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  • Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England by Kirilka Stavreva
  • Lara Dodds (bio)
Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England. Kirilka Stavreva. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. xxiv + 202 pp. $55. ISBN 978-0-8032-5488-6.

Kirilka Stavreva’s Words Like Daggers is an attempt to recuperate denigrated forms of female speech — scolding, “witch-speak,” and the “cries” of Quaker prophets — through attention to their performative and rhetorical qualities. Because women’s violent speech threatened to destabilize social hierarchies, early modern culture had no acknowledged place for it and instead attempted to punish, contain, or silence it. Stavreva suggests, however, that women’s fiery speech had powerful echoes throughout early modern British culture, not least in the theater, where playwrights such as Shakespeare, Middleton, and others appropriated women’s words for their own ends. Alternating between “historical” and “literary” chapters, Words Like Daggers traces the process of aestheticization by which the violent speech patterns of some early modern women are preserved as part of the largely male-authored drama of the early modern stage. Other than in its last chapter, which examines the works of mid-seventeenth-century Quaker prophets, therefore, Words Like Daggers is not concerned with women writers in the traditional sense. Instead, Stavreva’s contribution to the field lies in offering a model for examining female authorship more broadly. Words Like Daggers suggests how early modern literary tradition — in this case drama — is indebted to the creative energy of women’s scolding, witchcraft, and prophecy.

The first two chapters of Words Like Daggers describe the religious, moral, and legal contexts for women’s violent speech in early modern England. In chapter one, “Feminine Contentious Speech and the Religious Imagination,” Stavreva examines early modern sermons and homilies on the “sins of the tongue.” Identifying the tongue as a source of evil, these sermons abhor the injurious social effects, the “habitual contentiousness,” of scolding (5). While we are accustomed to the gendering of scolding as feminine, one of the primary insights of this book is that violent speech has the potential to transgender its speakers and listeners. The ministers struggled to distinguish their own rhetorical aggressiveness from that of the scold, revealing that violent speech had the potential to disrupt gender binaries. Scolding could feminize both male and female speakers, but “its capacity to ‘beget’ discord” was masculinizing (14).

For the preachers and moralizers of the first chapter, women’s aggressive speech was always harmful. Chapter two, “Gender and the Narratives of Scolding [End Page 213] in Church Courts,” turns to the treatment of female scolds in legal records in order to show how members of the wider community sometimes found value in the voice of the scold. Examining the semantics, stylistics, and pragmatics of scolding, Stavreva argues that aggressive speech could produce “viable claims to social authority” (19). This analysis provides the most valuable methodological insight of the book: scolding, like the witch-speak and cries discussed in the later chapters, has its own conventions and rules. The ministers tended to dismiss scolding as inarticulate and empty of meaning, but Stavreva’s analysis reveals the intentionality and creativity of these utterances. She provides a precise formal description of scolding, including its vocabulary and characteristic rhetorical strategies — hyperbole and the proliferation of detail. Stavreva characterizes women’s violent speech as enargeia, speech that provokes in listeners an “imaginary seeing” (xix). By examining the rhetorical qualities of scolding and other transgressive or devalued speech acts, Stavreva suggests an analogy between the creativity of poets and that of the scold or shrew. Recounting the words of women for whom scolding was the means to call their communities to account, Stavreva emphasizes the distance between the moralists’ delegitimization of women’s violent speech and the potential usefulness of scolding for women and their communities.

Chapter three brings the insights of the first two chapters to bear on fictional representations of the scold on the early modern stage. Focusing on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and other shrew-taming texts, Stavreva argues that the stage likewise allows for a more positive role for women’s violent speech in spite of the...

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