Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History

In early modern England, beautiful women occupied a central cultural place. As subjects of poetry and painting by men, Sidney's Stella, Spenser's Elizabeth, and Shakespeare's Dark Lady are well known. We know much less about how early modern women regarded beauty culture. Divided into three sections, on cosmetics, clothes, and hairstyling, individual chapters focus on fiction by Aphra Behn, Mary Wroth, and Margaret Cavendish, advice by Elizabeth Jocelin, Queen Henrietta's Maria's masques and a printed volume of recipes, and manuscript writing—domestic recipe collections, account books, letters, and historical chronicles-by Margaret Spencer, Brilliana Harley, Anne Clifford, and others. Through beauty practices, women developed their knowledge of medicine and employed their understanding of the body's cultural meanings. Skin, clothes, and hair could be used to represent racial, class, and gender identities, to convey political, religious, and philosophical ideals, and to question how literature commonly represented women as objects of desire.