Sanders, Eve Rachele

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SANDERS, Eve Rachele

PERSONAL: Female. Education: University of California, Los Angeles, B.A., 1986; University of California—Berkeley, Ph.D., 1995.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, Concordia University, Room 501, 1400 Maisonneuve Blvd. West, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8 Canada.

CAREER: Shakespearean scholar. Taught at University of California—Los Angeles, and Washington University; Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, assistant professor of English.

AWARDS, HONORS: Book award, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, 1998, for Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England.

WRITINGS:

Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England ("Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture" series), Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A comparative study of the Italian and English stages and the question of why, in England, boys were employed to play female characters.

SIDELIGHTS: Eve Rachele Sanders is the author of Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England, a study of how reading and writing helped to shape the models of gender in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Sanders draws on letters, memoirs, poetry, various plays, and conduct and instruction manuals for men and women in analyzing female literacy during a period when writing by women was considered to diminish the writer's virtue. Writing is covered in the second section of the book, and reading is the subject of the first. Sanders begins by describing humanist attitudes toward female literacy, women's access to literacy, and the fact that women and men gained literacy at proscribed different rates. While reading was more acceptable than writing, Sanders notes that fathers and husbands were expected to "mold" the characters of their daughters and wives by "regulating" their reading, which largely meant restricting it to devotional texts. "Along the way," noted Shakespeare Newsletter contributor Karoline Szatek, "she investigates the social conflicts that the exclusive masculine academy triggered, which becomes the main theme of her book."

Margo Hendricks commented in Shakespeare Studies that "this exploration of literacy practices and theories cogently sets the stage for Sanders's reading of Book Two of The Faerie Queene and Love's Labors Lost, two texts, for Sanders, that privilege reading as a site for self-understanding through the construction of idealized male and female readers." Hendricks explained that Sanders then examines "the gendered effects of humanist literacy practices on the English stage. Beginning with an analysis of Shakespeare's use of reading in Hamlet, and concluding with a discussion of Grace Mildmay's autobiography, Sanders illuminates the competing and often oppositional models of the gendered reader, both male and female." The author provides a historical background for her analysis and also focuses on other women writers, including Anne Clifford and Mary Sidney. Hendricks wrote that "Sanders's attentive eye to the generic distinctions that need to be maintained between a literary work and a conduct manual makes her close readings of the literary works she studies, from The Faerie Queene to King Lear, persuasive." Sanders also reads Antony and Cleopatra, Richard III, and Dekker's Whore of Babylon.

Danielle Clarke wrote in Early Modern Literary Studies that the volume "has many wonderful things in it, and is particularly strong on close readings and unpicking contexts. Gender and Literacy on Stage is very much a post New Historicist book, with all the pluses and minuses that this implies. It takes a well-established topic within social history and segues this with cultural and literary materials to produce a complex and nuanced reading of the gendering of literacy in the early modern period." Clarke called Sanders "an excellent cultural historian, and the excavations of meaning from less obviously literary texts is frequently riveting."