The Hillarian Circle: Scorpions, Sexual Politics and Heterosocial Coteries

Abstract

The literary coterie, as a subject worthy of investigation, enjoys a far higher status than it did some twenty years ago. This change has been largely due to the growing scholarly interest in literary sociability in its different manifestations. It is now widely acknowledged, for example, that manuscript culture continued to flourish beyond the Renaissance into the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that the boundaries between manuscript and print culture were permeable and fluid rather than rigid and discrete.¹ The study of early modern print culture itself has placed a new emphasis on publication as a sociable and collective activity which generated collaborative texts such as the literary miscellany.² The widespread interest in early modern women writers has emphasised the significance of friendship circles as a means of enabling and supporting female literary production.³ Thus it is that scholars such as Carol Barash, Kathryn King, Elizabeth Eger and Betty Schellenberg, to name but a few, have explored a wide range of literary and cultural circles and the means by which they produced and exchanged ideas and texts through conversations, letters and annotated critical comments, and how these exchanges made their way from manuscript to print and sometimes back again.⁴