English 791EM - S- Early Modern Revolutions

The political, religious, literary, media, social, and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century created a world that was, by the end of this period, recognizably modern. This course surveys the literary and other writings of this century of revolution, reading writers such as John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Dorothy Osborne, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton alongside radical political and religious writings from the British civil wars; letters and diaries; and writing in such genres as travel, education, medicine, and science. The course pays particular attention to writing by women, and explores such topics as the intersection of the political, the religious, and the literary, and the material culture of books, manuscripts, reading.