Herin Iole Han

My thesis 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, and by casting light on examples of women’s participation in sixteenth century common law actions for sexual defamation. Uniting these legal historical arguments is my intention to illuminate the emergence of an explicitly proprietary conceptualisation of chastity and female sexual honour, which I argue stylistically transformed poetic and dramatic fictions of the ‘female voice’ in the English Renaissance. I apply this interest in the relationship between property, propriety and proper style to discussions of literary humanism, Ovidian complaints of the 1590s, Shakespeare's plays, and verse histories. It 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.