- Teacher: Emily Louisa Smith
This seminar will examine the poems of Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer, two English female writers working in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, alongside early modern English translations of Greco-Roman texts published within this period. Exploring Whitney’s and Lanyer’s engagement with such sources and inspirations, this seminar will suggest, allows us to recognise their creative and original transformation of prior works. The seminar will conclude by considering how the life of Aemilia Lanyer has itself prompted an adaptation: the play Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. Throughout the semester, we shall engage critically with the concept of intertextuality in early modern England, and consider the implications of adaptation in texts both past and present.