Women Haters: A Controversy Women Haters: A Controversy Author Katelyn Ekker Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Katelyn Ekker, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Social Order Gender Femininity Misogyny Patriarchy Literature and the Arts Rhetoric Women Writers Published page. proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Katelyn Ekker Katelyn Ekker

Katelyn Ekker was an Honors student at Utah Valley University.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Printed Attacks and Defenses of Women

In the English early modern era, women were both satirically attacked and defended in several kinds of popular literature, including pamphlets, poems, and plays. In 1540, Edward Gosynhill wrote both an attack and a defense in the same year. His work was part of misogynist literature, a type that evolved in English starting in the Middle Ages with texts like Chaucer’s 1405 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. Plays like Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew are part of this tradition, often called the querelle des femmes (the quarrel about women). By the early 17th century, several such texts sparked furious responses from both men and women.

Notable Attacks

Joseph Swetnam’s misogynistic tract, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, received substantial comment and rebuttal. It was printed in 1615 under the pseudonym Thomas Tel-troth (truth teller), and contains typical and graphic misogyny:

Many women are in shape angels but in qualities devils, painted coffins with rotten bonesAlthough women are beautiful, showing pity, yet their hearts are black, swelling with mischief, not much unlike unto old trees whose outward leaves are fair and green and yet the body rotten

Then who can but say that women sprung from the devil, whose heads, hands and hearts, mind and souls are evil, for women are called the hook of all evil, because men are taken by them as fish is taken with the hook.

Responses to Misogyny

Many authors also defended women against attacks like Swetnam’s, both before and after his pamphlet sparked a war in print. One author known as Jane Anger wrote the most well-known feminist pamphlet of the era. The full title of her 1589 feminist pamphlet was Jane Anger her Protection for Women to Defend them Against the SCANDALOUS REPORTES of a Late Surfeiting Lover, and All Other like Venerians that Complaine so to be Overcloyed with Women’s Kindnesse. The name might be a pseudonym, but Anger was a popular last name in parts of England.

Although Jane Anger did not respond directly to Swetnam, she was a passionate defender of women. Her style combines the complex sentences made fashionable by John Lyly with many clever insults and quips. Her pamphlet begins with a description of a misogynistic pamphlet she had just finished: The chief matters therein contained were of two sorts: the one in the dispraise of man's folly, and the other, invective against our sex, their folly proceeding of their own flattery joined with fancy, and our faults are through our folly, with which is some faithFie on the falsehood of men, whose minds go oft a madding, and whose tongues can not so soon be wagging, but straight they fall a railing. Was there ever any so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, or so wickedly handled undeservedly as are we women?

She also describes how women are trapped by men’s attitudes: If we will not suffer them to smell on our smocks, they will snatch at our petticoats; but if our honest natures cannot away with that uncivil kind of jesting, then we are coy. Yet if we bear with their rudeness and be somewhat modestly familiar with them, they will straight make matter of nothing, blazing abroad that they have surfeited with love, and …telling the manner how.

Dramatic Response

Another response to Swetnam was the satirical play, Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women, which was performed at the Red Bull Theatre in 1619. The play’s author is unknown, although many scholars have suggested that its style of comedy resembles Thomas Heywood, a well-known playwright of the early 17th century.

The main plot is a romance about state politics, but the subplot is about Swetnam being tried by women, as the illustration on the title page depicts. The ending of the play depicts Swetnam debating another character, a man disguised as a woman about women’s traits, before an all-male judges’ panel. Swetnam wins, and then lustfully pursues his opponent, to comic ends due to the cross-dressing. Eventually, Swetnam is imprisoned by local women, who force him to recant his misogynist views.

Although the topic was popular, the play was not. Theater historians note that the play was performed again in 1633, but that not other performance records exist and it was not reprinted until 1880.

Women’s Prose Responses

Several actual women writers also repled to Swetnam’s attack. Rachel Speght was the only one not to have used a pseudonym when writing in defense of her gender, A Mouzell <supplied>muzzle</supplied> for Melastomus in 1617. She also published poetry in 1621.

Another woman responder was Ester Sowernam, which is also likely a pseudonym inspired by the Biblical figure Esther. The writer is presumed to be a woman, likely from the middle class because her response was dedicated to London apprentices.

Yet another woman under the pseudonym Constantia Munda mankind’s constancy wrote The Worming of a Madde Dogge…, another response to Swetnam, putting him in his place. Munda seems to be the most educated of these responders because she uses quotations in several languages and cites information from higher status professions.

Key Print Sources Anger, Jane et al. Defences of Women: Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, and Constantia Munda. Scolar Press, 1996. Boleyn, Deirdre. <q>Because Women Are Not Women, Rather Might Be a Fit Subject of an Ingenious Satyrist</q>: Constantia Munda’s <title level="m">The Worming of a Mad Dogge (1617). Prose Studies vol. 32, no. 1, 2010, pp. 38–56. Malcolmson, Christina, and Mihoko Suzuki, eds. Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Key Online Sources Anger, Jane. Her Protection for Women To Defend them Against the Scandalous Reportes of a Late Surfeiting Lover, and All Other like Venerians that Complaine so to bee Overcloyed with Womens Kindnesse. Ed. Mary Mark Ockerbloom. Digital Library. University of Pennsylvania. 1589. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/anger/protection/protection.html. Best, Michael. Women: Loved and Loathed. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/women%20writers/haters.html. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018. Munda, Constantia. The Worming of a Mad Dogge: or, A Soppe for Cerberus the Jaylor of Hell. No Confutation but a Sharpe Redargution of the Bayter of Women. Early English Books Online Text Creation Project. University of Michigan. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A07888.0001.001/1:4?rgn=div1;view=fulltext. Speght, Rachel. A Mouzell for Melastomus. Early English Books Online Text Creation Project. University of Michigan. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A12750.0001.001?view=toc. Swetnam, Joseph. The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women. University of Oregon. London, 1615. https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/WesternCiv102/SwetnamArraignment1615.htm.