A History of Early Modern Women's Writing

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

Patricia Phillippy (Edited by)

9781107137066, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 January 2018

456 pages, 11 b/w illus. 1 table
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.6 cm, 0.85 kg

'A thought-provoking and carefully organized collection … the quality of the scholarship within this frame will lend itself fruitfully to all scholars working on women writers in this or any period but may be especially productive for advanced graduate students and young scholars finding their own footing in the field.' Julie A. Chappell, Renaissance Quarterly

A History of Early Modern Women's Writing is essential reading for students and scholars working in the field of early modern British literature and history. This collaborative book of twenty-two chapters offers an expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production in the period stretching from the English Reformation to the Restoration. Chapters work together to trace the contours of a diverse body of early modern women's writing, aligning women's texts with the major literary, political, and cultural currents with which they engage. Contributors examine and take account of developments in critical theory, feminism, and gender studies that have influenced the reception, reading, and interpretation of early modern women's writing. This book explicates and interrogates significant methodological and critical developments in the past four decades, guiding and testing scholarship in this period of intense activity in the recovery, dissemination, and interpretation of women's writing.

Introduction: 'sparkling multiplicity' Patricia Phillippy
Part I. Critical Approaches and Methodologies: 1. Invisibility optics: Aphra Behn, Esther Inglis and the fortunes of women's works Margaret J. M. Ezell
2. Reconsidering the woman writer: the identity politics of Anne Cooke Bacon Jaime L. Goodrich
3. The critical fortunes of the tenth muse: canonicity and its discontents Patricia Pender
4. When we swear to tell the truth: the Carleton Debates and archival methodology Megan Matchinske
Part II. The Tudor Era (1526–1603): 5. Common and competing faiths Susan M. Felch
6. Isabella Whitney's slips: poetry, collaboration, and coterie Dana E. Lawrence
7. Transmitting faith: Elizabeth Tudor, Anne Askew, and Jane Grey Elaine V. Beilin
8. Humanism, religion, and early modern Englishwomen in their transnational contexts Julie D. Campbell
9. Women in worship: continuity and change in the prayers of Elizabeth Tyrwhit and Frances Aburgavenny Micheline White
10. Spatial texts: women as devisers of environments and iconographies Peter Davidson
Part III. The Early Stuart Period (1603–42): 11. Aemilia Lanyer's radical art: 'The Passion of Christ' Pamela J. Benson
12. Memory, materiality and maternity in the Tanfield/Cary archive Ramona Wray
13. Mary Wroth romances Ovid: refiguring metamorphosis and complaint in The Countess of Montgomery's Urania Clare R. Kinney
14. Nuns' writing: translation, textual mobility and transnational networks Marie-Louise Coolahan
15. Motherhood and women's writing in early seventeenth-century England: legacies, catechisms, and popular polemic Paula McQuade
16. Monuments and memory Peter Sherlock
Part IV. Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration (1642–76): 17. Prophecy, power, and religious dissent W. Scott Howard
18. Coteries, circles, networks: the Cavendish Circle and Civil War women's writing Sarah C. E. Ross
19. Inventing fame Jane B. Stevenson
20. Political writing across borders Mihoko Suzuki
21. English women's writing and indigenous medical knowledge in the early modern Atlantic world Edith Snook
22. Lady Anne Clifford's Great Books of Record: remembrances of a dynasty Jessica L. Malay.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Society & culture: general [JF], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB]