In Whores of Babylon, Frances E. Dolan offers a perceptive study of the central role that Catholics and Catholicism played in early modern English law, literature, and politics. She contends that despite sharing the same blood, origins, and history as their Protestant antagonists, Catholics provoked more prolific and intemperate visual and verbal representation, and more elaborate and sustained legal regulation, than any other marginal group in seventeenth-century England. This careful and thorough study examines legal and literary representations of the "Catholic menace" during three crises in Protestant/Catholic relations, from the Gunpowder Plot (1605) to the Popish Plot and Meal Tub Plot (1678-80). It also offers the first sustained analysis of the extent to which gender issues informed both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in the early modern period. Available for the first time in paperback, this book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern England, Catholic history, and gender studies.

Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture

Dolan, Frances E.

Reference

University of Notre Dame Press

While Shakespeare did not create rebellious feminists in the modern sense of the term, nevertheless it is fascinating to see the variety of ways his heroines operate in, rebel against, attempt to rule, or are crushed by a hierarchical, male-oriented social structure.
Shakespeare's Unruly Women examines the ways in which the Victorian period interpreted Shakespeare's characters according to their own notions of what it meant to be a woman. It includes material from the late 18th and early 20th centuries but focuses primarily on the ways in which Shakespeare's heroines were appropriated into the moral, literary, and theatrical cultures of the 19th century. It looks at specific heroines, and at the turn-of-the-century psychoanalytic commentary occasioned by the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 1916.

Shakespeare's Unruly Women

Arts & Photography

Roberts, Jeanne Addison

Ziegler, Georgianna

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Folger Shakespeare Lib

Looking back at images of violence in the popular culture of early modern England, we find that the specter of the murderer loomed most vividly not in the stranger, but in the familiar; and not in the master, husband, or father, but in the servant, wife, or mother. A gripping exploration of seventeenth-century accounts of domestic murder in fact and fiction, this book is the first to ask why.Frances E. Dolan examines stories ranging from the profoundly disturbing to the comically macabre: of husband murder, wife murder, infanticide, and witchcraft. She surveys trial transcripts, confessions, and scaffold speeches, as well as pamphlets, ballads, popular plays based on notorious crimes, and such well-known works as The Tempest, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale. Citing contemporary analogies between the politics of household and commonwealth, she shows how both legal and literary narratives attempt to restore the order threatened by insubordinate dependents.

Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Cornell University Press

In the seventeenth century, the largely Protestant nation of England was preoccupied with its Catholic subjects. They inspired more prolific and harsher criticism and more elaborate attempts at legal regulation than did any other minority group. To understand this phenomenon, Frances E. Dolan probes the verbal and visual representations of Catholics and Catholicism and the uses to which these were put during three crises in ProtestantCatholic relations: the gunpowder plot (1605), Queen Henrietta Maria's open advocacy of Catholicism in the 1630s and 1640s, and the popish and meal tub plots (16781680). She uses each crisis as a jumping-off point, an opportunity for speculation, as did contemporary writers. Drawing on political, religious, and legal writings and offering fresh readings of literary texts such as Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, Dolan shows how often Catholics and Catholicism were linked to disorderly women. Dolan maintains that since Catholics were members of many English families and communities and prominent at court, the threat they offered was precisely that they could not be readily isolated and assigned to a category--both laws and polemic struggled to identify Catholics, but never succeeded in establishing a clear line between Catholics and everyone else. In seventeenth-century England, Dolan says, the threat of Catholicism lay in the tension between the foreign and the familiar, the different and the same.

History

Europe

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what—or who—must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan contends, that its logical consequence is conflict.
Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime," and late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other.
In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce conflict, both companionship and competition.

Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy

University of Pennsylvania Press

Awarded the 2014 Jon Ben Snow Prize by the North American Conference on British Studies.
In the motley ranks of seventeenth-century print, one often comes upon the title True Relation. Purportedly true relations describe monsters, miracles, disasters, crimes, trials, and apparitions. They also convey discoveries achieved through exploration or experiment. Contemporaries relied on such accounts for access to information even as they distrusted them; scholars today share both their dependency and their doubt. What we take as evidence, Frances E. Dolan argues, often raises more questions than it answers. Although historians have tracked dramatic changes in evidentiary standards and practices in the period, these changes did not solve the problem of how to interpret true relations or ease the reliance on them. The burden remains on readers.
Dolan connects early modern debates about textual evidence to recent discussions of the value of seventeenth-century texts as historical evidence. Then as now, she contends, literary techniques of analysis have proven central to staking and assessing truth claims. She addresses the kinds of texts that circulated about three traumatic events—the Gunpowder Plot, witchcraft prosecutions, and the London Fire—and looks at legal depositions, advice literature, and plays as genres of evidence that hover in a space between fact and fiction. Even as doubts linger about their documentary and literary value, scholars rely heavily on them. Confronting and exploring these doubts, Dolan makes a case for owning up to our agency in crafting true relations among the textual fragments that survive.

True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England

British & Irish

A detailed study of seventeenth century farming practices and their relevance for today We are today grappling with the consequences of disastrous changes in our farming and food systems. While the problems we face have reached a crisis point, their roots are deep. Even in the seventeenth century, Frances E. Dolan contends, some writers and thinkers voiced their reservations, both moral and environmental, about a philosophy of improvement that rationalized massive changes in land use, farming methods, and food production. Despite these reservations, the seventeenth century was a watershed in the formation of practices that would lead toward the industrialization of agriculture. But it was also a period of robust and inventive experimentation in what we now think of as alternative agriculture. This book approaches the seventeenth century, in its failed proposals and successful ventures, as a resource for imagining the future of agriculture in fruitful ways. It invites both specialists and non-specialists to see and appreciate the period from the ground up. Building on and connecting histories of food and work, literary criticism of the pastoral and georgic, histories of elite and vernacular science, and histories of reading and writing practices, among other areas of inquiry, Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the seventeenth century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows. Dolan analyzes the stories seventeenth-century writers told one another in letters, diaries, and notebooks, in huge botanical catalogs and flimsy pamphlets, in plays, poems, and how-to guides, in adages and epics. She digs deeply to assess precisely how and with what effect key terms, figurations, and stories galvanized early modern imaginations and reappear, often unrecognized, on the websites and in the tour scripts of farms and vineyards today.

Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture (Haney Foundation Series)

Twelfth Night: Language and Writing (Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing)

Frances E. Dolan examines the puzzling pronouns and puns, the love poetry, mischief, and disguises of Twelfth Night, exploring its themes of grief, obsessive love, social climbing and gender identity, and helping you towards your own close-readings.

Dramas & Plays

The Arden Shakespeare

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dolan, Frances E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dolan, Frances E.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dolan, Frances E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture

Shakespeare's Unruly Women

Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700

Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture

Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700

Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy

Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy

True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England

Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture (Haney Foundation Series)

Twelfth Night: Language and Writing (Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing)