Social space in the writings of early modern women

Henri Lefebvre in his work, The Production of Space describes “representational space” as being “alive. It speaks... It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations.” Manuel Castells reiterates this view of spatiality when he argues, “Space is not a reflection of society, it is society.” This work explores the way in which the texts of five early modem women insert into the dynamics of spatial production alternative constructions and possibilities. Aemilia Lanyer accesses the discourse of the country house, inserting alternatives to authoritarian cultural constructs in her poem “The Description of Cooke-ham.” Isabella Whitney draws upon discourses of the city to create both a celebration and a complaint of her experience of London. Her poem, “The Maner of her Wyll & What She Left To London...” uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to represent the social spaces of the city and the place of the individual within it. The diary of Margaret Hoby reveals another kind of relationship to social space. This diary is explored using the concepts of body-ballet and time/space routine. What is revealed is Hoby’s subjective representation of a personal geography. The elegiac poetry of Elizabeth Russell is inscribed in the sacred spaces of the culture, on the monuments of her husband and children.

Through this spatial act Russell sought to mediate the damage death wrought upon her and her “house” or family. Her poetry also serves as a vehicle through which she performs her construction of self-identity. Jane Seager, in her gift book to Queen Elizabeth, seeks to appropriate deities of space, the sibyls, in order to enter imaginatively into the social spaces of the Queen. In this way she seeks to secure some form of agency. The writing of each of these women draws upon what Lefebvre terms representational space, as a means to explore the spatiality of their period and insert alternative constructions into a spatial dialogue that was increasingly focused on conceptual spaces of emerging mathematical processes, cartographic imaging and methods for the measurement and traversing of space.