ABSTRACT
The contributors to this volume study women who embody a wide range of socio-economic examples, ranging from prostitutes in nineteenth-century India to aristocrats in seventeenth-century Europe. While this essay focuses on the seventeenth century and on women in Europe, it mainly concentrates on lesser known, less socially-prominent English women in a particular time period — that of the English Civil War of the 1640s — who did not enjoy the same highly visible presence of their social superiors, whether they were aristocrats or queens. The idea of visibility is central to understanding this essay collection with its key concepts of 'sighting' and 'siting.' As an articulation of these concepts, this essay explores how the sight of women protesting to the English Parliament in the 1640s provoked male authors to locate and then disable the radical potential of the female body. This was achieved first by taking rhetorical control of specific, dissenting female bodies and second, by labeling those bodies merely as metaphorical sites at which the political differences between Royalists and Parliamentarians could be fought out.
