Rhetoric, gender, and property in English Renaissance anatomical and topographical poetry

Renaissance England witnessed the development of "anatomical" or erotic love poetry, which revels in the female body, and "topographical" or country-house poetry, which celebrates the English country estate. These anatomical poems include John Donne's "Elegy 18: Love's Progress" and "Elegy 19: To his Mistress Going to Bed," Thomas Carew's "A Rapture," and Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." Examples of country-house poems include Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" and "To Sir Robert Wroth," Carew's "To My Friend G. N., from Wrest" and "To Saxham," and Marvell's "Upon Appleton House." Yet these two genres are only superficially disparate; their different subjects belie an affinity of form and idea. Women and land are perceived and described in similar ways, and the poetry reflects the aggressively masculine, imperialistic tenor of Renaissance England by simultaneously praising and appraising the lady and the landscape as male-controlled "properties.".;My study demonstrates how these genres are integrated by considering the contexts that inform both types of poetry: the tradition of the blazon, which takes rhetorical control of the woman's body and the estate through its division into parts; and the metaphorical equation of the female body and the land, which lends topographical features to the woman while it anatomizes and feminizes the landscape. My study also discusses this intersection of rhetoric, gender, and property in other facets of English Renaissance culture, notably in images of woman as microcosm of the world, in English exploration narratives that blazon and feminize the New World, and in Renaissance maps and surveys. The dissertation concludes with an excursus on the legal rights of women in Renaissance England in order to show that the subjugation of the feminine to the masculine in anatomical and topographical poetry originated in the patriarchal culture.