The Literary London Journal, 14:1 (Spring 2017): 27 Gender, Genre and the City in Early Modern English Writing: A Reading of Thomas Deloney’s ballad ‘The ouerthrow of proud Holofernes, and the triumph of vertuous Queene Iudith’ (1587-8) Ananya Dutta Gupta (Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan,West Bengal,India) The Literary London Journal, Volume 14 Number 1 (Spring 2017) Abstract The essay sets out to re-read Deloney’s ballad about Judith’s daring assassination of her city’s besieger, Holofernes, as a laudatory fable of urban womanhood. I have sought to locate Deloney’s representation of the Judith legend at the cusp of multiple cultural archetypes: gendering of elements of architecture, gendering of the city as a woman in terms of the architectural essentialisation of its walls, the perceived association of walls, in turn, with mercantile access, resultant prosperity and visible opportunities for hedonism, the related perception of urban women as habitually promiscuous and disruptive, and the hinging of the military and political fate of cities on the alleged impact of such vitiating feminine presence. I argue that in fashioning Judith, Deloney is seeking to locate and resolve, express and exorcise urban male anxieties about the city, anxieties that are recognizably early modern in their moorings, but also generically conditioned and perpetuated through deeply entrenched, pronouncedly gendered strands of what Deborah Shuger calls “habits of thought”. Keywords Judith, Deloney, Bible, siege, gender, urban, space, walls Introduction This essay re-reads Thomas Deloney’s late-1580s’ ballad about the Biblical Judith’s daring assassination of her city’s besieger, Holofernes, as a laudatory fable of urban womanhood. In terms of its immediate ambit of allusion, the ballad is a flattering solicitation of Queen Elizabeth I’s proactive guardianship of national