Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World: Rethinking Female Adolescence

Description

This groundbreaking study of girlhood and cognition 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, Caroline Bicks 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.

Caroline Bicks is Professor and Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. She is the author of Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England (2003), the co-editor of The History of British Women's Writing, 1500-1610 (2010), and the co-author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas (2015). Her writing has been featured in the Modern Love column of the New York Times and on National Public Radio.

'... original and imaginative book ... Recommended.' D. Pesta, Choice Connect