Phillippy, Patricia Berrahou 1960–

PERSONAL:

Born May 28, 1960.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Texas A&M University, 227 Blocker Bldg., P.O. Box 4227 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Texas A&M University, College Station, associate professor.

WRITINGS:

Love's Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 1995.

Women, Death, and Literature in Post-Reformation England, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Patricia Berrahou Phillippy is a professor of English who has written several books regarding the perception of women in other eras. In Women, Death, and Literature in Post-Reformation England, Phillippy argues that women's mourning practices were not simply the maudlin, unproductive pastime that men assumed them to be, but were in fact an important cultural component. Women were intimately involved in attending to the dying, washing corpses, embalming bodies, and preparing shrouds. Thus, women's mourning was not only emotional in nature, but intensely physical and often undertaken on their own children. Much of Phillippy's research is taken from autobiographies of notable women, which reveals they were consumed by the sickness and death of their own children no matter how hard they tried to moderate their grief.

More broadly, the death of Elizabeth I is discussed in detail for the unusual amount of ceremony surrounding it. Creating elaborate funerary processions and writing heartfelt eulogies were two means of artistic expression allowed to women at the time, of which Phillippy examines prime examples. Additionally, paternal grief, Phillippy says, though both real and powerful, was exhibited in a much different, less artistic way. Marlo M. Belschner of Humanities and Social Sciences Online appreciated how Phillippy "excavated valuable and wide-ranging documents on women's involvement in death and dying, and carefully distinguishes between women's self-representations, and other cultural constructions." Danielle E. Clarke's review for Albion stated that Women, Death and Literature is "clearly written, well researched, and beautifully produced—it is a pleasure to use."

In Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture, Phillippy examines three distinct practices in Italy, France, and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: women painting their own bodies with cosmetics, women who paint on canvas, and women who are painted by men either in pigment or in words. Her discussion reveals gender and moral concerns associated with each practice, all of which derive from a shared cultural history. Her findings are based on primary documents written both by men and women and includes, among many examples, artists' depictions of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare's Juliet, and the paintings of female artist Lavinia Fontana. Katharine J. Lualdi, writing in the H-France Review, summarized the book positively, stating that it "makes a compelling case that early modern women were able to navigate male control and hierarchy to create self-portraits in words and images, thereby controlling the mirror, not just being controlled by it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Albion, winter, 2004, Danielle E. Clarke, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 641.

American Historical Review, February, 2007, Frances E. Dolan, review of Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture, p. 264.

Biography, fall, 2003, Emma Smith, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 731.

Canadian Journal of History, December, 2004, Megan L. Hickerson, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 584.

Choice, July-August, 1995, E.D. Hill, review of Love's Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry, p. 1725; March, 2003, E.D. Hill, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 1185.

Clio, spring, 2005, Susanne Woods, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 369.

History: Review of New Books, spring, 2003, Elizabeth Lane Furdell, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 113.

Notes and Queries, September, 1996, Andrew Hadfield, review of Love's Remedies, p. 329; March, 2004, Claire Pickard, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, pp. 83-85.

Reference & Research Book News, November, 2002, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 202; Ma, 2006, review of Painting Women.

Renaissance Quarterly, summer, 2004, Clare R. Kinney, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 754; winter, 2006, Yael Even, review of Painting Women, p. 1259.

Shakespeare Studies, 2004, Kristen Poole, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 408.

Sixteenth Century Journal, winter, 2004, Raymond B. Waddington, review of Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, p. 1155.

ONLINE

H-France Review,http://www.h-france.net/ (September, 2006), Katharine J. Lualdi, review of Painting Women.

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (January, 2004), Marlo M. Belschner, review of Women, Death and Litera-ture in Post-Reformation England.