in Latin is Women Writing Latin from Roman Antiquity toEarly Modern Europe, in three volumes edited by Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and JaneE. Jeffrey (New York: Routledge, 2002).Volume 3, Early Modern Women Writing Latin, includesdiscussion of some English and Continental women in touch with each other via correspondencein Latin and other languages.4 Coelius Secundus Curio (1503 –69) knew Olimpia Morata in Ferrarra. He, however, ‘fled tothe Protestant north’, taking the chair of Latin literature at Basel. He had four learned daughterswho died of the plague in their twenties (Stevenson, Women Latin Poets 231). Morata (1526–51)was the daughter of Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, a ‘man of letters and a professional grammarian’who taught in several universities (285). She was a tutor/companion for Anna, daughter of theDuchess of Ferrara, at the Court of Ferrara where Morata wrote poems and dialogues and ‘deliveredthree Latin essays on Cicero’s Paradoxes’ (286). Because of her Protestant convictions, she, too,eventually had to leave Italy.5 The Morel salon was frequented by such literary luminaries of the time as Jean Dorat, SalmonMacrin, Michel de l’Hôpital, Joachim du Bellay, and Pierre de Ronsard. In Studies on the LiterarySalon in France, 1550 –1615, L. Clark Keating posits that Macrin’s wife, Gélonis de Borsala, andL’Hôpital’s wife, Marie Morin, may have been among the other female habituées of the Morelsalon (24–31).6 Hosington 117 –18, 158 –60. See also Samuel F. Will, ‘Camille de Morel: A Prodigy of theRenaissance’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 51.1 (1936): 85, note 14.7 Keating points out that L’Hôpital sent translations of the Seymour sisters’ verses to Margueritede France (40).8 Utenhove was employed as a tutor for the Morels from c.1557 –61; however, he remained aclose friend of the family after leaving his position as a tutor (Keating 24, 31).9 There is no extant correspondence between Camille de Morel and Mildred Cecil, and no oneknows if such an alliance ever blossomed, but the efforts of Utenhove to strengthen the connectionsbetween the famed Cecil household in England, which Jan van Dorsten calls, ‘England’s nearestequivalent to a humanist salon in the days after More’ (195), and the Morel salon is noteworthyregarding the pertinent information to which English courtly women had access regardingContinental literary activities of learned women. See Stevenson, Women Latin Poets, 190.10 See also Will 103.



[email protected]

11 Regarding Elizabeth Jane Weston, or ‘Westonia’, and her circle, see also Donald Cheney’s ‘Makingthe List: The Evolution of Ravisius Textor’s Catalogue of Learned Women’ in Acta ConventusNeo-Latini Abulensis: Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Medievaland Renaissance Texts and Studies 207 (Tempe,AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and RenaissanceStudies, 2000), 177–82.12 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets 191. Harvey, also an acquaintance of Philip Sidney, could haveserved as one of the several possible conduits of knowledge about the Morels for the Sidney circle.Regarding his association with Sidney, see Duncan-Jones 117–20.13 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets 190–1.14 For more on these circles, see Keating 81–125; Campbell, Literary Circles 73–96; Christie EllenSt-John’s dissertation, ‘The Salon Vert of the Marechale de Retz: A Study of a Literary Salon inSixteenth-Century France’, Ph.D. diss. (Vanderbilt University, 1999), 17 –46; Colette H. Winn’sintroduction to Cabinet des saines affections, by Madeleine de Villeroy (Paris: Honoré Champion,2001), 15–19.15 In Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet, Duncan-Jones writes that Sidney ‘made an enormous numberof new acquaintances and friends, from the King of Navarre downwards’, and posits that Ronsardmay have been among those he met, as well as Michel de L’Hôpital, whose work Sidney praisesin the Defence of Poesy (61–2). Ronsard was associated with the Morel, Retz, and Villeroy circles,as well as that of Marguerite de France, and L’Hôpital was especially associated with the circles ofthe Morel family and Marguerite de France (Keating 25, 39–43).16 See Josephine Roberts’s introduction to The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 140 (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Textsand Studies, 1995), xcii.17 Nashe 90.

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cross-channel connections: early modern english noblewomen's familiarity with continental...

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