An in-depth study of early modern women's modesty rhetoric from the English Reformation to the Restoration. This book provides new readings of modesty's gendered deployment in the works of Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet.

Featuring the most frequently taught female writers and texts of the early modern period, this Companion introduces the reader to the range, complexity, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain from 1500–1700. Presenting key textual, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to the study of women's writing. The book is clearly divided into three sections, covering: how women learnt to write and how their work was circulated or published; how and what women wrote in the places and spaces in which they lived, worked, and worshipped; and the different kinds of writing women produced, from poetry and fiction to letters, diaries, and political prose. This structure makes the volume readily adaptable to course usage. The Companion is enhanced by an introduction that lays out crucial framework and critical issues, and by chronologies that situate women's writings alongside political and cultural events.

Because print publishing was often neither possible nor desirable for women in the early modern period, in order to understand the range of writing by women and indeed women's literary history itself, it is important that scholars consider women's writing in manuscript. Since the body of critical studies on women's writing for the most part prioritizes print over manuscript, this essay collection provides an essential corrective. The essays in this volume discuss many of the ways in which women participated in early modern manuscript culture. The manuscripts studied by the contributors originated in a wide range of different milieux, including the royal Court, the universities, gentry and aristocratic households in England and Ireland, and French convents. Their contents are similarly varied: original and transcribed secular and devotional verse, religious meditations, letters, moral precepts in French and English, and recipes are among the genres represented. Emphasizing the manuscripts' social, political and religious contexts, the contributors challenge commonly held notions about women's writing in English in the early modern period, and bring to light many women whose work has not been considered before.

In a famous passage in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf asked 'why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age'. She went on to speculate about an imaginary Judith Shakespeare who might have been destined for a career as illustrious as that of her brother William, except that she had none of his chances. The truth is that many women wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and this collection will serve to introduce modern readers to the full variety of women's writing in this period from poems, prose and fiction to prophecies, letters, tracts and philosophy. The collection begins with the poetry of Isabella Whitney, who worked in a gentlewoman's household in London in the late 1560s, and ends with Aphra Behn who was employed as a spy in Amsterdam by Charles II. Here are examples of the work of twelve women writers, allowing the reader to sample the diverse and lively output of all classes and opinions, from artistcrats such as Mary Wroth, Anne Clifford and Margaret Cavendish to women of obscure background caught up in the religious ferment of the mid seventeenth century like Hester Biddle, Pricscilla Cotton and Mary Cole. The collection includes three plays, and a generous selection of poetry, letters, diary, prose fiction, religious polemic, prohecy and scienticficic speculation, offering the reader the possibilility of tracing patterns through the works collected and some sense of historical shifts and changes. All the extracts are edited afresh from original sources and the anthology includes comprehensive notes, both explanatory and textual. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on—and challenges—the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland provides an original perspective on both new and familiar texts in this first critical collection to focus on seventeenth-century women’s life writing in a specifically Irish context. By shifting the focus away from England—even though many of these writers would have identified themselves as English—and making Ireland and Irishness the focus of their essays, the contributors resituate women’s narratives in a powerful and revealing landscape. This volume addresses a range of genres, from letters to book marginalia, and a number of different women, from now-canonical life writers such as Mary Rich and Ann Fanshawe to far less familiar figures such as Eliza Blennerhassett and the correspondents and supplicants of William King, archbishop of Dublin. The writings of the Boyle sisters and the Duchess of Ormonde—women from the two most important families in seventeenth-century Ireland—also receive a thorough analysis. These innovative and nuanced scholarly considerations of the powerful influence of Ireland on these writers’ construction of self, provide fresh, illuminating insights into both their writing and their broader cultural context.

This book contains expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production from the Reformation to the Restoration.

This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women between 1550 and 1700 and reveals an unprecedented view of the intellectual and literary lives of women in early modern England

This book contains the first comprehensive account of writing by women from the mid sixteenth century through to 1700. At the same time, it traces the way a representative sample of that writing was published, circulated in manuscript, read, anthologised, reprinted, and discussed from the time it was produced through to the present day. Salzman's study covers an enormous range of women from all areas of early modern society, and it covers examples of the many and varied genres produced by these women, from plays to prophecies, diaries to poems, autobiographies to philosophy. As well as introducing readers to the wealth of material produced by women in the early modern period, this book examines changing responses to what was written, tracing a history of reception and transmission that amounts to a cultural history of changing taste.

Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other genealogical concepts to talk about authorship, family, selfhood, and memory. In turn, both Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth also shaped their works in relation to the ways in which writers within their familial communities and literary coteries constructed them as Sidneys, heirs, descendants, and future ancestors, in genres ranging from the patronage dedication and pastoral eclogue to mythographic genealogia and georgic poetry. In the intersection of ancestry, death, sexuality, and reproduction, the book contends that Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth develop their authorship within the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of their world’s genealogical discourses.