Includes bibliographical references (pages 272 - 286) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: The change of fourteen years -- "A spectacle to men and angells" : Juliet Capulet and the case of Mary Glover -- "Imagination helps me" : liberating brainwork in Comus, Othello, and The two noble kinsmen -- "The progresse of an art" : daughters and the invention of new knowledges -- "If I should tell / my history" : memory, trauma, and testimony in Pericles and Hamlet -- "Put on the minde" : cognitive play in Gallathea, The winter's tale, and The Convent of Pleasure -- "From thirteene yeares ... resolved to serve God" : Mary Ward's adolescent brainwork -- Coda: "to think upon -- &c".
Summary:
"In this groundbreaking study of girlhood and cognition, Caroline Bicks argues that early moderns depicted female puberty as a transformative event that activated girls' brains in dynamic ways. Mining a variety of genres from Shakespearean plays and medical texts to autobiographical writings, she shows how "the change of fourteen years" seemed to gift girls with the ability to invent, judge, and remember what others could or would not. Bicks challenges the presumption that early moderns viewed all female cognition as passive or pathological, demonstrating instead that girls' changing adolescent brains were lightning rods for some of the period's most vital debates about the body and soul, faith and salvation, science and nature, and the place and agency of human perception in the midst of it all"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.