This dissertation traces the formation and representation of female gossip communities in early modern literature. It has become conventional wisdom within scholarship to claim a negative teleology for gossip, positing that the gossip was originally a figure with a purely spiritual function (that of a godparent of either sex), but that by the eighteenth century, the office of gossip was associated with the "idle talk" and unruly behavior, a result of unregulated female friendship. This dissertation challenges that developmental model, offering evidence of a both/and dynamic in the representation of gossips, revealing how, from the earliest literary representations through the Restoration, there are recognizable tensions between their socially positive contributory role in reproductive safety and the securing of legitimacy, on the one hand, and the threat posed by women operating autonomously, beyond male control or oversight. I posit that gossip communities actually operated in a number of ways and in a range of venues in the late medieval and early modern eras, and that negative representations of the "good gossip" (the drunken, disorderly woman) are indicative of unease surrounding women's various social roles and unacknowledged importance of female labor to the medieval and early modern culture and economy. Chapter 1 traces the relationship between medieval and early modern representations of gossip communities, demonstrating through the Noah plays from the York, Wakefield, and Chester mystery cycles that gossips were a central and legitimate element of communities,had real, viable social functions beyond the birth chamber, and represented a much more complex identity than has generally been identified. Building on this medieval acknowledgment of the complexity of women's gossip functions and interactions, I turn to the Tudor comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle, which focuses on the gossip community's relationship to the community at large. To ground the issues of female social participation featured in the play, I trace the shift in the sites and the production of potables in the early modern period, which gradually deprived women of both the social function of ale brewing and the social locus of the alehouse as a viable site for female community. Chapter 2 explores the traditional social roles of the gossip community - its functions in assisting and celebrating birth and in privately effecting justice for transgressions that disrupt domestic function - and its concomitant spaces, the birth room, alehouse, and tavern. Focusing on Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the chapter explores how these plays are part of the larger conversation surrounding gossips' private functions and the tensions between public spaces and interventions, and unease about gossips' larger circles of influence. Chapter 3 explores public roles not traditionally associated with the gossip community, and uses two comedies - Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women and The Staple of News - to track a change in the representation of gossip communities as groups less invested in private function and more devoted to presenting a public intellectual presence in society. Each dramatically stages the competing conceptions of women as gossips and social mediators with an explicitly intellectual, interpretative, interventive function. The Coda examines this continuing trend into the Restoration and examines two female-authored texts, Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure and Manley's The New Atalantis to demonstrate how the separation of the intellectual and the physical functions of the gossip community led to its eventual demise.
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