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By drawing on a wide range of literary and non-literary materials authored by women, this thesis explores what it meant to be a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century woman suffering persecution. It considers the ways in which persecution operated in relation to prescribed female stereotypes and gendered restrictions in early modern England and wider Europe, worlds in which the Christian St. Paul forbade women to speak. Therefore, this thesis breaks new ground by focusing on persecution as a gendered experience rather than something exclusively religious or political in nature. Rather than examining the effect of persecution on any one religious or political grouping, it prioritises gender to highlight women's experiences, and the treatment they were accorded, in a series of different persecutory contexts and situations. In this way the thesis tracks the multi-faceted nature of persecution itself.

Creative component 'A Map of Ghosts' is a novel about Ireland, maps and ghosts. The narrator is the ghost of Richard Bartlett, an Elizabethan cartographer who was employed by the notorious Lord Mountjoy during the Nine Years War (1594-1603) In the afterlife, the fictional Bartlett is shackled to a book of maps which reveals the Gaelic kingdom of Ulster before the villages, castles, woodland and sacred sites were destroyed by war and the colonial ambitions of the English. Bartlett cannot understand why he is a ghost and, as the centuries pass, he revisits episodes from his life in a search for answers. Through the figure of Bartlett, I explore the power of maps in the years leading up to the plantation; maps as the eye of history; the Elizabethans in Ireland; sin and atonement. Critical component 'The Art of the Map' investigates a context for the maps of cartographer Richard Bartlett which are held in the National Library of Ireland. Chapter One gives a context for Bartlett's maps within the history of maps of Ireland from Ptolemy to the Elizabethans. In Chapter Two, I consider the drawing and cartographic tools an Elizabethan map-maker would have had at his disposal; in Chapter Three I give consideration to the purpose of Bartlett's maps; whether they were intended for display or for inclusion in a book.

This PhD comprises two elements: Creative Component: 'The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer' is a novel about conflicting narratives of salvation set in the early modern period. It is a fictional account of real people who were born into Elizabethan England and died during the Stuart era. The novel's storyline explores how an illiterate countrywoman, Elizabeth Sawyer, affected the prison chaplain, Henry Goodcole, in Newgate Prison and guides the reader through the lay preacher's reaction to her in the week of her execution for witchcraft on 19 April 1621. My novel takes its title from Henry Goodcole's pamphlet on Sawyer and contains references to the playwrights who created The Witch of Edmonton, which used Goodcole's text as a source. In seeking to reverse the providential judgement of the original pamphlet, it also reimagines the tragedy of Dekker, Ford and Rowley's play and presents Sawyer as a storyteller whose narratives challenge certain stock interpretations of Scripture, particularly ones that favour the status quo of the Established Church. Told largely from Goodcole's point-of view, the novel outlines a process by which the lay preacher is forced to first question and then expand his faith. (ii) Critical Component: 'A Story in Maps' addresses the research question: 'How do the maps and surveys commissioned during Elizabeth Sawyer's lifetime shed light on the life lived by ordinary people in Edmonton Hundred?' By contextualising the hand-drawn and hand-written evidence, most of which is still held by the Salisbury family in Hatfield House, 'A Story in Maps' shows how pressures on the landless contributed to the imprisonment of twenty four of Elizabeth's neighbours during her teenage years. In addition, the study speculates how this event anticipated Elizabeth's own journey, first to Newgate then to Tyburn, thirty-one years later. The study establishes that landless countrywomen were active in defending their rights of common. It also shows that in a court of law such women required the intervention of a member of the male literate elite to pursue their complaint; this reality was evident in Sawyer's own trial for witchcraft in 1621.

In early modern England, colour was both a material and a textual preoccupation. However, the polychromatic palette that surrounded English men and women, and the particoloured palette of early modern writers, has thus far received little scholarly attention. This thesis rethinks the culture of colour in England between c. 1580 and c. 1660 to stimulate and enhance critical appreciation of colour in early modern literature. In contradistinction to the monochromatic trend of current cultural histories and early modern research, in this thesis I analyse all colours, situating these within their original socio-cultural contexts to substantiate the significance of colour in a literary text. My contextualised and polychromatic colour-concern offers an alternative method to traditional quantitative or symbolic approaches to colour in literature, as it takes into consideration how colour was experienced during an era that was attentive both to the material qualities and textual existence of colour. This thesis explores five "colourscapes," which include the workplace, household, Church, New World, and theatre, in order to finesse connections between colourful environs and attendant colour-configurations in early modern English literature. Attending to rhetorical instantiations of colour, and to the lived experience of colour as manifested in literature, this thesis offers an analytical lens through which early modern scholars, and literary scholars alike, can approach colour in literature.

This thesis examines literary appropriations of the Virgin Mary in the early modem period to argue that she continued to occupy the early modern imagination. The Virgin Mary operates as a lieu de memoire, recalling the Catholic medieval past, but she was refashioned in new terms in the early modern period to ruminate on issues such as mnemonic prayer, material spirituality, motherhood and breastfeeding, female voice, appropriate grief and female authority. By reading a variety of genres, written by both men and women, Protestant and Catholic, from across the period, the thesis argues for the Virgin's sustained relevance. It demonstrates how the Virgin was contested and adapted for various ideological ends. often against the customary religious and gendered understandings of her significance. The Virgin Mary's body is central to literary appropriations and the thesis argues that Marian imagery retained potency, relevancy and power precisely because of the figure's controversial femininity and her bodily status as virgin mother.

This thesis offers a new model for understanding the rise of the word plantation as a keyword of anglophone colonialism in the early seventeenth century. Generally approached as a simple (and perhaps simplistic) synonym for colony in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,plantation is missing from printed Elizabethan texts which promoted colonial settlement in Ireland and the Americas. Instead, in a colonial context,plantation rose to sudden prominence in promotional pamphlets published in 1609 and 1610, and James VI/I was an active agent in this discursive shift. Tracing the word's colonial appropriation to a previously unrecognized connection with sixteenth-century pamphleteering regarding the dissolution of the monasteries, the thesis argues that plantation had taken on a distinctive association with religious reform and divine providence by the time the word was adopted as the Jacobean name for colonial settlement. Thus, plantation offered a means for suggesting both classical and Christian authorities for the colonial enterprise - a duality not open to colony. More definitively than kingdom, colony, or commonwealth, the word plantation yoked the civil and the ecclesiastical, and transformed the colonial promotional pamphlet into a space where monarch and subject could publicly, but indirectly, contest competing conceptions of the relationship between temporal and spiritual authority. Through rhetorical analysis which considers how the printed form was engaged in the making of meaning, the thesis provides a study of the colonial promotional pamphlet from 1571, when print was first used to promote a particular English colonial project, to 1641, when violence broke out on "plantation" lands in Ireland. It offers new readings of colonial texts by Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, Thomas Blenerhasset, John Davies, John Donne, and John Cotton; an examination of the rhetoric of "plantation" as it was deployed by James VI/I; and an analysis of the word's appearances in the 1641 Depositions.