Amy Merrill:
Hi, everybody. We're going to get started now. My name is Amy Merrill, and I want to welcome you all to this special salon titled, Shakespeare's Sisters: A Tale of Four Extraordinary Renaissance Women Writers.
Amy Merrill:
First, I'll introduce myself. I am an alum, class of '69, and a long-time member of the Brandeis Alumni Association. I've also been an engaged and active supporter of the Brandeis Arts Council, which is committed to the arts at Brandeis as well as Brandeis alums in the arts.
Amy Merrill:
I am a playwright, and so, this topic, writing, illuminating the lives of forgotten women, is something that's very dear to me. Personally, I have written a play about Jane Adams, and I had the good fortune of hearing it read at Brandeis a couple of years ago.
Amy Merrill:
So, first, I see you all coming in. Thank you so much. Welcome. And please, in the chat section of this webinar Zoom conference, please identify yourselves. We'd love to know who's here. And after the discussion between me and Professor Targoff, we're going to go to a Q&A section and we'll be using the chat function for your questions. We'll also be using the raised hand command. We really want to have as many questions as possible. So, again, welcome. So glad to see you, all of us.
Amy Merrill:
As you can see, Professor Targoff has invited us into her study this evening for a fascinating look into the lives of four extraordinary women writers who were Shakespeare's contemporaries. As this is a humanities-focused salon, I wanted to take a moment to share that this year marks the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Mandel Center for Humanities where Professor Targoff is the Jehuda Reinharz Inaugural Director.
Amy Merrill:
Brandeis has had an extraordinary renaissance in the humanities thanks to the transformative gift from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. The humanities at Brandeis provides students the opportunity to engage in the ideas, texts, images, and language cultures that have shaped human experience across time and place. This unique interdisciplinary approach to inquiry is woven into the fabric of our institution.
Amy Merrill:
At the Mandel Center, students and faculty from across campus participate in programs, courses, and lectures that explore major themes of human experience. As a research university with enduring concerns for ethical participation in a complex world, the humanities is an essential part of our Brandeis commission and core values.
Amy Merrill:
Now, it's my great pleasure to introduce Ramie Targoff, Professor of English, co-chair of Italian Studies, and the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis. Professor Targoff teaches and studies renaissance literature with emphasis on lyric, poetry, and women's writing. She has written books on the invention of common prayer, on the works and poet of preacher John Don, and on renaissance love poetry. Her latest book, a biography of Vittoria Colonna, was published in 2018. And her translation from Italian of Colonna's 1538 Rime, the first book of poetry ever published by a woman in Italy, will appear in the Fall of 2020.
Amy Merrill:
Professor Targoff is currently writing Shakespeare's Sisters, a joint biography of four women writers in Renaissance England to be published in 2022, and that is the topic of our salon.
Amy Merrill:
So, welcome Professor Targoff.
Ramie Targoff:
Thank you. Welcome to everybody. Thank you all for being here.
Amy Merrill:
Yes. So, we're going to start off ... Because, as many of you know, Shakespeare's Sister is a particularly famous passage in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. In that passage, Woolf describes a fictional character whom she refers to as Shakespeare's sister, Shakespeare's biological sister, who is, like William, similarly gifted, accomplished, and yet never gets a chance to achieve, to realize her gifts.
Amy Merrill:
Like Shakespeare, she goes to London, but instead of becoming a woman of the theater, she's seduced and abandoned by one of Shakespeare's colleagues and dies in the street.
Amy Merrill:
So, we'll start off this conversation by saying this book of yours is about four extraordinary English renaissance women, and how do their lives square with Virginia Woolf's pessimistic description of the sad future of English women in the Renaissance?
Ramie Targoff:
Okay. So, Mennen, who is our tech expert here, would you put up, just so people can see this quotation? I'm not going to read the whole thing, but this is the brunt of what Amy is talking about. So, in what, to me, was my first introduction, really, to feminist theory, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which I read as an undergraduate in college. I'm sure many of you have read it or seen parts of it at different stages.
Ramie Targoff:
She goes on this imaginative rant about how impossible it would have been for a woman in the Renaissance to have achieved anything, and she conjures up an imaginary figure, Shakespeare's sister. And I just want to pull out a couple phrases just to give you a feeling for it.
Ramie Targoff:
So, this is around three lines down. She says, "Any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century would clearly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half-witch, half-wizard, feared and mocked at." Okay. And this goes on and on.
Ramie Targoff:
She says, just to go to the last line, "Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination."
Ramie Targoff:
So, here we have one of our champion women writers of the 20th century, one of the really great feminist writers on the one hand, saying that it was absolutely impossible for a woman ever to write anything. She would have gone crazy, she would have shot herself, she would have been accused of witchcraft and so forth.
Ramie Targoff:
So, this is the sort of challenge for me of writing this book, is to respond to Virginia Woolf, who, as I say, is kind of our pinnacle of achieving what women writers can do, and to say, "Wait a second, this sounds right. This corresponds to what I, as an undergraduate ..." I graduated from college in 1989 as an English major, and the first woman whom I read was Jane Austin. So, in my mind, at Yale College in 1989, I thought there were no women writers before Jane Austin. Maybe Fanny Burney.
Ramie Targoff:
But the point is, when I studied renaissance literature, and I have a PhD in renaissance literature, I never encountered a single woman. And actually, interestingly, that goes through my PhD. So, I had four years of undergraduate study, I had six years of getting a PhD at UC Berkeley in renaissance literature. Never read a word written by a woman before the 1800s or late 1700s.
Ramie Targoff:
So, what I want to say is, on the one hand this sounded right, and then, on the other hand, it turns out that Virginia Woolf is just as stuck in the narrative that we were all stuck in until very recently.
Ramie Targoff:
So, my book is an attempt to respond to Virginia Woolf, to say, "You're absolutely right. It certainly was really quite difficult to break out of the overwhelming patriarchy that dominated Renaissance England, and yet, to say that no one could do this is absolutely not true," and I'm going to show you four examples of women who did.
Amy Merrill:
Thank you. I also understand that there's a Brandeis connection that inspired your writing this book. And I think since we're all very Brandeis people tonight, a lot of us are alums, hopefully you can tell me about that. And I just wanted to mention that earlier in this summer, I was on a panel about distinguished Brandeis alums who have gone off and done a great job in film and TV, and they said, "We are what we are not so much because of our aptitude for film, but because we all took Professor Whitfield's American Studies classes, and it was just automatic that we would go and work in film and TV."
Amy Merrill:
I'm not sure Professor Whitfield is here tonight.
Ramie Targoff:
He is. I see his name. I saw his picture. Yep, he's waving.
Amy Merrill:
Anyway. So, it's a great story and I understand there's a Brandeis connection that describes the spark for this quote.
Ramie Targoff:
Yeah. That's absolutely true. So, I, as I just described my own education, never got to read any women's literature, and I basically perpetuated this in my own teaching until around six or seven years ago when a very distinct colleague of mine ... Maybe it wasn't even so long ago. Maybe it was five years ago. I don't want her to get mad at me.
Ramie Targoff:
But esteemed colleague of mine, Sue Lancer, who taught women's literature in the 18th century and forward, retired. Maybe we overlapped doing this for a year. And at that point, I realized there was going to be this hole in our curriculum, that no one was going to be teaching either renaissance or 18th, 19th century women's literature, and I decided it really behooved me to do this. It was also following my writing and researching a biography of an Italian woman poet from the period, the first woman ever to publish a book of poems in Italy, and that's my book called Renaissance Woman, and that got me more intrigued by the whole project for women of breaking through and of publishing works.
Ramie Targoff:
So, I decided that I would bring this interest and these women into the Brandeis curriculum, and I started teaching a renaissance women's writing class. And what was really fun about this, Amy, and I'm sure other faculty, other teachers on this call will connect to this. Usually, when I'm teaching something, I've either written a book about it or spent a lot of time studying it. I was actually new to almost all the women I was teaching in this class because I really had never had the occasion to read them at all. If I read them, it was very, very minimal.
Ramie Targoff:
So, I was joining my students and I did it as a PhD seminar, as a graduate seminar. So, these were advanced students, and we'd just embarked on this together. And after finishing the course, which I've now taught twice, but after the first time I thought, "These are amazing writers. I know nothing about these women. I'm going to write a book about them." And so, that was actually how the whole thing began.
Amy Merrill:
Well, that's a great beginning. And yet, Professor Whitfield is here tonight. So, welcome.
Amy Merrill:
So, let's talk about the women. We're setting up the context and the reason for the book. Tell us a little bit about the women. I'd love to hear about them generally, their husbands, their children, their education. And also, how do they break out of obscurity, how do they become the published, accomplished women that they really were, even though history has sort of forgotten them?
Ramie Targoff:
Okay. Well, there are a lot of questions in your question, so maybe we'll break them down.
Amy Merrill:
Yes.
Ramie Targoff:
I chose four women to focus on in this book. There are a couple of additional women that I could have included, but for reasons of scale and focus, I chose four who did different things. And when I say, "did different things," I'll explain what I mean by that, but wrote in different genres, had different life experiences, came from different socio-economic classes, although not nearly so diverse as one would imagine, let's say, today.
Ramie Targoff:
So, the four women that I'm writing the book about are the following. The first woman is named Mary Sidney, and she was the sister to one of the most famous poets of the period, a man named Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote an extraordinary sonnet series called Astrophil and Stella. He was really considered with Spenser and Shakespeare. Those are the sort three great poets of the Elizabethan era.
Ramie Targoff:
So, Mary Sidney was Philip's sister. She came from a quite aristocratic family, and then made an extraordinary marriage to the Earl of Pembroke. She lived in an amazing house. I actually have an image of it. Mennen, would you put ... It's actually out second slide, the one right after the ... just to get people a sense of this house so we can imagine where she is. I don't know if Mennen is there. Are you there, Mennen? Well, she'll get it.
Mennen:
Yeah. Sorry. One second.
Ramie Targoff:
That's okay. You can just put up a picture of this house. I just want people to kind of get a sense of where this woman lived.
Ramie Targoff:
So, that's her house, a modest dwelling. So, Mary Sidney was this sister to one of the most famous poets. She was married to the Earl of Pembroke, one of the most powerful noblemen. So, she had everything going for her in terms of privilege and opportunity, and she used it to become, really, the leading woman of letters in the late ... No. We don't need to go forward. Just go back to the ... You can take it off now. I'll tell you when we're ready for another slide.
Ramie Targoff:
And her literary contribution was actually mostly in the field of translation, and that's a common entry point for women in the early periods of literature. If you translate something, it's a more modest gesture. It's not considered an act of hubris, let's say. So, what she did was to translate all 150 Psalms into English in extraordinarily very poetic form.
Ramie Targoff:
So, she just changes her meter and changes her rhyme in almost every poem. So, on the one hand, she is sort of sneaking in the back way because she's doing a translation of a Biblical text. On the other hand, she's showing her amazing skills as a poet. So, that was her great accomplishment, and I just want to say about that accomplishment that, last Fall, when we were still all traveling and able to move around the world, I was in the Bodleian Library in the rare books room in London ... Excuse me. In Oxford. And I had, in my hands, Queen Elizabeth's copy of Mary Sidney's Psalms.
Ramie Targoff:
Because when Queen Elizabeth came to the house I just showed you to visit, Mary Sidney paid the best calligrapher in England, he was the calligraphy professor at Oxford, to make a manuscript for the queen. And so, I was holding in my hands this enormous volume, I mean, it was really half the size of my desk, that was her personal gift to the queen. And my final comment about this, which is not important but I think is just a nice detail, I was turning the pages of this magnificent manuscript that's been preserved since 1599, and all of a sudden, I started to see these outline of flowers on the page, of roses and lilies. And it turns out, at some point in the 400 year history of this book, someone used it to press flowers. So, there were flowers exploding in the middle of Psalms. I mean, it was absolutely exquisite. So, I've requested permission to have it photographed because I'd like to actually reproduce this in my book. Anyway. That's Mary Sidney. That was a long answer to your first question.
Ramie Targoff:
My second woman, and this is interesting for Brandeis' history, is actually a Jewish woman, or at least half-Jewish. Her name is Amelia Bassano Lanyer, and she was the daughter of a Venetian Jewish musician, Baptiste Bassano, who came to England to play the recorder for Henry VIII with his brothers and ended up staying.
Ramie Targoff:
And Amelia Lanyer is a really fascinating character. So, my first woman is very aristocratic. She's a middle-class Jewish woman who was the daughter of a court musician. Her mother was illiterate. We know that because she couldn't sign her name to her will, so she just put an X, and that's basically how we judge literacy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, she couldn't read, but she couldn't write.
Ramie Targoff:
So, here we have a woman born to a Jewish Venetian father, an illiterate mother, who goes on to become the first woman to publish a book of her own poems in the 17th century. And now, actually, Mennen, if you could go to the slide. This is just a title page from her first edition. It might take Mennen a minute to get there so ... Oh. There we go.
Ramie Targoff:
So, her book of poems is called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a very learned title for a woman whose mother was illiterate, which means "Hail God, King of the Jews." And what's interesting about it, and you can see this even in the table of contents there, Eve's Apology in Defense of Women. This is a strong, feminist attack on Adam and on misogyny, on blaming Eve for the Fall. So, it's a defense of Eve. The Tears of the Daughters of Jerusalem. The Salutation Sorrow of the Virgin Mary. So, there are women in three of those four titles.
Ramie Targoff:
But the most interesting thing about this is in her preface to the reader, her letter explaining what she's done, she said that she wanted only women readers. She didn't want men to read her book, and she dedicated her book to 10 or 11, now I can't remember, different women of the time, her contemporary women.
Ramie Targoff:
So, she didn't want women readers, she dedicated the book only to women, and she wrote the book in a fact her poems a defense of women against century after century of misogyny. So, that's my second woman. The other fun, complicated, interesting thing about her, Amy, which we can come back to later, is that she was ...
Ramie Targoff:
So, here we have to book, printed. As you can see, it was printed in 1611. Notice how she's identified by her husband because it was pretty ballsy to publish a book of poems. So, she's called, "Written by Mistress Amelia Lanyer, wife to Captain Alfonso Lanyer, Servant to the King." So, she's sort of hiding her own voice and authority in that respect. Or, she's not, but the publisher is to legitimize her, to make sure everyone knows she's married, that her husband works for the king, and so on. Her husband was also a court musician, in fact. So, you can take away the slides. Actually, we can go to the next slide, Mennen, because it's an image of her.
Ramie Targoff:
The interesting thing ... No. Back one. The interesting thing that happened to Amelia Lanyer, she was completely forgotten for hundreds and hundreds of years. That book was never republished after 1611. And then, in the late 20th century, I can't remember what year it was, this miniature was discovered and was identified to be her. And around the same time, people started to come up with this theory that she was Shakespeare's long, unidentified Dark Lady.
Ramie Targoff:
The Dark Lady is the women Shakespeare wrote his last 27 sonnets to, and he describes her as dark, dark-haired, raven-haired, and as musical, and there's some suggestion she might be Italian, which is really not there, but that's how it's come to be understood.
Ramie Targoff:
Anyway. A lot of critical enthusiasm and energy gathered around Amelia Lanyer as Shakespeare's lost lover. So, that is the context in which her poems got republished. They were published as an appendix, and I feel like this is such a poignant story, is here we have this woman who dared to publish a book of feminist poetry in 1611, and the only reason we rediscovered her was because we thought she was Shakespeare's mistress, and her poems get published in the 1970s as an appendix to Shakespeare's sonnets. So, that's Amelia Lanyer. We now don't believe she probably was Shakespeare's lover. And there are independent editions ... I actually have it right next to me because I was writing about them today. Independent editions of her poems. But that's my second woman.
Ramie Targoff:
The third women ... I'm going to actually jump chronologically because she's connected to Amelia Lanyer. When Amelia Lanyer was a girl ... Excuse me, was a young woman, for a short period of time, she became the tutor to my third woman, who's name is Anne Clifford. And Anne Clifford is the women who is in the triptych, the painting that was on our invitation. Mennen, if you can bring up ... It's actually our last slide, the sixth slide.
Ramie Targoff:
So, one of the fun things, Amy, about writing this book is that a lot of the women overlap. And I'm really writing more of a joint biography. I think of it as a Bloomsbury story with the connections between these women, of which there are many. But one of the very interesting connections is that Amelia Lanyer was hired by Anne Clifford's mother to be her tutor.
Ramie Targoff:
So, this is Anne Clifford at three different stages of her life. On the left, you see her as a girl of 15. You see her lute, and interestingly, Amelia Lanyer's father was a lute player as well as a recorder player, and he actually was the lute instructor to Princess Elizabeth, to Queen Elizabeth before she became queen. So, here you see Anne Clifford with Amelia Lanyer's instrument, in effect, which she also played. There she is as a girl at 15.
Ramie Targoff:
On the other side, she is a woman of 56, and in the middle panel, this is probably my favorite part, she's only in-utero. Her mother is pointing at her stomach to indicate that she has conceived Anne Clifford.
Ramie Targoff:
So, the painting we're looking at tells lots of wonderful stories, but it was commissioned by Anne Clifford during the English Civil War when she finally, after around 43 years, gained her inheritance. And Anne Clifford is the great diarist of the 17th century, so some of you, many of you, will have probably read or at least heard of Samuel Peeps. Anne Clifford is the female Samuel Peeps. She kept a diary from 1603 until 1676 when she died at the age of 86.
Ramie Targoff:
And in her diary, she chronicles her extraordinary, stubborn, legal battle against her father's family, against her husband, against the Archbishop of Canterbury, against King James who at one point locks her up inside Whitehall Palace to try to make her sign over her inheritance, and she manages to sneak out the door, get into a carriage, and run away.
Ramie Targoff:
So, she's a wonderful example of the stamina and perseverance and sheer will it took to battle patriarchy, and she chronicled all of this in her diaries, as I say, for over 70 years.
Ramie Targoff:
Her first entry in her first diary is actually written on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth's funeral, and so, it's a wonderful bracketing of the era. So, she's just lost her queen. She's a 13 year old girl, and she says she's too small to be allowed to march in the funeral with her mother, because her mother is a countess, and so, she's one of the noblewomen marching. So, this is where her diary begins. It ends three weeks before her death, before she took burial. So, she's a diarist.
Ramie Targoff:
Just to quickly summarize where I am, and then I'll go to my fourth one. We have a translator of the Bible and poet. We have a sort of feminist polemicist in Amelia Lanyer. We have a diarist in Anne Clifford, and in addition to being a diarist, she was also a historian and wrote her entire family's history, which went back to the Norman Conquest. And then, my last woman is the one, Amy, who may be closest to your heart, is a woman named Elizabeth Cary who was a ... This is anachronistic language, but was an upper middle-class girl.
Ramie Targoff:
She was born to a very wealthy but untitled lawyer, who wanted nothing more than to get a title to enter the English aristocracy. So, her marriage was to an aristocratic, penniless man who needed money. So, it was that kind of marriage. So, she married someone who went on to become the Earl of Dorset, and she was a child prodigy. Before she was 10, she apparently, by other people's accounts, not just her own, had taught herself French, Italian, Latin, and some Hebrew. And by the time she was 12, she had translated all of Seneca's letters from Latin to English, as well as a big Frenchy book of cartography, and had read and disagreed with Calvin.
Ramie Targoff:
So, this was a woman who, by the time she was a teenager, became famous in England for her extraordinary intellect. And she was married off, as I say, in an arranged marriage that had cynicism on both sides, and that was very typical. We could talk about all their marriages, but this was a very extreme case of that.
Ramie Targoff:
Within a couple years of her marriage, she went on to write the first original play ever written by a woman in the period, and interestingly, this play is about a Jewish princess from the Hasmonean Princess Mariam from the days around the time of Christ, who was murdered by the tyrant, Herod. And it's called The Tragedy of Mariam, and what's among the many interesting things about this extraordinary work of art, this play, this tragedy, who's heroin refuses to back down. She's done nothing wrong, but she stands her ground and refuses to bow down to her husband.
Ramie Targoff:
What's very sort of striking about it, it's in a very close and interesting relationship to Shakespeare's Othello, which had been written a few years earlier. And Elizabeth Cary's daughter says that her mother loved nothing more than to go to theater. She lived in London, Othello was being performed, and there are echos of Othello in the play.
Ramie Targoff:
But what she did is if you would to take Desdemona and give her a lot of fiery rhetoric and make her talk back to Othello in a way she never does, because this character is very strong. So, that's Elizabeth Cary. She went on to write a number of other works over the course of her life. Unfortunately, some of them are lost. She was also the first woman ever to have a biography written about her, and that's an interesting category. Even mediocre men had their biographies written, but women never did, and four of her daughters whom she actually shipped off to Europe to become nuns ... She converted herself from Protestantism to Catholicism, and that's a very long, complicated, interesting story.
Ramie Targoff:
But her daughters, when they were living in a convent in the North of France decided to tell their mother's story, and so, they wrote her life, and that's why we know lots of things that we know about her, thanks to this passing from mother to daughter of her stories.
Ramie Targoff:
So, those are my women. Sorry for going on.
Amy Merrill:
Well, it's easy to fall in love with your subjects, and I think you have to if you're writing a biography or a play about somebody. And these are all wonderful women, and we were talking about the experience. And again, as a playwright, the experience of Elizabeth sitting, and watching Othello, and wishing, as I've often wished when I've watched Othello, wishing that Desdemona wouldn't just accept all the awful things that Othello was saying about her, and she also seems to have a premonition of her eventual death. So, it's reassuring and very humanizing to think of Elizabeth Cary sitting there and thinking, "I've got to do better than that."
Ramie Targoff:
Yeah, absolutely.
Amy Merrill:
So, I fired a lot of questions at you and now we'll try to sort of zero in on a couple of things. There is this theme of obscurity. Unfortunately ... Well, there's two things that we've been sort of touching on. The theme of obscurity, and I think we'd all know, unfortunately, particularly works of women kind of disappear, fall out of favor, and then get brought back. I think we've had experience with that.
Amy Merrill:
But I'm also ... And you've alluded to that, Ramie, in terms of Amelia Lanyer's poems. But I'm also interested in the way tat these women got published or transcended a life. Yes, they had an intellectual, personal life, but actually will be able to transcend that, get published, and everything.
Amy Merrill:
And I also love your point about the fact that they were contemporaries. Maybe they knew each other, or they knew each other's work. And I don't think history of literature makes this point enough, that the great works come out of great comings together of different people.
Amy Merrill:
But anyway. So, the issue of obscurity, how were these four women able to transcend the confines of their lives in the English Renaissance?
Ramie Targoff:
Yeah. I mean, it's a rich and interesting question. I think the first thing to say is that these women, each of them in her own way, was quite well-known at the time and then got completely forgotten. So, it's not the case ...
Ramie Targoff:
So, for example. John Donne wrote poems about two of these women. Ben Johnson and Amelia Lanyer were competing with each other to write the first country house poem. So, these women were actually reasonably well-known before we decided to forget about them, you know? And I think that that's an important point.
Ramie Targoff:
So, it's not that no one at the time could imagine that a woman could do this, it's that, once they were no longer there, they somehow fell off the track. And that has to do with how the canon got formed, and what subsequent centuries valued as good literature versus not, and so forth.
Ramie Targoff:
But having said that, it's not the case that they had tremendous success, necessarily, with their writings. So, going back to Amelia Lanyer, who had this bold book of poetry and really tried to do something kind of amazing, to say, "I only want women readers. I'm only writing for women. I'm only writing about women." It fell flat. And I say it fell flat because it's like a Sicilian road project that just came to a dead end. Nothing was on the other side of it. So, she launched this thing, never got republished. It was in one edition. And she never wrote another book of poems, although she lived another 25 years.
Ramie Targoff:
So, what does that mean? And this is one of the things that's really interesting. Amy, and I know you've worked on women's history, too. We're left to guess and to fill in a lot of blanks. We don't know what people thought about her poems. I can make up some things, but what we know is that they didn't succeed in the marketplace enough to warrant a second edition, let's say.
Ramie Targoff:
And that's interesting because, just as a point of contrast, my Italian Woman, Vittoria Colonna, whose book of poems I've just translated, she saw 12 editions of her poems published in the 10 years after they first appeared. So, there was a market.
Ramie Targoff:
So, on the one hand, Amelia Lanyer published her book of poems. Elizabeth Cary published her play, The Tragedy of Mariam ... And actually, Mennen, if you could bring up ... This is the fifth slide. I think the only one that we haven't looked at yet. Second from the last, just to show you her title page.
Ramie Targoff:
She published her play, but then her daughters talk about several other plays that she wrote which didn't get published. So, where are those plays? What happened to them? Just go back one slide. Yeah. So, notice here, this play is published in 1613, and she sort of hides, a bit, her identity.
Ramie Targoff:
I told you she was famously learned. "Written by that learned, virtuous, and truly noble lady, E.C." So, anyone in the know would have identified her as Elizabeth Cary, but she's also a little bit protecting herself from the marketplace. Her husband was in the high nobility. It was a mixed blessing to be a published author in this period. We talk a lot about the stigma of print anyway that, even for aristocratic men, to allow yourself to be democratized, to be spread around, was something they worried about. And so, for women, that was also the case.
Ramie Targoff:
Having said that, it is important to know that she was recognized as a learned lady. Amelia Lanyer was a published poet. Mary Sidney was actually very esteemed. That had lots to do with the fact that she came from this noble family, that her brother was a famous poet, but she enjoyed tremendous success. She had a kind of salon, a literary salon, at the house you saw, and was widely recognized as being just an immensely gifted poet and writer.
Ramie Targoff:
So, these were people who had name recognition, I would say, to different degrees during their lifetime, and then somehow didn't make the move to posthumous recognition.
Amy Merrill:
Thank you. I just got a note from somebody who says, "Can we hear a little bit more about the life of the queen and what the relationship were with these learned women, with Queen Elizabeth?"
Ramie Targoff:
Yeah, and that's a great question.
Amy Merrill:
And throw in a juicy story or two.
Ramie Targoff:
Okay. So, all four of the women I'm writing about were born to a female queen, Queen Elizabeth. They were different ages. There's actually almost 30 years between the first and the last woman I'm writing about.
Ramie Targoff:
So, when Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 ... Actually, the opening scene and the opening chapter of my book is Queen Elizabeth's funeral because all four women were there in different capacities. So, I've already mentioned that Anne Clifford began her diary that day. She was the youngest. She was 13.
Ramie Targoff:
Amelia Lanyer was there in the crowd because her husband, Alfonso Lanyer, was playing the recorder. She married another recorder player. Her father was a recorder player. And we have an account of how much fabric, how much black fabric, mourning fabric, was given to him to make his clothes for the occasion.
Ramie Targoff:
Mary Sidney was one of the most distinguished mourners at the funeral. She was marching with the other 16 highest countesses in the land. And Elizabeth Cary's husband was the so-called Master of the Jewel House. He was in charge of jewels and so forth. So, all four women were there in different capacities, and all four had, in different ways, a direct relationship to the queen.
Ramie Targoff:
Mary Sidney, who is the oldest of the four, she was 42 when the Queen died, she had actually been a maid at Elizabeth's court when she was a girl. And when I say maid I don't mean she was cleaning the toilets. I mean she was, what they called, "A maid of honor."
Ramie Targoff:
So, one of the fascinating things ... I don't know how many people in the audience have seen the movie The Favorite, which takes place 100 or so years later, but is incredibly smart about how simultaneously glamorous and totally demeaning it was to serve the queen. The maids of honor were the young maidens, unmarried girls, who hung around the queen. They carried her train. They served her meals. They danced and entertained her. But they were in her inner circle.
Ramie Targoff:
And Mary Sidney was invited to be a maid of honor when she was 13. Her mother was one of the gentlewomen of the privy chamber, she was called. Namely, the women who had to be with Elizabeth all the time. And again, this is really well-documented in that film, The Favorite.
Ramie Targoff:
This was a really poisoned gift, to be a gentlewoman of the privy chamber. It meant you had to stay by the queen at all times. The only occasions you were allowed to leave were pregnancy ... Not pregnancy, but giving birth, labor. Because women didn't nurse their own children, she didn't take nursing as an excuse, so you had to come back as soon as you'd recovered, as soon as your convalescence, and other family emergencies. But for someone like Mary Sidney's mother, she spent her entire life serving Elizabeth. The queen didn't even like to sleep alone. Remember, she had no husband. She was the virgin queen. So, the women had to take turns sleeping with her, literally in her bed. So, anyway. Mary Sidney had a very intimate relationship there to the queen.
Ramie Targoff:
And Clifford, on the other end of the spectrum, did as well because her aunt was also one of the gentlewomen of the chamber, and Anne Clifford spent her childhood living at court with her aunt. And she very poignantly says in her diary that the queen said she was going to make her one of her maids of honors. Had the queen not died, she would have been allowed in because she said, "She loved me very much." So, she had a direct relationship.
Ramie Targoff:
My sort of upper middle-class, smart as all hell, Elizabeth Cary doesn't seem to have a relationship with the queen, but I then recently discovered, and this is the fun of doing archival research. I was looking through the queen ... Every summer, the queen would leave London, which would get ... This is too close to our hearts, which would get infested with plague, very, very often. The queen would leave London, where she had several different palaces that she would rotate around, and she would go on what was called her, "Progress," her summer progress. That was like her grand tour.
Ramie Targoff:
And what she would do is visit the homes of her subjects, mostly in the South of England, and this was the invitation you didn't want to receive if you were a landowner in the South of England because you had to not just entertain the queen, but she traveled with her entire court, which means around 1,000 attendants came with her. So, you had to find housing for her, for all of her ... We have lists of the food that had to be ordered. It was just a total nightmare. Anyway. She mostly stayed with extremely wealthy aristocrats who had houses like the one we just looked at.
Ramie Targoff:
But interestingly, when I was doing some research reading the annuls of her progress in the summer of 1592, I noticed that she stopped on the way to Kenilworth, which is one of the great properties owned by the Earl of Leicester. She stopped at the home of Lawrence Tanfield. I thought, "Wait a second. Lawrence Tanfield. That's Elizabeth Cary's father."
Ramie Targoff:
So, Queen Elizabeth was the house guest of Elizabeth Cary for two days when Elizabeth Cary was seven years old. And if I were writing a novel, I would go wild with this, but I'm not. So, all I can say is what must it have been like for this seven year old girl to have her queen stop at her house and spend two days? We don't know.
Ramie Targoff:
Anyway. Amelia Lanyer is the only person who probably didn't know the queen personally. Her father, however, as I said, was the queen's lute instructor, and one of his court musicians. So, whether she ever got to accompany her father to court ... He played for the queen almost every evening. She liked to have music before her official entertainment of the evening. So, I like to think of this little girl hiding behind someone and watching the queen watch her father play.
Amy Merrill:
We've been going strong for a while, and I'm thinking that maybe this is a time to segue into the ... I guess what we're calling the cocktail and conversations portion of this evening. Please put your questions in the chat, and we would love some more questions. We can talk about these women all night, all week, but let's hear some questions. And I'm looking around to see if people are putting their hands up, and/or you can also tell us what you're drinking, in terms of what's appropriate for a salon about the English Renaissance. What are you drinking, and maybe what they were drinking?
Amy Merrill:
So, thank you. Oh. Annette Miller says, "Why did Elizabeth Cary write a play about a Jewish woman from the Hasmonean Empire?"
Ramie Targoff:
And that is a very interesting and a good question. I wish I could give you a definitive answer, but what I can tell you is that in the early 1600s ... So, we don't know exactly when she wrote the play. She published it in 1613.
Ramie Targoff:
In that first decade of the 1600s, there was a fascination with early Judaism, with Jewish history, and specifically with Josephus, the historian, Josephus. And Josephus' Histories, which include the story of Mariam, were translated for the first time into English in that decade.
Ramie Targoff:
So, there is enough similarity between her play and this translation to suggest that she used this translation as her main source. So, in other words, all of a sudden, English people were given access to this ancient, Jewish historian, Josephus.
Ramie Targoff:
That doesn't answer the question, though. Why was she interested in this? And my strong feeling is that the other story that was very dominate in first decade of the 17th century, from the same exact time period, is the story of Antony and Cleopatra. So, in her play, Herod, her husband ... Or, her mother in law says that Herod chose Mariam over Cleopatra. So, they're exact contemporaries, historically, give or take a decade. And preceding her play, we had not just Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, but we had Mary Sidney, my first woman's, translation from French of a play called Antoine, or Antonia, she calls it, which is her first introduction to English audiences of the Antony and Cleopatra story.
Ramie Targoff:
So, Antony and Cleopatra were very much in vogue. Mary Sidney wrote a play called Antonius. One of the other great poets of the era, Samuel Daniel, who was Anne Clifford, my fourth woman's, private tutor, wrote a play called Cleopatra. So, I like to think of Elizabeth Cary as getting into this story from a different angle. So, we're still in the Roman Empire, we're still talking about this massive war going on between Rome and Egypt, but she displaces it so that we're actually at this early moment of Jewish history. And then, that connects it, in fact, to Amelia Lanyer.
Ramie Targoff:
And I do think, when you were talking earlier, Amy, about intellectual influence, that it's not a coincidence that two of these women broke through the publishing world within a year and a half of each other. So, Amelia Lanyer's poem, her long poem, Salve Deus ... Actually, the heroine of that long poem is the most minor character in the Bible, it's the wife of Pontus Pilate. And Pontus Pilate, when he's considering whether he should crucify or pardon Jesus, has this tiny moment in the Bible with his wife where she says, "I have a bad feeling about this. You should let him go." That's it. It's one line, and it's only in one of the Gospels.
Ramie Targoff:
Amelia Lanyer takes that line and writes a couple hundred line poem about it, about this female heroine who dared to speak to Pontius Pilate, her husband, and tell him not to do this. And so, this is the exact same time period as the tragedy of Mariam. So, in other words, there's a kind of weird and interesting diving into this crucial moment in history when Christ is crucified, when the Roman Empire is born out of Antony and Cleopatra's love affair and so forth. And I think Elizabeth Cary, who was a great reader and was fascinated with the past. In addition to writing The Tragedy of Mariam, we know that she wrote a play set in ancient Syracuse. We don't know anything else about it, but we know that. And she also wrote a history of Tamburlaine.
Ramie Targoff:
So, this is a woman who is interested in the past, in the far past. And I like to think she saw, when she read that story ... Let's just imagine she goes to see Othello. She watches Desdemona be falsely accused of adultery, and to be murdered by her husband without really protesting. She then reads Josephus' History of the Jews, and she reads about Mariam whose falsely accused of adultery, and instead of just sort of passively giving in and apologizing, stages this enormous battle with her husband, defending herself, refusing to sleep with him.
Ramie Targoff:
And the other important figure in that play whom I haven't had a chance to mention but is really important is Salome, the sister of Herod. And Elizabeth Cary knows from her source that Salome had multiple husbands, and even asked for a divorce. And what she did with that was to give her the probably strongest pro-divorce speech ever written by a woman in English literature.
Ramie Targoff:
Salome says, "Why should only men have the right to get divorced? Why should we be stuck with husbands we despise?" So, I love to think about Elizabeth Cary, who's been stuck in this marriage with someone she had no interesting in marrying, basically sold by her father to get an aristocratic title, four years into her marriage finding in Salome a sort of secret way of voicing her discontent.
Amy Merrill:
Sounds great. Thank you.
Amy Merrill:
We're getting some great questions. Diane Bernbaum has another literary question. Diane, can you unmute yourself?
Diane Bernbaum:
Hi. I'm here. So I want to know ... Mary Sidney, when she translated the Psalms, what languages did she use? Did she know Hebrew or Latin, or was she using another English translation and making it better?
Ramie Targoff:
Okay. That's a really good question, Diane, and it's one that scholars actually, as you could probably imagine, have spent a lot of time on.
Ramie Targoff:
What we know for sure is that her primary source was French, not Hebrew, and not English, and not Italian. We know that because there was a French commentary on the Psalms that shows up a lot in her translation.
Ramie Targoff:
Some scholars have found evidence, they think, that she knew Hebrew. It's very hard to establish. There's no record of her learning Hebrew, and to be honest, it would have been extremely unusual. She definitely knew Latin, and she had extraordinarily good French and Italian. Italian wouldn't have helped her here. But there were ...
Ramie Targoff:
I should say, the translation she did was very Protestant in its biases and there was a French commentary that she relied heavily on. We know she had very good French. She translated this other place, the Marc Antony play, from French. She translated Petrarch from Italian to English. So, she was an incredibly multi-lingual person, but it's probably not the case that she knew Hebrew.
Amy Merrill:
Thank you. Now we have another question. Letty, have you unmuted yourself? Do you want to ask your question?
Letty Cottin Pogrebin:
Sure.
Amy Merrill:
All right. Thank you.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin:
Hi, thank you so much for this fascinating presentation. We know something about Mozart's musically-gifted sister, Nannerl. Do we know that Shakespeare did in fact have a sister, and if so, whether she was gifted, and what happened to her?
Ramie Targoff:
This is a very interesting question. There's been a lot of speculation about it. Shakespeare had a daughter named Judith, and it's interesting that Virginia Woolf ... We don't know anything about Shakespeare's sister. We know that Shakespeare had a daughter named Judith, and Virginia Woolf uses the name, and it's not clear why, of the daughter for the sister.
Ramie Targoff:
There's a recent film that ... I'm trying to remember the name. Maybe one of our other guests knows it and can write it in. I believe Kenneth Branagh made it a few years ago. Maybe a year and a half ago. Which images Shakespeare's daughter as actually having extraordinary talent and being the really gifted child that he had, but being dominated by his son, Hamnet, about whom you can imagine Hamlet owes quite a bit of something, but there's no record of Shakespeare's female relatives having any particular gifts. So, this is all a kind of ...
Ramie Targoff:
As I say, there was a woman named Judith Shakespeare, Shakespeare's daughter, but she was not ... We don't know. I shouldn't say she wasn't a talented poet. She might have been a very talented poet. She didn't write anything.
Amy Merrill:
Thank you. Anymore questions? I'm looking around. You can put your hands in the air. Let me just see. I'm looking around. Oh! Annette-
Ramie Targoff:
There are a couple questions on the chat.
Amy Merrill:
Oh. Annette Miller has a question.
Annette Miller:
Yeah. I'm interested in who this ... I'm fascinated by the fact that I didn't know, in fact, that Josephus' book came out then about Jewish history, and I'm interested in this play, in Mariam. Which Mariam was this? From the Hasmonean Empire, I don't actually know of her. There's one Miriam that we speak of in the Bible, Aaron's sister. So, I'm interested in that.
Annette Miller:
And then, I also realize that that speech that you said that she gave in the play about ... Is it Salome?
Ramie Targoff:
Yes. The divorce speech.
Annette Miller:
The divorce speech is right out of Othello's Emilia. Emilia said, "Why should a man do this and that?" Emilia, in her anger at Iago, gives one of the most famous speeches about women independence. So, I feel as though she may have taken that ... She put that in Desdemona's mouth, in Mariam's mouth, in her version?
Ramie Targoff:
Yeah. It's a different speech, but you're absolutely right that Emilia actually says something different, which is, "Well, I'd certainly be tempted. I'm not sure that I would remain so loyal and faithful as you. I would certainly be tempted." It's not about divorce per se, but you're absolutely right that she has an incredibly rebellious speech. Emilia-
Annette Miller:
Incredibly so! Right.
Ramie Targoff:
Yes. And very sort of out there.
Ramie Targoff:
For the Josephus ... the history if from ... It's called the Antiquity of the Jews, as you probably know, it sounds like. It would be not in the interest of our time together for me to drag up the dates, so you and I can go back and forth. I could pull it up, but I don't have it off the top of my head, the exact dates.
Annette Miller:
That's not important.
Ramie Targoff:
But this figure of Mariam was married to Herod, was the daughter of Alexander, and her grandfather had been the king whom Herod killed. So, it's that Mariam, but I can't give you too much genealogy right now.
Annette Miller:
Right. Thank you.
Ramie Targoff:
You're welcome.
Amy Merrill:
Janice, could you unmute yourself?
Janice Paul:
Hi. I was just wondering since some of these women were lost to history, and as you've said, you went all the way through your doctorate without ever hearing of them, how did you find them?
Ramie Targoff:
Yeah. It's an interesting story, or it's a symptom of what I described. So, I'm exactly of the age where I finished all of my education in 1996, and if I were 10 years younger, all of these women were published in the 1990s.
Ramie Targoff:
So, thanks to feminist scholars, mostly a generation older than me, these women were edited ... Not so much discovered, because as I say, their names are familiar, but were edited, were made available. And I saw there was a question about how to find these women's works, and I'd be happy to share that with the group in some way.
Ramie Targoff:
But these women were all published, most of them for the first time, as their own authors, as I pointed out. Some of them were published as appendixes to men. Mary Sidney's works were circulating under the name of her brother, and so on. But they were published in the 1990s, in the last 20 years and the first decade of the 2000s.
Ramie Targoff:
I personally came at them in a slightly sideways fashion because I'm both an English professor and an Italian professor, and I started working on Italian women's writing, which was an equally fascinating story. And then I thought, "Why aren't I looking at the English women from this period? Surely there are equally compelling women in England that I could look at."
Ramie Targoff:
So, I came at it that way, but had I wanted, in 1989 when I was a senior at Yale ... Had I wanted to write my senior essay on women's writing, I literally would not have been able to on these women, because they weren't published.
Ramie Targoff:
I mean, yes. I could have gone to the British Library and found the manuscript, and so forth, but they weren't in print and that's what's so amazing, really, about this, is that we've just come to them really in the last 20 years.
Ramie Targoff:
That said, when I was first working on this book, I was astonished to discover that almost no one, unless you're a renaissance English scholar, has read anything by any of these women. And actually, my publisher, Knopf, has asked me to put together an anthology of the women's writing, which, I think Knopf is going to publish with the book so that interested readers can actually read them directly. And I think that will be a real asset for people.
Amy Merrill:
That sounds great, Ramie, because we don't want them to drop into obscurity again. And I think you raise an interesting question about the Italian Renaissance woman, or the woman who you wrote about. Do they drop into obscurity? What was their relationship with obscurity? Did they have a different public life that was different from the English Renaissance women?
Ramie Targoff:
Unfortunately not. So, their story is almost worse in a way. Or, actually, it's around the same I would say. What's interesting is, when the woman I wrote a biography of, Vittoria Colonna, was first published that was in 1538. So, that was a lot earlier than the women we're describing. In the wake of her publication in Italy, there was an explosion of published women.
Ramie Targoff:
So, by the year 1600, there were 200 women in Italy who had been published. We had a handful in England, but 200 women had been published. So, Italy saw an absolute renaissance of women's writing in the Renaissance, and then things got so bad that, today, in Italy, if you wanted to buy a book of Vittoria Colonna's poems, you could only ... Well, you can't buy my translation yet, but the only access you'll have to it is my bilingual edition.
Ramie Targoff:
So, she's been out of print for almost 40 years in Italy. In translation, again, because of feminist scholarship in the US and the UK, we've started to translate all these women, and the series in which my translation is appearing is the same series that most of them appeared. It's called The Other Voice of the Renaissance, and they're all bilingual editions, so you always have the original language on the left and then the English on the right. So, now these women, like the English women, have been recovered, recuperated, translated, but they're mostly neglected in Italy.
Amy Merrill:
Hmmm...
Annette Miller:
Fascinating.
Amy Merrill:
Anymore questions? We talked a lot about Shakespeare, so maybe we could talk a bit more about the relationship of these four women to Shakespeare. Do you think they were familiar with his work? We talked about Elizabeth Cary loving to go to the theater. We somehow think that maybe the theater was a dangerous place for women. Was it that dangerous? How did she get to the theater? And did these women know their Shakespeare?
Ramie Targoff:
It's an interesting question. I would say that Shakespeare is ... And this is one of the fun things about writing this book. Shakespeare plays a pretty minor role in the lives of these women as writers. So, there's not an awful lot of Shakespeare that shows up. The only real overlap is this question of Othello. Actually, Shakespeare probably used Mary Sidney's play, Antonius, when he was writing Antony and Cleopatra. So, Shakespeare was relying on Mary Sidney rather than the other way around. But we have no record of Anne Clifford ever mentioning Shakespeare.
Ramie Targoff:
Anne Clifford was connected to Ben Johnson, as was Elizabeth Cary, as was Amelia Lanyer. And part of the reason for that was that Ben Johnson was much more a courtly poet, much more aristocratic poet. Shakespeare was writing for everybody.
Ramie Targoff:
So, actually, there are a couple wonderful descriptions of Ben Johnson's Masques, masque are those private entertainments that you put on just inside of aristocratic households, in which Anne Clifford was performing, Mary Sidney performed, Mary Sidney's daughter performed. Elizabeth Cary was said to be too fat to perform. That's one of these moments where we glimpse a certain kind of misogyny, but her husband performed the masque. So, there was a sort of energy around Ben Johnson.
Ramie Targoff:
John Donne preached privately for Anne Clifford and her husband, and was a friend of Anne Clifford's husband. John Donne wrote a poem to Mary Sidney, praising her translation of the Psalms. So, there were connections with Donne, but Shakespeare, as I say, one of the fun things, it's like the New Yorker map and then you look at the Cleveland, Ohio map where New York is just a little ... Shakespeare wasn't so important to these women, really. He wasn't a significant figure in the lives as far as they've been recorded.
Ramie Targoff:
In terms of going to the theater, yeah. Going to the theater was sort of, I'd say, like going to a Celtics game, or something. It was a little edgy, it was loud, it was complicated, but it wasn't forbidden. But women weren't supposed to go to the theater alone. They should have male companions with them, and then, certain theaters were considered safer than others. The private indoor theaters were more expensive, the tickets, there was much less likely to be pick pocketing, and vandalism, and so forth than theaters like The Globe, for example.
Amy Merrill:
Thank you so much. We have another question from Shulamit Reinharz. Shula? Can you unmute yourself? Let's see ...
Ramie Targoff:
There she is. Hi, Shula. We can't hear you.
Shula Reinharz:
Okay. Can you hear me now?
Ramie Targoff:
Yes. Hi, Shula. How are you? Nice to see you.
Shula Reinharz:
I wanted to just ask you a question about translation. One of the people that you told us about got into her own compositions by beginning with translation. And I was wondering, as a sociologist, that's how I discovered the person that I now call the founder of sociology, which is Harriet Martineau as opposed to Auguste Comte, who is always getting that honor. So, I was just wondering if anyone has written a history of women translators.
Ramie Targoff:
Yeah. It's a good question. I don't know if anyone's written a history of women's translation of women translators, but I do know that translation was invited and encouraged. And one thing we haven't talked about, Amy, but you and I have chatted about briefly, is women's education during the period.
Ramie Targoff:
Translating other men's works was considered sort of the highest form of education. So, actually, I have, I think right here ... I could show you two enormous volumes of Queen Elizabeth's translations. Queen Elizabeth, as a youth, as a princess, spent a lot of time translating. And this is what her fancy, Oxford teacher taught her to do, and as I say, I have a big double-volume set that has been published of her translation.
Ramie Targoff:
It was a way for women both to remain anonymous and within someone else's works, and also to exercise their minds. So, if no one's written a book about women translators, it would be a good book to write, but I imagine someone has. I don't know myself.
Amy Merrill:
Isn't this Women's Poetry Translation Month, or was July Poetry Translation Month? In any case, it's a very timely question.
Amy Merrill:
I'm thinking ... Anymore questions? We've been going strong for almost 45 minutes. No. More than that. And I'm just wondering if anybody ... Yeah. Oh, Janet Giele. Can you unmute yourself? Thank you.
Janet Giele:
Yes. Well, when I was an undergraduate, I was both a French and sociology major, and I was fascinated by the Précieuses in France. So, maybe it's my sociological bent makes me think about a kind of evolutionary progress here across several different countries in the emergence of women as translators, as holding conversations, salons. You mentioned, Ramie, the Italian ... So, I wonder if anybody has thought about that.
Janet Giele:
I can't even remember the names of the Précieuses, but I remember being fascinated by them. And I was in college in the 1950s, so this was definitely before the New Women's Movement, and it was fascinating to me just to read about these women who were pioneers.
Ramie Targoff:
What century were they, Janet?
Janet Giele:
I think it was maybe a century later, but I think it was 16 and 1700s.
Ramie Targoff:
Yeah. I don't know anything about the Précieuses, but certainly there were amazing, extraordinary exchanges going on between France and England at that time. And maybe my favorite book, except for the book of the Psalms that I described finding, is the opposite size. Also, actually, in the Bodleian Library last year, I had Princess Elizabeth, when she was 12 years old, translated the French Queen Marguerite of Navarre's long poem called The Mirror of the Sinful Soul.
Ramie Targoff:
She translated this poem, a 12 year old girl, from French to English, as a gift to her new step mother, Henry VIII's last wife, Katherine Parr, and she wrote the book in her own hand, this long, long poem. I think it's 1200 lines. And then, she embroidered Katherine Parr, K.P., on the cover. It's one of the treasures of the Bodleian Library.
Ramie Targoff:
But when I was holding it in my hand, I thought, "This is so extraordinary" because we have three queens in this one book. We have the French Queen Marguerite of Navarre, we have Queen Katherine Parr, and then we have soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth the first all having a conversation through this vehicle of a Protestant poem about the conscious, about a guilty, sinful soul, and so forth.
Ramie Targoff:
So, anyway. There were certainly lots of wonderful exchange.
Amy Merrill:
Anymore questions? We see that these are remarkable women and very complex women. Any more questions that you have? In which case, I think we will thank Ramie for a wonderful introduction to her book. I'm certainly looking forward to reading it, and it's coming out in a couple of years?
Ramie Targoff:
Hopefully in the Fall of 2022.
Amy Merrill:
Hopefully in the Fall of 2022. Can't wait. And we have a little post-script, which is to circle back to talking about the humanities at Brandeis, and talk a little bit about some great things that are happening right now at Brandeis in the humanities.
Ramie Targoff:
Okay. I'm happy to do that. So, I have various hats at Brandeis, and Shula Reinharz is here so she can attest to the fact that I am the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities, which is a great honor.
Ramie Targoff:
And that institution, the Center for the Humanities, is now approaching our 10th year. We opened in 2010, so this is our going on 10th anniversary from our ribbon cutting.
Ramie Targoff:
I guess, Amy, I would say that the most exciting thing happening that I could share with you as a group of many of you as alumni or related to alumni at Brandeis, you've probably all heard about and read about the attrition, the decline of students interested in the humanities, the fact that people really want to do STEM, and so on.
Ramie Targoff:
And actually, we've seen a little bit of the opposite recently at Brandeis thanks to the extraordinary gift of this humanities center from the Mandel Foundation. But connected to that, the humanities presence on campus has been terrifically enhanced by a new fellowship program that we have for incoming first year students. So, our admissions office ranks students. I can't remember what the scale is, but let's say it's one to five, and five are the best students that we want to get and we often lose to Cornell, or to Columbia, and so on.
Ramie Targoff:
We're asking students now to check a box if they're interested in majoring in the humanities when they apply. You know, we ask them many things so this doesn't stand out, but that pile of applications is then vetted for a special humanities fellowship, a merit fellowship.
Ramie Targoff:
And what we're found is that, of those top candidates, those fives, let's say, we used to get around 12% yield. So, that means only 12% of them came to Brandeis. We're now getting ... I haven't heard the percentage this year because I was on leave this Spring. But last told, we were getting around 30%.
Ramie Targoff:
So, in other words, we are getting higher-quality students who want to study the humanities, are coming to Brandeis thanks to getting this merit scholarship. So, what we do is we give them ... I think, again, last told, it was around 17 or $18,000 in addition to ... It's not about their financial aid. It's a merit scholarship.
Ramie Targoff:
But then we've also, through the Mandel Center, created special courses that are exclusively for them. So instead of taking freshman English, which most students hate, no offense to freshman English teachers, but it's hard to teach freshman English if you have students not necessarily wanting to be in the class. We have a special designated humanities seminars for them.
Ramie Targoff:
So, I taught one the year before last called ... It had a really un-trendy title. I think it was Renaissance Literary Masterpieces. So, I taught them great works from Italy, England, France, Spain, Germany. We read Luther and Calvin, and Thomas Moore's Utopia, and Don Quixote, and Montaigne, and so forth. And it's capped at 12 students or 15 students, so it's a small group.
Ramie Targoff:
Every semester, we're having one or two such classes that are just for these humanities fellows. So, we're basically saying to students of the humanities, "We value you. We want you to have a special experience here at Brandeis." We have events for them where we take them ... I take them almost every year to see a Shakespeare play in Boston. We take them to the Boston Symphony. We take them to the Gardner Museum or the MFA.
Ramie Targoff:
So, we do things to connect them to the humanities and the arts in the world, and I think that's been, really, the most exciting thing that's been happening, is the expansion of this program. I think we started with, maybe, 15 and now we have around 40 students. So, this program is expanding, and it's one of these win/wins because we're bringing smarter students to Brandeis, students who care about the humanities, we're creating good curriculum for them. So, it gets everyone sort of energized precisely in a moment in our country when we're feeling rather gloomy about the humanities among other things to feel gloomy about.
Ramie Targoff:
So, that is one of the things that's going on. And yeah. I think that would be a nice way to end. I do want to say, I see a lot of people here whom I know, so I just would like to greet personally, and Tannenbaum, who's an old supporter and friend of the Humanities Center. She actually sponsored one of my first series on close looking with the museum.
Ramie Targoff:
I would like to say hello to my first employer of my life, my next door neighbor growing up, Denise Rosenberg, and long-time family friend. Her daughter, Jenna, is a Brandeis alumni. I'm not sure if she's here. And her mother, Erika, I want to greet personally and warmly. Erika, it's lovely to see you and I'm happy to see you looking so well. So, it's very lovely to see these special people and the rest of you too. So, thank you for coming here tonight.
Amy Merrill:
And thank you Professor Ramie Targoff for a fascinating introduction to her book. And thanks to all of you for coming. Long time friends of Brandeis, men, women, who have contributed so much to the university, and also thank you to many of you who have been part of the extraordinary programs in humanities opportunities. We look forward to your participation in advancing the humanities beyond, particularly during this difficult time that we're going through. It's great to be together. Thank you, all of you, and have a wonderful evening.