HUTSON, Lorna 1958-

PERSONAL: Born November 27, 1958, in West Berlin, Germany; daughter of John Whiteford (a diplomat) and Doris (a teacher and homemaker; maiden name, Kemp) Hutson. Education: Somerville College, Oxford, B.A. (with first class honors), 1979, D.Phil., 1983. Politics: Labour. Religion: Agnostic.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, 322 Wheeler Hall, #1030, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1030. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of London, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, England, began as lecturer, became reader in English, beginning 1986; University of Hull, professor of English literature, 1998-2002; University of California—Berkeley, professor of English, 2002—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow at Folger Shakespeare Library and Huntington Library, 1995.

WRITINGS:

Thomas Nashe in Context, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1994.

(Editor) Feminism and Renaissance Studies, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor, with Victoria Kahn) Rhetoric and Law in EarlyModern Europe, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Lorna Hutson is the author of The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England, in which she argues that Renaissance scholars successfully defined their own intimate friendships with other men, particularly the aristocratic men who were their sponsors, in terms meant to distinguish themselves from homosexuals. According to Alan Bray, writing in History Today, Hutson writes that in much of the fiction of the sixteenth century, there are "moments in these stories when the uncertainty in masculine relations is displaced and resolved by a pliant woman. . . . [The stories] are fundamentally concerned . . . with the ambiguities of masculine friendship that the humanists needed to negotiate in their rise to power." The Usurer's Daughter, Bray concluded, "brings a new light to the story of how stereotypes of gender have been historically deployed."

In Feminism and Renaissance Studies, Hutson gathers together seventeen scholarly essays concerning women's experience of the Renaissance. Among the subjects examined are women painters, the education of women, the decline of the importance of the household, and the persecution of witches. Anne Kelley of Renaissance Forum described Feminism and Renaissance Studies as an "excellent collection of important essays [which] illuminates the Renaissance period from a feminist viewpoint."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

English: The Journal of the English Association, summer, 1995, Sue Owen, review of The Usurer's Daughter.

History Today, February, 1998, Alan Bray, review of The Usurer's Daughter, p. 55.

Journal of Women's History, spring, 2001, Kathleen E. Kennedy, review of Feminism and Renaissance Studies, p. 222.

Renaissance Forum, Volume 4, number 2, 2000, Anne Kelley, review of Feminism and Renaissance Studies.

Renaissance Quarterly, autumn, 1990, Elizabeth Story Donno, review of Thomas Nashe in Context, p. 643; spring, 2002, Wayne A. Rebhorn, review of Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, p. 291.*