What was the relationship between woman and politics in seventeenth-century England? Engaging with debates on the public sphere, contract theory, class, religion, and identity, Susan Wiseman argues that the theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it. Rather than producing silence, exclusion generated complex, and oblique political involvements, which this study traces through a variety of genres: letters, journals, poetry, history, pamphlets, petitions, prophecy, legal documents, biographies, artworks. Expanding the range of what is normally understood as political discourse, Conspiracy and Virtue considers a richly contextualized range of figures: Elizabeth Avery, Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Christina Queen of Sweden, Anne Clifford, Anne Halkett, Brilliana Harley, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Jessey, John Milton, Elizabeth Poole, Rachel Russell, and others. Book jacket.

Susan Wiseman teaches in the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London.