My thesis, supervised by Professor Lorna Hutson, considers fictions of first-person female speech in Renaissance verse and drama. It begins by interrogating traditional feminist arguments about the legal status of women in pre- and early modern England through a reinterpretation of the ‘raptus’ statutes from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, as well as by casting light on women’s participation in sixteenth century common law actions for sexual defamation. Underpinning these legal historical arguments is my intention to illuminate a proprietary understanding of female chastity, which I argue stylistically transformed poetic and dramatic fictions of the ‘female voice’ in English Renaissance literature. I examine the relationship between property, propriety and proper style in literary humanism, Ovidian complaints of the 1590s, the works of Shakespeare and contemporary verse histories. This research is supported by the Clarendon Fund, AHRC and Magdalen College. Before the DPhil, I completed the M.St. English (1550-1700) at Merton College and a BA in English at UCL.
Publications
"Reading Satire in The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (1632)", Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, University of Texas School of Law, 2026. 2025 Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice. https://sites.utexas.edu/workingpaperseries/wp-content/uploads/sites/5428/2026/06/WPS_-Han-Norris2026-2.pdf
