Dissertation Abstract

Taking a comparative approach, my dissertation puts into conversation the letters of writers from different language traditions. Reading the extant correspondence of four women letter-writers between 1540–1640 in England, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, the thesis focuses on the use of the rhetorical tropes of exemplarity and exceptionality. The thesis argues that women letter-writers construct their epistolary personas as exemplary or exceptional in collaboration with their correspondents, in order to increase their authorial agency. Unapologetic about their actions—beyond moments of rhetorical modesty—these writers attempt to increase support and minimize opposition by courting allies who are already in positions of influence. Their invocation of exemplarity and exceptionality is based on the writers’ autobiographical experiences, allowing them to develop epistolary personas that are effective in their correspondences.

The first two chapters examine women whose correspondences position them as “exceptional” figures, both in their own letters and the letters of others.Chapter One reads the correspondence of Luisa Sigea, a humanist working at royal courts in Portugal and Spain. She invokes the praise she received from Pope Paul III for her exceptionality in her letters to further her later career. Chapter Two looks at the surviving letters of Irish clan leader Gráinne Ní Mháille. The combination of a handful of petitions by Ní Mháille in the 1590s with a large bureaucratic correspondence about her from the 1570s and ’80s illuminates the ways in which English bureaucrats’ interpretation of her actions as “exceptional” informs Ní Mháille’s own self-presentation in her petitions. The third and fourth chapters examine the letters and documents of two writers whose “exemplary” lives are constructed in negotiation with their epistolary personas. In Chapter Three, Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza represents her often-radical religious practices as part of the exemplary tradition of martyrs and saints, culminating in her move to London in 1605, where she hopes to evangelize Catholicism and achieve martyrdom. Chapter Four looks at Elizabeth Cary, as she attempts to reconcile her recusant Catholicism with her role in a Protestant family and kingdom, by positioning herself as an exemplary wife, mother, daughter, subject, and Christian.