Women Writing in English (Renaissance and Reformation)

Introduction
However much of a Renaissance early modern Englishwomen writers may, or may not, have experienced—a question raised in 1977 by Joan Kelly (“Did Women Have a Renaissance?” inBecoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977], 137–164)—their writing practices seem not to have been immediately affected by the coming of the book. Of over thirty-three thousand entries in A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991), eighty-five have been assigned to women authors, or approximately 0.5 percent, and these titles appeared predominantly between 1545 and 1640. The dramatic increase in printed writings by women from 1641 to 1700, constitutes approximately 1.2 percent of the titles in print from a period in which fewer than seven hundred titles have been assigned to women of the over 120,000 recorded titles in Donald Goddard Wing’s Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1972–1988). These small numbers of works can be explained, in part, by relatively low literacy rates among women compared to men and by the disapproval of women’s expressing their thoughts in public(ation). With the fairly recent growth of research into manuscript writings by women, it seems indisputable that most early modern Englishwomen writers raised their voices in manuscript rather than in print and in what we now term private, noncanonical forms like letters and diaries. It also seems that most of those women who wrote poems or dramas or prose of traditional types circulated their writings in familial and social manuscript networks (a proportion suggested by recovered materials).
General Overviews
Very useful general overviews of English women writers are available in broad, traditionalmonographs; in essay collections organized around a central topic; and in dissertations exploring large areas of interest, all of which serve as substantive introductions to this newly recognized field of study.
MONOGRAPHS
Among literary scholars, Pearl Hogrefe was early in recognizing and studying learned early modern women, among them writers, with “Education of Women: Love, Marriage” (Hogrefe 1959), an important chapter in her The Sir Thomas More Circle. Following Hogrefe, other literary scholars, influenced by the growth of social history, have increased and refined our knowledge of women, and of women writers, in all classes of English society. The monographs listed here, beginning with Elaine Beilin’s pathbreaking and still valuable study on the earlier part of the period (Beilin 1987), provide solid reviews of English women writers. Hobby’s Virtue of Necessity (Hobby 1982), also by an early contributor to the field, deals with the later 17th century, Schleiner 1994 and Krontiris 1992with the Tudor and Stuart years, Lewalski 1993 with the earlier 17th century; Walker 1996 andWoodbridge 1984 span both periods. Demers 2005, which avoids any type of polemic, is perhaps the most inclusive, and is certainly the most up-to-date of these studies.
Beilin, Elaine V. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
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A thoughtful, accessible, still standard guide to thirty of the better-known early modern Englishwomen writers in English. Polemical in the sense that it posits religious respectability as a constant in the works of these women. Perhaps especially useful is the “List of Works by Women, 1521–1624” (pp. 335–338). This list is amplified in Beilin’s “Current Bibliography of English Women Writers, 1500–1640,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, edited by Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 347–360. Reprint, 1990.
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Demers, Patricia. Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
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A careful reconstruction of the scholarly development of the field, a well-developed exploration of contexts for early modern Englishwomen’s writings, and a clear discussion of the genres in which these women wrote. Supplemented by two helpful appendices––“Women and the Rise of Print Culture” (pp. 242–245) and “Chronologies” (pp. 246–274)––and by solid bibliographies of primary and secondary works (pp. 305–346). Highly recommended to both the student and the advanced reader.
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Hobby, Elaine. Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–88. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982.
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Based on the premise that Englishwomen writers, in the period 1649–1688, made “a virtue of necessity” and found their public voice despite and in view of their subordinate position, this is a valuable pioneering study of the genres—prophecy, religious poetry, meditations, conversion narratives, autobiographies, skills books, arguments for education, prose fiction, drama, and love poetry—in which they wrote. Contains useful bibliographies (pp. 228–260) and a helpful index. Reprints: 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992.
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Hogrefe, Pearl. “Education of Women: Love, Marriage.” In The Sir Thomas More Circle: A Program of Ideas and Their Impact on Secular Drama. By Pearl Hogrefe, 201–250. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959.
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An early study by a literary scholar, in a published monograph, of learned early modern women, some of whom were writers. In 1975, she continued this line of inquiry with “Women with a Sound Classical Education” (pp. 97–117) and “Women as Literary Patrons” (pp. 118–143) in Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens (Ames: Iowa State University Press), and in 1977, with a book-length series of vignettes of exceptional early modern Englishwomen: Women of Action in Tudor England: Nine Biographical Studies (Ames: Iowa State University Press).
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Krontiris, Tina. Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
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A readable, if perhaps polemical, discussion of the “very inventive” ways in which six early modern Englishwomen writers (Isabella Whitney, Margaret Tyler, Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth) carved out “meaningful, productive, and creative roles” in circumventing norms (p. 3). A popular source among scholars. Contains bibliographies of primary and secondary sources (pp. 166–178).
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Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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Argues that English feminism was born there in the early 17th century, positing Anne of Denmark; Elizabeth Stuart; Arbella Stuart; Lucy, Countess of Bedford; Anne Clifford; Rachel Speght; Elizabeth Cary; Aemilia Lanyer; and Mary Wroth as the asserters and voices of a feminist challenge to patriarchal Stuart norms. Useful appendices on specifics concerning Elizabeth Cary and Aemilia Lanyer. Carefully documented with a meticulous index.
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Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Translated by Connie McQuillen and Lynn E. Roller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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A thoughtful study usefully pairing women writers in such milieux as household and courtly circles and in Catholic activism. Contains enormously useful translations of texts by the Cooke sisters and by Elizabeth Jane Weston, a modernized excerpt from Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, and a transcripton from a manuscript by Southwell. Useful bibliographies (pp. 274–285).
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Walker, Kim. Women Writers of the English Renaissance. New York: Twayne, 1996.
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Ranges over Englishwomen writers, mainly in print, between 1560 and 1640. Contains a timeline, bibliographies, and an index. A helpful guide to beginners.
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Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
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A thorough discussion of the formal debate—attacks on and defenses of women—that raged from 1540 to 1620, from the early Tudor through the Jacobean period. Valuable to both beginning and advanced readers. Especially useful to readers of this article for comments on the texts by and assigned to women writers. Includes useful bibliographies and an index.
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ESSAY COLLECTIONS
In the evolving field of early modern women’s studies, collections of individual recoveries and studies had become, by the 1990s, a central mechanism for disseminating important scholarly discoveries about early modern Englishwomen writers. Journal articles culled from special issues of English Literary Renaissance (see Special Issues of Journals) and coupled with painstaking bibliographies constitute one such collection (Farrell, et al. 1988). Presentations on manuscripts culled from the Perdita conference (Burke and Gibson 2004) and on pious early modern Englishwomen from a Modern Language Association (MLA) panel titled “Literature and Christianity” (Hannay 1985) constitute two others. Collections on drama (Cerasano and Wynne-Davies 1998), on poetry (Smith and Uppelt 2001), and on the relationship of manuscript and print circulation (Justice and Tinker 2002) bring together some of the important foci that have developed among scholars. The recent seven-volume Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700 (Lamb 2009) collects and reprints many important essays on individual women writers.
Burke, Victoria, and Jonathan Gibson, eds. Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
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A selection of strong studies of early modern women’s manuscript writings in many genres and from different British cultures, selected from presentations at the Perdita seminars at Nottingham Trent University. The essays discuss love poetry (Heale); devotional texts (Gibson, Wolfe); learned and political texts (Longfellow, Stevenson); literary texts (Burke); Gaelic Irish texts (Coolahan); autobiographical texts (Hunt, Ross, Shell); and domestic papers (Bowden, Pennell). Useful to the advanced scholar.
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Cerasano, S. P., and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds. Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance, 1594–1998. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
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Commentary on early modern women dramatists in three parts: early commentary (1594–1957); later, general essays; and essays on individual dramatists: Elizabeth Tudor, Jane Lumley, Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth, Jane and Elizabeth Cavendish, and Margaret Cavendish. Intended for and most useful to the beginning student, though lacking a more structured listing of these sources; the volume does, however, include a bibliography of secondary materials.
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Farrell, Kirby, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Arthur F. Kinney, eds. Women in the Renaissance: Selections from English Literary Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
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Essays from two special issues of English Literary Renaissance, including meticulous bibliographies on early modern Englishwomen writers by Elizabeth Hageman (“Recent Studies in Women Writers of Tudor England” and “Recent Studies in Women Writers of the English Seventeenth Century”) and by Josephine Roberts (“Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke”), necessarily, alas, layered in a series of alphabets. See also Special Issues of Journals for supplementary bibliographies.
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Hannay, Margaret P., ed. Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985.
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Still widely cited collection drawn from MLA presentations; concentrates on the virtuous woman writer. Essays on Catherine of Aragon’s circle (Wayne), Parr (King), Margaret Roper (Verbrugge), Elizabeth Tudor (Prescott), Askew (Beilin), Jane Grey (Levin), the Cooke sisters (Lamb), Mary Sidney Herbert (Bornstein, Hannay, Fisken), Lanyer (Lewalski), and Cary (Fischer). Also a theoretical essay on difficulties encountered by early modern women writers: Gary F. Waller, “Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women’s Writing” (pp. 238–256). Index. Bibliography.
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Justice, George L., and Nathan Tinker, eds. Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Examines the use of manuscript and particularly the circulation of manuscripts (in networks) by modern Englishwomen. Justice’s “Introduction” (pp. 1–16) relates manuscript and print publication practices to the contemporary overlap between print and digital technologies, emphasizing the endurance of the “legacy” practice.
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Lamb, Mary Ellen, gen. ed. Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.
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Seven volumes edited by recognized authorities on early modern Englishwomen. Reprinted essays by various hands on such writers as Anne Askew, Katherine Parr, Margaret Roper, Mildred Cecil, Anne Bacon (Beilin); Elizabeth Cary (Raber); Margaret Cavendish (Mendelson); Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson (Suzuki); Mary Sidney Herbert (Hannay); Anne Lok, Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer (White); and Mary Wroth (Kinney).
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Smith, Barbara, and Ursula Uppelt, eds. Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.
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A set of essays grappling with the difficulties faced by 16th- and 17th-century Englishwomen poets. Deals with writers of both manuscript and printed materials. Austen (Hammons), Behn (Russell, Medoff), Masham (Ezell), Wroth (Kinney), Askew (Linton), Mary Sidney Herbert (Miller), Philips (Shifflett, Price), and more general essays (Hannay, Wilcox). Contains an index; each essay includes a bibliography.
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DISSERTATIONS
Many excellent dissertations studying one or a few early modern women writers have been produced since 1980. This listing is limited to dissertations covering a wide range of women writers and/or genres—Daybell 1999 on letter writers, Frater 1994 on writers in Scotch Gaelic, Giles 2004 on Scottish literary women, Hughey 1932 and Kohler 1936 on literary women, and Ludlow 1978 on preaching women.
Daybell, James. “Women’s Letters and Letter-Writing in England, 1540–1603.” PhD diss., University of Reading, 1999.
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An encyclopedic review of the types and uses of letter writing by early modern Englishwomen. Includes an appendix (pp. 285–313) listing women letter writers, 1540–1603.
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Frater, Anne C. “Scottish Gaelic Women’s Poetry up to 1750.” PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 1994.
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A pioneering review of a much neglected subject. Partially incomprehensible without a knowledge of Scottish Gaelic. An appendix (pp. 353–710) supplies texts. A first-line index and list of sources are also included.
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Giles, Pamela B. “Scottish Literary Women, 1560–1700.” PhD diss., University of Saskatchewan, 2004.
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An important survey of writing by Mary Stuart, Mary Beaton, Elizabeth Douglas, Esther Inglis, Agnes Murray, Elizabeth Melville, Barbara MacKay, Lillias Skene, Helen Hay, Margaret Cunningham, and Marion Veich.
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Hughey, Ruth Willard. “Cultural Interests of Women in England from 1524 to 1640, Indicated in the Writings of the Women: A Survey.” PhD diss., Cornell University, 1932.
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The earliest 20th-century study of this subject––still useful despite the absence of many tools scholars now take for granted––by a woman who continued to produce important, fastidious editions and articles on early modern Englishwomen writers. Includes tables of original and translated printed writings. The foundation on which much later work rests.
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Kohler, Charlotte. “The Elizabethan Woman of Letters: The Extent of Her Literary Activities.” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1936.
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A competent survey of writings by early modern Englishwomen and by writers using female pseudonyms. An appendix lists ninety-one authors chronologically.
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Ludlow, Dorothy P. “Arise and Be Doing: English Preaching Women, 1640–1660.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1978.
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A foundational study of preaching women of the mid- to late 17th century, attempting to avoid sometimes inaccurate generalizations about these women and to analyze their departure during the civil war years from traditional restraints on public preaching by women. Extensive bibliographies include lists of tracts written by women, 1640–1660, and of those women’s petitions and other works by women cited in the dissertation.
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Reference Works
The extremely useful print and online reference works listed here are biographical dictionaries (Bell, et al. 1990, Blain, et al. 1990, Sage 1999, Shattock 1993), catalogues (The Perdita Project), an encyclopedic compendium of biographical and generic information (The Orlando Project), and a comprehensive chronology, complete with an index (Sterling 1995).
Bell, Maureen, George Parfitt, and Simon Shepherd, comps. A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers, 1580–1720. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.
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A succinct, well-researched guide to women writers of the period, useful to both new students of the field and more seasoned researchers who want to check a fact. The appendices on anonymous and pseudonymous texts and on false ascriptions are also useful, though it is regrettable that the listings are in different alphabets. The critical appendices, while also useful as starting points, do not fit the overall format of the book.
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Blain, Virginia, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
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A well-researched guide. A reliable beginning point for the student, beginning before and extending beyond the English Renaissance.
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Orlando Project: A History of Women’s Writing in the British Isles.
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An interesting attempt at cohesive study of English women writers through many centuries with a wide range of search options—by name, date, occupation, place, genre, and word or phrase. Particularly useful to the beginner. Edited by Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, Susan Brown, and others. Available by subscription.
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Perdita Project: Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Compilations.
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A painstakingly compiled catalogue of manuscript compilations by Englishwomen, 1500–1824, identified and searchable by writer’s name and biography (when known); manuscript repository; and first line, genre, and source of each manuscript. Edited by Elizabeth Clarke, Victoria Burke, and Martyn Bennett.
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Sage, Lorna, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Women Writing in English. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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A reliable, accessible guide for beginners. Entries on both names and titles, by over two hundred scholars. Not limited to the early modern period. Includes occasional illustrations.
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Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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A reliable, accessible guide for beginners. Not limited to the early modern period. Includes a bibliography (pp. 483–492).
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Sterling, Eric. “Women Writers of the English Renaissance: A Chronology of Texts and Contexts.” In “The Muses Female Are”: Martha Moulsworth and Other Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Edited by Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little, 281–307. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1995.
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A useful compilation of information that provides context for women writers in English, 1558–1660. A variant on the timeline; Sterling organizes events and women writers year by year in paragraphs rather than in a chart. The chronology is rendered accessible by the appended “Index of Women Mentioned in the ’Chronology of Texts and Contexts’” (pp. 308–310).
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Bibliographies
An abundance of excellent bibliographies on early modern Englishwomen writers, particularly writers of printed texts, have appeared in the last several decades. Gartenberg and Whittimore 1977,Crawford 1985, Smith and Cardinale 1990 and Travitsky’s Bibliography of English Women Writers, 1500–1640 demonstrate the growth of information about Englishwomen writers; Foxton 1994 shows the growth of specialized subfields of knowledge; Evans 2002 and Ziegler 2001 attest to the increasing interest in introducing these materials to the classroom; and Barker, et al. 2007 highlights the firmly interdisciplinary nature of early modern women’s studies. (Some outstanding bibliographies not listed in this cluster are noted in the annotations to Monographs, Essay Collections, and Special Issues of Journals )
Barker, Kathleen, and Karen Nelson, with Rachel McCann. “A Sweet Nosegay of Scholarship: Publications in English in Early Modern Women’s Studies, 2004–2006.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2 (Fall 2007): 165–192.
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A thorough listing. Not limited to writers or to England.
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Crawford, Patricia. “Women’s Published Writing 1600–1700.” In Women in English Society, 1500–1800. Edited by Mary Prior, 211–282. London and New York: Methuen, 1985.
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Taking publication in print as its basis, this list enormously expanded the number of printed texts known to have been authored by 17th-century women. An important precursor to Smith and Cardinale 1990.
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Evans, Robert C. “Internet Resources for Teaching Early Modern English Women Writers.”Working Papers on the Web 4 (2002).
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An extremely useful resource for teachers of early modern Englishwomen writers.
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Foxton, Rosemary. “Hear the Word of the Lord”: A Critical and Bibliographical Study of Quaker Women’s Writing, 1650–1700. Melbourne: Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 1994.
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A meticulous annotated list of printed writings by a group of women that is coming increasingly within the scholarly radar. Prefaced by an excellent introduction. Useful particularly to the specialist.
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Gartenberg, Patricia, and Nena Thames Whittemore. “A Checklist of English Women in Print, 1475–1640.” Bulletin of Bibliography 34.1 (1977): 1–13.
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An early effort to locate printed writings by Englishwomen in the Pollard-Redgrave short-title catalogue period. A starting point for today’s beginner.
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Smith, Hilda L., and Susan Cardinale, comps. Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography Based on Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990.
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An impressive ferreting out from Wing of printed writings by Englishwomen of the 17th century. Its only shortcoming is the separate listing, in separate alphabets, of additional works by and about women.
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Travitsky, Betty S. Bibliography of English Women Writers, 1500–1640.
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A preliminary listing of scholarship about more than seven hundred early modern women writers of manuscript and print texts––in England, in the colonies, and on the Continent––as well as about writers in Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh. Annotation in this early mounting is limited to entries that would otherwise be unclear. Available online by subscription.
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Ziegler, Georgianna. “Women Writers Online: An Evaluation and Annotated Bibliography of Web Resources.” In Special Issue: Women Writers. Edited by Lisa Hopkins. Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (2001).
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A useful listing that includes websites featuring early modern women artists and writers in English and in other languages.
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Teaching Guides and Pedagogy
The development of a new field of study necessarily has brought in its wake an interest in approaches to teaching it. Essays on pedagogy in Brink 1994, Donawerth 1998, McManus 2000,Steen 2003, and Woods 2007, as well as summaries of related workshops from the proceedings volumes of the “Attending to Women” conferences are listed here. The Modern Language Association volumes often include essays on teaching individual women writers; Cheney and Prescott 2000, Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry, includes several such essays.Gough 2002, an essay on teaching the querelle, and Woods and Hannay 2000, a rich collection on teaching women writers, are important sources of pedagogical ideas, as is the rich, and earlyTeaching Judith Shakespeare (Hageman and Steen 1996). Robert Evans’s “Internet Resources for Teaching Early Modern English Women Writers” (Evans 2002 in Bibliographies) is another important resource.
Brink, Jean R. “Remodeling the Landlord’s House: Ownership of the Canon.” Paper presented at a symposium held 8–10 November 1990 at the University of Maryland. InAttending to Women in Early Modern England. Edited by Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff, 301–335. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.
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Based on Brink’s address on pedagogy at the 1990 “Attending to Women in Early Modern England” conference. Discusses the fierce controversy over teaching newly discovered writings by early modern women as a manifestation of the canon wars. Instructive review of resistance to curricular changes. Appended “Responses to a Pedagogy Survey” describes individual experiences in introducing women writers into survey courses. Volume includes summaries of pedagogy workshops that followed Brink’s address.
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Cheney, Patrick, and Anne Lake Prescott, eds. Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2000.
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Contains essays on teaching early modern women writers by Margaret Hannay, Janel Mueller, and Susan M. Felch.
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Donawerth, Jane. “Changing our Originary Stories: Renaissance Women on Education, and Conversation as a Model for Our Classrooms.” Paper presented at symposium sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, 21–23 April 1994. In Attending to Early Modern Women. Edited by Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seeff, 263–277. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998.
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Based on her presentation at the 1994 “Attending to Women in Early Modern England” conference. Offers an alternative history of the origins of education (in the Renaissance) to the traditional masculine model and shows similarities between the feminist model and current feminist pedagogical theory and practice. The volume also includes essays on pedagogy based on presentations by Sheila ffolliott and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, as well as summaries of the pedagogy workshops at the conference.
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Gough, Melinda. “Women’s Popular Culture? Teaching the Swetnam Controversy.” InDebating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Edited by Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki, 79–100. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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Basing her argument on both undergraduate and graduate teaching experiences with the polemic of the Swetnam controversy, Gough suggests a way to teach the querelle. Includes a model syllabus.
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Hageman, Elizabeth H., and Sara Jayne Steen, eds. Special Issue: Teaching Judith Shakespeare. Shakespeare Quarterly 47.4 (1996).
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A very impressive collection of essays on a range of pedagogical concerns connected to teaching women writers (and thereby enlivening the teaching of early modern literature). Authors include Irene Dash, Jane Donawerth, Nancy Gutierrez, Kim Hall, Lisa Hopkins, Theresa Kemp, Megan Marchinske, Josephine Roberts, Jan Stirm, and Frances Teague. Topics include race and gender, single-sex retreats, sisterhood, and women’s culture.
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McManus, Barbara F. “Whose Voice Is It Anyway? Teaching Early Modern Women Writers.” Paper presented at a symposium sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, 6–8 November 1997. In Crossing Boundaries: Attending to Early Modern Women. Edited by Jane Donawerth and Adele Seeff, 227–240. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.
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Essay, based on McManus’s presentation at the 1997 “Attending to Early Modern Women” conference, suggests ways to sensitize students to the effect on an understanding of a text when an author’s identification can be gendered and how understanding of a text can be complicated by the use of a female subject position. Volume also contains essays on pedagogy by Frances Dolan and Martha Howell and summaries of the pedagogy workshops.
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Steen, Sara Jayne. “’I’ve Never Been This Serious’: Necrophilia and the Teacher of Early Modern Literature.” Paper presented at a symposium sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, 9–11 November 2000. In Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women. Edited by Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff, 303–316. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003.
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Essay, presented at the 2000 “Attending to Early Modern Women” conference, negotiates between efforts of some feminist scholars to determine the authorship of newly discovered texts and to fix their meanings and efforts of others to posit indeterminate authorship and multiple meanings. Steen demonstrates from her own teaching that successful pedagogy can accept some degree of uncertainty and consider a range of probable meanings for these texts. Volume contains summaries of the pedagogy workshops.
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Woods, Susanne. “But Is It Any Good? The Value of Teaching Early Modern Writers.” Paper presented at a symposium sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, 6–8 November 2003. In Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women. Edited by Joan E. Hartman and Adele Seeff, 324–340. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007.
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In her essay, originally presented at the 2003 “Attending to Early Modern Women” conference, Woods recalls an early question about the “value” of newly recovered works by early modern women writers and discusses poems by Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth to demonstrate their aesthetic power and therefore their rightful place in the curriculum. Volume contains essays on pedagogy by Julia Marciari Alexander and Allyson Poska and summaries of the pedagogy workshops.
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Woods, Susanne, and Margaret P. Hannay, eds. Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. New York: Modern Language Association, 2000.
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Contextual and theoretical essays; essays on eight unequivocally canonized early modern Englishwomen writers: Elizabeth I (Mueller), Anne Lock (Felch), Mary Wroth (Roberts and Hannay), Cary (Weller), Speght (Lewalski), Philips (Hageman), Cavendish (Shaver), and Behn (Greer); essays providing specific pedagogical strategies and strategies for teaching specific texts; and bibliographical guides by Hull, Steen, and Ziegler. Also contains an index.
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Special Issues of Journals
With increased attention to early modern women, several special issues of journals have gathered essays about them, including a few special issues on women writers specifically. These include Re-visioning Renaissance Women (Frye and Steen 1999), Studying Early Modern Women (Barroll 1997), Women in the Renaissance: An Interdisciplinary Forum (Jones and Travitsky 1991), andWomen in the Renaissance (Kinney and Farrell 1984). The serial special issues of English Literary Renaissance (ELR) range beyond women writers. Particularly noteworthy in ELR are the bibliographies. Women Dramatists of the Early Modern Period (Wynne-Davies 1999), Women Writers (Hopkins 2001), Women Writing, 1550–1750 (Wallwork and Salzman 2001), and Writings by Early Modern Women (Beal and Ezell 2000) are quite specialized and succeed in bringing cutting-edge research on early modern women writers to the fore.
Barroll, Leeds, ed. Special Issue: Studying Early Modern Women. Shakespeare Studies 25 (1997).
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Introductory but solid essays, on both history and literature, by Amussen, Belsey, Hannay, Margaret King, Lena Orlin, Maureen Quilligan, and Susanne Woods.
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Beal, Peter, and Margaret J. M. Ezell, eds. Special Issue: Writings by Early Modern Women.English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 9 (2000).
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Brilliant essays. Encyclopedic essay by Jane Stevenson (“Women, Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century”); excellent, more specific essays on Elizabeth I (Teague), Inglis (Tjan-Bakker; Ziegler), Mary Sidney Herbert (May), Richarddson (Burke), Jocelin (Brown). Highly recommended to the advanced reader.
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Frye, Susan, and Sara Jayne Steen, eds. Special Issue: Re-visioning Renaissance Women: On the Perils and Pleasures of Re-viewing the Past. Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 20 (1999).
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A strong collection of essays and reviews, though not all of them deal with early modern Englishwomen writers or even with early modern England. Englishwomen writers discussed include Anne Boleyn, Alice More, Anne Stanhope (Warnicke); Elizabeth Wolley (McCutcheon); Mary Harding, Elizabeth Mervin Bourne, Frances Brandon, Elizabeth Willoughby, Elizabeth Talbot, Margaret Clifford, Elizabeth Cooke Russell, Elizabeth Hatton, Margaret Bourchier, Bridget Willoughby, Penelope Rich (Daybell); Aemilia Lanyer (Gutierrez); and Margaret Cavendish (Bowerbank).
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Hopkins, Lisa, ed. Special Issue: Women Writers. Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (2001).
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Solid general articles by Burgess and Acheson and solid articles on the following writers: Bowyers (Burke), Elizabeth I (Benkert), Moulsworth (Steggle), Wroth (Hageman), Lanyer (Siegfried).
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Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Betty S. Travitsky, eds. Special Issue: Women in the Renaissance: An Interdisciplinary Forum. Women’s Studies 19.2 (1991).
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Based on presentations at a Modern Language Association forum in 1989. Essays on history and literature. Women writers discussed include Elizabeth Brackley, Esther Sowernam, and Mary Wroth.
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Kinney, Arthur F., and Kirby Farrell, eds. Special Issue: Women in the Renaissance. English Literary Renaissance 14.3 (1984).
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The first of three special issues of ELR, followed in 1988 (18.1) and 1994 (24.1), containing painstaking layers of bibliography on Englishwomen writers, 1500–1700, by Elizabeth Hageman, Josephine Roberts, Sara Jayne Steen, Micheline White, and Georgianna Ziegler. Writers discussed include Jane Anger, Constantia Munda, Ester Sowernam, Rachel Speght, Isabella Whitney, Mary Wroth (1984); Arbella Stuart, Mary Tyler (1988); and Elizabeth Cary, Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney Herbert, Frances Howard, and Ester Sowernam (1994).
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Wallwork, Jo, and Paul Salzman, 2001. Special Issue: Women Writing 1550–1750. Meridian18.1 (2001).
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General essay by Hobby, articles on the Astons and Thimelbys (Sanders), Aphra Behn (Narain), Anne Bradstreet (Pender), Margaret Cavendish (Barnes; Kerr; Wallwork), Anne Halkett (Wiseman; Walker), Haywood (Spedding), Celia Fiennes (McRae), Dorothy Leigh (Davies), Katherine Philips (Lilley; Tomlinson), Mary Wroth (Cavanaugh; Smith). Solid. Useful for both beginners and advanced students.
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Wynne-Davies, Marion, ed. Special Issue: Women Dramatists of the Early Modern Period.Women’s Writing 6.1 (1999).
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Valuable collection. Includes general reviews by Alison Findlay, Gweno Williams, and Stephanie J. Hodgson Wright, and by Sophie Tomlinson, as well as essays on Behn (Hobby), Cary and Lumley (Purkiss), Cavendish (Chalmers; Wiseman), Mary Sidney Herbert (Skretkowicz), and Wroth (Wynne-Davies).
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Primary Sources
These few sources of information consist of brief lives and anthologies. With the exception of occasional paeans of praise and funeral sermons, the early modern tradition of recording exemplary women’s lives began in England in 1675, when Edward Phillips appended compact comments on a number of early modern women writers to his Theatrum Poetrarum (Phillips 1675). Over fifty years later, George Ballard, an antiquarian and the friend of such learned women of the 18th century as Elizabeth Elstob (the scholar of Anglo-Saxon), produced carefully researched and edifying lives of dozens of early modern women, often including extracts from their texts (Ballard 1752). Biographium Fӕmineum continued Ballard’s practice, ten years later, of rehearsing the lives of exemplary women. And ten years later still, Thomas Gibbons printed the lives of twenty-two Englishwomen of the period (Gibbons 1777). In 1582, the rather shadowy Thomas Bentley, tentatively identified by Colin Atkinson and Jo Atkinson in the introduction to their Ashgate facsimile edition of his Monument of Matrones (Bentley 1582; facsimile cited under Series of Editions), created what John King has dubbed “the earliest anthology of Englishwomen’s texts,” an important, conservative source of pious texts by early modern Englishwomen, dedicated to and intended to edify Elizabeth Tudor as well as other early modern Englishwomen through the printing of pious texts by women, and including some manuscript and orally transmitted texts that would be otherwise unknown to us. George Colman and Bonnell Thornton produced a well-organized anthology of texts, Poems by Eminent Ladies (Colman and Thornton 1755), in 1755. These sources are unlikely to contain information a student today would find revealing, but they are important for what they tell us of earlier impressions of and responses to early modern Englishwomen writers.
Ballard, George. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences. Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752.
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Impressively researched brief lives (and often excerpts from) the writings of (generally exemplary) early modern Englishwomen, the stable of the figures noted till very recently. Reprint, edited by Ruth Perry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985).
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Bentley, Thomas, comp. The Monvment of Matrones: Conteining Seuen Seuerall Lamps of Virginitie, or Distinct Treatises: Whereof the First Fiue Concerne Praier and Meditation; The Other Two Last, Precepts and Examples, as the Woorthie Works Partlie of Men, Partlie of Women; Compiled for the Necessarie Vse of Both Sexes Out of the Sacred Scriptures, and Other Approued Authors by Thomas Bentley of Graies Inne Student. London: H. Denham, 1582.
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This huge publication (over fifteen hundred pages long) contains (in Lamp 2) texts by Anne Askew, Mistress Bradford, Elizabeth Tudor, Jane Grey, Katharine Parr, Dorcas Martin, Frances Neville, and Elizabeth Tyrwhit; (in Lamp 3) additional texts by Elizabeth Tudor; and (in Lamp 5) additional texts by Frances Neville. The first five “lamps” were printed by Denham, the last two, also in 1582, by Thomas Dawson.
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Biographium Fӕmineum. The female worthies: or, memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments, conspicuous in all the various stations and relations of life, public and private. Containing (exclusive of foreigners) the lives of above fourscore British Ladies, who have shone with a peculiar luster, and given the noblest proofs of the most exalted genius, and superior worth. Collected from history, and the most approved biographers, and brought down to the present time. 2 vols. London: Printed for S. Crowder and J. Payne in Pater-Noster-Row, J. Wilkie and W. Nicoll in St. Paul’s Church-yard, and J. Wren in the Strand, 1766.
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Brief accounts of distinguished women of all stripes, among them Englishwomen of the sixteenth and 17th centuries.
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Colman, George, and Bonnell Thornton. Poems by Eminent Ladies, particularly Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Behn, Miss Carter, Lady Chudleigh, Mrs. Cockburn, Mrs. Grierson, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Killigrew, Mrs. Leapor, Mrs. Madan, Mrs. Masters, Lady M. W. Montague, Mrs. Monk, Duchess of Newcastle, Mrs. K. Phillps, Mrs. Pilkington, Mrs. Rowe, Lady Winchelsea. 2 vols. London: Printed for R. Baldwin, at the Rose, in Pater-Noster Row, 1755.
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Contains a strong selection of poems by the eighteen 17th-century Englishwomen named in the title. Volume 1: Mary Barber, Aphra Behn, Eliza Carter, Lady Chudleigh, Mrs. Cockburn, Mrs. Grierson, Mary Jones; Volume 2: Anne Killigrew; Mary Leapor; Mrs. Madan; Mary Masters; Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Mrs. Monk, Duchess of Newcastle; Katherine Philips; Lӕtitia Pilkington; Elizabeth Rowe; Anne, Countess of Winchelsea.
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Gibbons, Thomas. Memoirs of Eminently pious women, who were ornaments to their sex, Blessings to their families, and edifying examples to the church and world. 2 vols. London: Printed for J. Buckland, in Paternoster Row, 1777.
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Accounts of twenty-two 16th- and 17th-century Englishwomen.
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Phillips, Edward. “Women Among the Moderns Eminent for Poetry.” In Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets, Especially the Most Eminent, of all Ages. The Antients Distinguish’t from the Moderns in Their Severall Alphabets. With Some Observations and Reflections upon Many of Them, Particularly Those of Our Own Nation. Together with a Prefatory Discourse of the Poets and Poetry in Generall. By Edward Phillips, 253–261. London: Charles Smith, at the Angel near the inner Temple-Gate, 1675.
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This short list, which follows a longer “Women Among the Antients Eminent for Poetry” (pp. 235–252), includes brief discussions of the following 16- and 17th-century Englishwomen: Anne Askew; Anne Broadstreet; Anna Maria Shurman, Arabella (Stuart); Astrea Behn; Lady Bacon; Catherine Philips; Elizabeth Carew; Elizabetha Joanna Westonia; Lady Jane Grey; Mis. Killigrew; Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, Mary Marpeth; Mary (Sidney Herbert), Countess of Pembroke; Lady Mary Wroth; Mildred (Cooke); Lady Russell.
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Writing Published Post-1800
With the exception of a few very prominent, usually praiseworthy exemplars, Englishwomen writers and their texts garnered little attention in their own time or in later centuries. Even those few texts, predominantly by a few prominent women like Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart, and Mary Queen of Scots, that have been noticed by scholars in the past have rarely been reprinted since the early modern period. Archaeology into writings by early modern women writers has been further hindered by difficulties in identifying women, often known as daughter of, sister of, or wife of so-and-so, and these difficulties have been compounded by the vagaries of early modern spelling, by women’s frequent name changes and frequent use in print of initials, rather than of full names, and in the case of translations by women, of a tendency not to name the translator. Their consequent invisibility led Virginia Woolf to lament famously that “no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature, when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet” (A Room of One’s Own). The growth of feminist scholarship in the late 20th century, such as that listed in this bibliography, and the development of online tools (such as ESTC, EEBO, and ECCO) have rendered these texts and authors easier to identify, locate, and study in recent years.
PRINTED COLLECTIONS
Spurred by the “doubled vision” of feminists of the later 20th century, awareness of and interest in early modern women writers has grown, and many excellent collections of Englishwomen’s writings have appeared over the last thirty years. These collections increasingly include noncanonical texts and private writings. The selection listed here is limited to collections of texts by early modern Englishwomen published after 1980. It includes some encyclopedic collections (Ostovich and Sauer 2004), some limited to major writers (Fitzmaurice, et al. 1997), some genre-specific ones (Graham, et al. 1989, Greer, et al. 1988, Henderson and McManus 1985, Millman and Wright 2005, Stevenson and Davidson 2001), and some organized by the category of writer (Latz 1989 and Travitsky 1981).
Fitzmaurice, James, Josephine Roberts, Carol L. Barash, Eugene R. Cunnar, and Nancy A. Gutierrez, eds. Major Women-Writers of Seventeenth-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
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Very useful modern-spelling anthology of writings by Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, Rachel Speght, and Ester Sowernam. Contains a general introduction with a bibliography, brief introductions to each author, and an index. Large selections make for helpful classroom use.
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Graham, Elspeth, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, eds. Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
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A collection, reprinted in 1992 and 1994, of very brief (modernized) excerpts of autobiographical texts by 17th-century Englishwomen. Especially valued by historians. It contains useful bibliographies of primary and secondary works and an index.
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Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, eds. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. London: Virago, 1988.
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Valuable, extensive collection of texts by and information about 17th-century women poets. Its shortcoming, compounded by the lack of an index, is its unusual format for an anthology: esoteric and useful information is imbedded in footnotes and other commentary and hard to retrieve. Recommended therefore for the most advanced undergraduates. The concluding list of “Works Cited” adds to the frustration of tracing information.
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Henderson, Katherine Usher, and Barbara F. McManus, eds. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
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A carefully organized volume. The first half provides historical, social, and literary contexts for the modernized texts that comprise the second part. A useful, selective bibliography closes the volume.
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Latz, Dorothy L., ed. “Glow-Worm Light”: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts. Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 1989.
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A somewhat undisciplined, but nevertheless valuable, compendium of information about and writings by early modern Catholic Englishwomen who entered orders on the Continent to escape religious persecution in early modern England. The volume is pathbreaking in its focus on the very largely ignored women Catholics as well as on their far-flung manuscripts, as is Latz’s Neglected English Literature (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 1997).
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Millman, Jill Seal, and Gillian Wright, eds. Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry. Manchester, UK, and New York: University of Manchester Press, 2005.
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This welcome collection of sometimes newly discovered, always carefully transcribed manuscript poetry by 16th- and 17th-century Englishwomen includes translations and original writings on a variety of subjects—domestic, religious and political—and illustrates the significance of manuscript composition, and dissemination, among women writers. Useful notes, select bibliographies, and a first-line and title index.
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Ostovich, Helen, and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., assisted by Melissa Smith. Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700. New York: Routledge, 2004.
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Unusually organized compendium of modernized extracts from a large number and variety of printed and manuscript texts—legal, private, secular, polemical, and religious. Reproduces a facsimile page followed by a transcription (in the case of manuscripts) and commentary (on all of the texts), the last written by dozens of scholars. Chapters, based on genre, begin with an introduction and end with a bibliography; the volume contains a useful index. Recommended as an introductory text.
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Stevenson, Jane, and Peter Davidson, eds. Early Modern Women Poets (1520–1700): An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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Incorporating, in addition to more familiar writings, scrupulously transcribed Gaelic and Welsh texts (in the original and in translation), popular and learned materials, and writings by Englishwomen in the colonies and on the Continent, expanding the concept “early modern [English]women poets” exponentially. Pithy, sound apparatus, with contributions from Meg Bateman, Kate Chedgzoy, and Julie Saunders, makes this an eminently user-friendly volume for both students and scholars.
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Travitsky, Betty, ed. The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981.
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Divided into writings by conforming and “exceptional” women, with the conformist writings classed as religious compositions, familial and personal writings, and secular writings, this early anthology served to introduce the early modern Englishwoman as writer to the Renaissance scholarly world. It includes an introduction, conclusion, endnotes, and a bibliography. Reprinted (with enlargements) by Columbia University Press in 1989.
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RESOURCE PROJECTS
A cornucopia of websites featuring early modern texts and early modern women is now available to the student; many are listed in Georgianna Ziegler’s “Women Writers Online” (Ziegler 2001 inBibliographies), which, while not altogether up-to-date, lists and describes a wide selection of resources on early modern women of many nationalities and many occupations. The listings in this cluster are limited to online anthologies of women’s writings alone. One of the seven sections of theEmory Women Writers Resource Project focuses on early modern women writers; Perdita Manuscripts I, Adam Matthew Digital’s online reproductions of manuscripts catalogued by the Perdita Project (in Reference Works), brings archival materials to one’s desktop; one hundred printed texts by women written in the 16th and 17th centuries are contained in Renaissance Women Online, a subset of the 320 texts in Women Writers Online, both products of the Women Writers Project housed at Brown University.
Emory Women Writers Resource Project.
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A large site edited by Sheila Cavanagh. The section “Early Modern through the Eighteenth Century” includes texts by twenty-eight early modern women along with critical apparatus.
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Perdita Manuscripts I: Women Writers 1500–1700.
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A digitized collection of facsimiles of over 250 manuscripts produced in association with the Perdita Project (Reference Works). The collection is available online by subscription.
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Renaissance Women Online.
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A grant-funded subset, edited by Elizabeth H. Hageman and created from 1996 to 1999, of one hundred texts by 16th- and 17th-century women and of contextual materials. Culled from Women Writers Online (in the Women Writers Project).
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Women Writers Project, Brown University.
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Long-term, ongoing Brown University project to promote knowledge of pre-Victorian women’s writings. Researches the creation and encoding of digitized texts by pre-Victorian women; the texts, with critical materials, have been available online since 1999 in Women Writers Online, general editor Susanne Woods. See project director Julia Flanders’s “The Women Writers Project: A Digital Anthology,” in Electronic Textual Editing, edited by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), pp. 138–149.
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SERIES OF EDITIONS
Sometimes important editions of individual writers have been issued by prestigious presses and institutions including Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, the University of Chicago Press, Oxford University Press, and University of Toronto Press. Listed here are several multivolume series of editions—old spelling, modern spelling, and facsimile––of writings by early modern Englishwomen. Oxford University Press published Women Writers in English, culled from texts digitized for the Women Writers Project (cited under Resource Projects), and Scolar (later Ashgate) Press published four series of both facsimile and scholarly editions under the rubric The Early Modern Englishwoman (see Contemporary Editions; Printed Writings 1500–1640; Printed Writings 1641–1700; and Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Women).
The Early Modern Englishwoman: Contemporary Editions. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002–.
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Fifteen volumes edited by various scholars published to date. Each contains an introduction and bibliography; most contain an index. Edited texts, some old-spelling, some modern-spelling, include dramas, prayers, diaries, autobiographies, letters, and monastic rules. General editors: Patrick Cullen (2002), Anne Lake Prescott (2003–), and Betty S. Travitsky (2002–).
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The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Printed Writings 1500–1640. Series 1: Parts 1–4. Part 1: Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT: Scolar, 1996; Parts 2–4: Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000–2007.
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Thirty-three volumes, edited by various scholars. Each contains an introduction followed by a bibliography. Some volumes feature appendices of variant pages or editions. Contents of the volumes range from single texts, to single-author texts, to composite texts by several authors; some reprint texts that have been almost completely neglected. Part 1 (1996) and Part 2 (2000-2001), general editors Patrick Cullen and Betty S.Travitsky; Part 3 (2002-2003) and Part 4 (2006–2007), general editors Anne Lake Prescott and Betty S. Travitsky.
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The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Printed Writings 1641–1700. Series 2: Parts 1–4. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2001–2010.
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Thirty-five volumes, edited by various scholars. Each contains an introduction followed by a bibliography; some feature appendices of variants. Volumes contain single texts, single-author texts, or texts by several authors; some constitute subsets of related texts. Part 1 (2001–2003), general editors Patrick Cullen and Betty S. Travitsky); Part 2 (2003), Part 3 (2005–2006), and Part 4 (2009–2011), general editors Anne Lake Prescott and Betty S. Travitsky.
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The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Women. Series 3: Parts 1–3. Edited by Anne Lake Prescott and Betty S. Travitsky. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005–2010.
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Twenty volumes of texts by, for, and about women, edited by various scholars. Each contains an introduction followed by a bibliography. Some volumes feature appendices of variant pages or editions. Contents of the volumes range from single texts, to single-author texts, to composite texts by several authors; some reprint texts have been almost completely neglected; some constitute subsets of two or more volumes of related texts. Volumes reprint works on legal treatises, pamphlet literature, the querelle, prostitution, witchcraft, jestbooks, recipe books, service, prayers, pious tracts, and catechisms.
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Women Writers in English 1350–1850. Edited by Susanne Woods and Elizabeth H. Hageman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993–1999.
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Fifteen-volume outgrowth of the Women Writers Project of texts by fourteen early modern Englishwomen. Each contains an introduction followed by a bibliography: Anne Askew (Beilin); Jane Barker (Wilson); Mary Lady Chudleigh (Ezell); Eleanor Davies (Cope); Eliza Haywood (Backscheider; Spacks); Aemilia Lanyer (Woods); Judith Sargent Murray (Harris); Mary Shelley (Curran); Jane Sharp (Hobby); Charlotte Smith (Curran); Rachel Speght (Lewalski); Arbella Stuart (Steen); Anna Weamys (Cullen); and Catherine Williams (Caldwell).
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Trends in Modern Interpretation
The earliest 20th-century surveys of writings by early modern Englishwomen emphasized the conforming and generally self-effacing nature and marginal impact of early modern Englishwomen writers in print, following the lead of those few researchers who had noticed them. More recently, some scholars have interrogated these truisms. Coles 2008 argues that writings by some early Protestant Englishwomen were central to 16th-century reform, while Goldberg 1997 reinterprets some of these writers as transgressive. Chedgzoy 2007 considers writers in the four kingdoms of Great Britain (including those writing in Irish and Scottish Gaelic and in Welsh) and women who emigrated (to the colonies). Ezell 1993 and Mack 1992 study Quaker women writers, Walker 2003recusant women who went into exile, Clarke 2001 and Wall 1993 the ways in which women’s social and political position affected their writings.
Chedgzoy, Kate. Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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A pioneering study positing that it is memory that informs the engagement of early modern British women’s writings with political and geographical changes in the expanded world of the four kingdoms of Great Britain and the Atlantic colonies. Most of the writers considered are post-1640, and many are Irish, Scotch, and Welsh, or émigrés from England, i.e., part of this enlarged radar screen.
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Clarke, Danielle. The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing. New York: Longman, 2001.
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Tries to demonstrate the ways in which gender, and particularly women’s political “place,” is a key to interpreting the choices of genre and the circulation of their texts by early modern Englishwomen. Devotes particular attention to Jane Anger, Elizabeth Cary, Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, Joanna Lumley, Isabella Whitney, and Mary Wroth. Includes “Select Bibliography” (pp. 266–181) and index.
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Coles, Kimberley Anne. Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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Deviates from traditional evaluations of 16th-century women’s writings as marginal to the Protestant reform, arguing that some women’s texts—Anne Askew’s Examinacyons, Katherine Parr’s Prayersand Lamentacions, the Sidney-Pembroke manuscript psalms, Anne Lok’s “Meditation” sequence, and Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve—“were among the most important and influential works of sixteenth-century England” (p. 2).
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Ezell, Margaret J. M. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
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A pathbreaking analysis of writing by “pre-1700 writers” in order to uncover assumptions that may limit scholarly understanding of these writers as well as assumptions about genre and canon. The analysis is applied to Quaker women writers from 1650 to 1672. Lucid but probably not for beginners. Excellent bibliography and an index.
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Goldberg, Jonathan. Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
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Argues that we have restricted our interest in early modern women to “good” women; provides some occasionally hard-wrung case studies (Aemilia Lanyer, Aphra Behn, Margaret Roper, Mary Sidney Herbert, Mary Shelton, Elizabeth Cary). Substantial bibliography. Index.
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Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
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Meticulous analysis of women preachers in England in the 17th century, beginning with outspoken individuals like Eleanor Davies, Anna Trapnel, and Katherine Chidley and then the wave of women Quakers. Contains very detailed tables: “Well-Known Women Visionaries of the 1640s and Early 1650s” (pp. 413–414), “’First Publishers of Truth’: Women Active as Prophets, Missionaries, and Writers, 1650–1665” (pp. 415–420), and “Prophets Appearing Once or Twice, 1650–1665” (pp. 421–424), as well as a comprehensive series of bibliographies.
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Walker, Claire. Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
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An important study of another neglected group of early modern Englishwomen––Catholic women who fled to Continental convents to practice their religion without hindrance from the Elizabethan government. Many became quite learned and left writings behind. Especially relevant is “Active in Contemplation: Spiritual Choices and Practices” (pp. 130–172).
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Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
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A careful, detailed examination of the ways in which already problematic aspects of authorship in print were applied to women and the ways in which some women negotiated these restrictions. For the advanced student. Includes bibliography and index.
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Genre Studies
When the smoke had cleared from the canon-war battlefields of the late 20th century, literature studies had expanded to include such texts as women’s prefaces, diaries, domestic papers, recipe books, and advice books (Dowd and Eckerle 2007); letters (Daybell 2006), political and religious texts (Sondergard 2002), polemical tracts, prophecies in “Genres,” (Various authors 2002) and petitions as well as traditional forms like autobiography (Dowd and Eckerle 2007 and “Genres”Various authors 2002), poetry (McGrath 2002), prose fiction (“Genres” Various authors 2002), courtly writing, prose, and drama (“Writing Women in Early Modern England”) in Wilcox 1996).
Daybell, James. Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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A fine-tuned study of approximately three thousand letters by some 650 Englishwomen indicating both a greater level of literacy for Englishwomen than has often been assumed and a variety of strategies employed by (predominantly elite) women in their letter writing. Includes bibliography.
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Dowd, Michelle M., and Julie A. Eckerle, eds. Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
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In its introduction and in essays by several hands (Wilcox, Ezell, Field, Matchinske, Lamb, Eckerle, Dowd, Graham, Dodds, Donovan), this volume expands the definition of life writing from manuscript autobiography through the early print novel, situating it within early modern literary culture and demonstrating the intersections of life writing with such “domestic papers” as recipe books, prefaces, and conversion narratives.
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McGrath, Lynette. Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England: “Why on the Ridge Should She Desire to Go?” Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002.
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Analyzes the success, despite many impediments, of those early modern Englishwomen who wrote original poetry. A very detailed study. Accessible to the beginner and useful to the more advanced reader. Contains a detailed bibliography and an index.
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Sondergard, Sidney L. Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2002.
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Examination of patterns of rhetorical strategies involving violence by six early modern Englishwomen writers: Anne Askew, Anne Dowriche, Elizabeth I, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Southwell, and Mary Wroth. Accessible to beginners, useful to more advanced students. Contains bibliography and index.
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Various authors. “Genres.” In A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Edited by Anita Pacheco, 229–335. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
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Accessible introductory essays by recognized scholars: Sheila Ottway (autobiography), Teague and De Haas (defenses), Hobby (prophecy), Price (poetry), Salzman (prose fiction), Tomlinson (drama). A bibliography follows each essay, and the volume contains a fairly detailed index.
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Wilcox, Helen, ed. Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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Part 2, “Writing Women in Early Modern England,” contains solid, lucid essays on courtly writing (Hackett), poetry (Hageman), self writing (Graham), prose (Travitsky), and drama (Ballister). These follow a more general essay by Margaret W. Ferguson, “Renaissance Concepts of the ’Woman Writer’” (pp. 143–168). Useful to both beginners and more advanced readers. Also contains a timeline juxtaposing events and publications, a bibliography, and an index.
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Editorial Methodology
The recovery of writing by early modern Englishwomen has excited and preoccupied many scholars (Laird 2003, Nevala 2001, Roberts 1996, Roberts 1998, Wray 2000). Simultaneously, the recent declaration of the death of the author and the tendency to edit writings as social, political, cultural, economic documents runs, or may run, counter to the impulse to recover and identify early modern Englishwomen writers, a subject of concern to many (Hurley 2009). These subjects have moved to mainstream scholarship, as in the superb Renaissance English Texts Society (RETS) volumes edited by W. Speed Hill (Hill 1993 and Hill 2004).
Hill, W. Speed, ed. New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991. Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1993.
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The first of Hill’s three collections of papers presented at RETS meetings at the Modern Language Association (MLA). Notable: Elizabeth H. Hageman, “Did Shakespeare Have Any Sisters? Editing Texts by Englishwomen of the Renaissance and Reformation” (pp. 103–109); Sara Jayne Steen, “Behind the Arras: Editing Renaissance Women’s Letters” (pp. 229–138); and John W. Velz, “Giving Voices to the Silent: Editing the Private Writings of Women” (pp. 263–272). Valuable. Includes index.
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Hill, W. Speed, ed. New Ways of Looking at Old Texts. Vol. 3, Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1997–2001. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004.
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The third of Hill’s compelling editions of RETS papers, the volume includes, in addition to many relevant individual papers, two fora on editing women writers: “2001: Editing Early Modern Women Writers, chair Margaret Hannay” (pp. 85–130) and “1998: Editing Women Writers of the English Renaissance, chair, David Freeman” (pp. 169–190) from the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Highly recommended to all readers.
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Hurley, Ann Hollinshead, and Chanita Goodblatt, eds. Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.
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A very strong collection of reprinted and original essays seeking to marry the contradictory impulse to uncover facts about early women writers and editors and the newer approaches to editing that emphasize nonauthorial contexts: social, political, cultural, and economic. Contains an index.
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Laird, Holly. “From the Editor.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22.2 (2003): 263–314.
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Laird’s preface to this special issue (“Editing Early Modern Women Writers”) discusses the tendency of feminist scholars to concentrate on recovering and reissuing texts rather than on contributing to editorial theory. She cites two of the essays in this special issue (Dubrow on Mary Wroth and Pettit on Eliza Haywood) as demonstrations of the value to textual study of writers in manuscript (Wroth) and print (Haywood).
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Nevala, Minna. “’With Out Any Pregyduce or Hindranc’: Editing Women’s Letters from 17th Century Norfolk.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 102.2 (2001): 151–171.
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Discusses (and appends examples of) letters by three women in the Gawdy family in the context of their social position and education. Somewhat technical discussion of orthography and linguistics. Useful to more advanced students.
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Roberts, Josephine A. “Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 63–70.
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Accessible discussion of increased scholarly interest in early modern women writers in manuscript and print since the 1970s and its influence on early modern studies. Illuminating discussion of early modern women and manuscript writing and circulation, and the importance of study of this lost manuscript culture, as well as of printed texts by women, and of poststructuralist de-emphasis on the author. Includes survey of some series of women’s writings.
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Roberts, Josephine A. “The Phallacies of Authorship: Reconstructing the Texts of Early Modern Women Writers.” In Attending to Early Modern Women. Edited by Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seeff, 38–57. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998.
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Describes the difficulties, and the importance, of determining female authorship and the phenomenon of use by male authors of women’s voices in complaints and polemics, collaborative authorship (as in answer poems), and even in autobiography. Accessible survey, probably most useful to advanced scholars.
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Wray, Ramona. “Anthologising the Early Modern Female Voice.” In The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality. Edited by Andrew Murphy, 55–72. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.
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Posits need for gendered editorial practice for woman-authored texts to consider singularities like the frequent use of an amanuensis by women authors, of confinement of women’s texts to family or other close knit circles, and the difficulties inherent in such forms as translation, religious writing, and prophecy. Postulates the usefulness of anthologies in contextualizing a multiplicity of voices to unravel facts about early modern women’s writings.
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