The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

by Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth; Clarke, Danielle; Ross, Sarah C. E.

• ISBN13: 9780198860631
• ISBN10: 0198860633
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-01-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Scott-Bauman, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, King's College London,Danielle Clarke, Professor of English Renaissance Language and Literature, University College Dublin,Sarah C. E. Ross, Associate Professor of English, Victoria University of Wellington

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King's College London and her monograph Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 published in 2013. She has co-edited essay collections including The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680 (with
Johanna Harris, 2010); The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (with Ben Burton, 2014); Shakespeare's Sonnets: The State of Play (with Hannah Crawforth and Clare Whitehead, 2017) and two collections of poems, On Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Poets' Celebration (with Hannah
Crawforth, 2016) and Women Poets of the English Civil War (with Sarah C.E. Ross, 2017, winner of the 'Best Teaching Edition' prize of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender).

Danielle Clarke is Professor of English Renaissance Language and Literature at University College Dublin. She has published widely on women's writing, gender, and poetry. Recent articles include work on the reception of Teresa de Ávila, on complaint, and on recipe books. She has just completed an
edition of the recipe books from Birr Castle, Co. Offaly, Ireland (Irish Manuscripts Commission) and is working on a book called Becoming Human: Women's Writing, Time, Nature and Devotion 1550-1700. She is a section editor (Theories and Methodologies) for The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern
Women's Writing in English.

Sarah C. E. Ross is Associate Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has published widely on early modern women's poetry, religious and political writing, and manuscript and print culture, and she is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in
Seventeenth-Century Britain (2015) and editor of Katherine Austen's Book M: Additional Manuscript 4454 (2011). She has co-edited Editing Early Modern Women (2016, with Paul Salzman) and Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics (2020, with Rosalind Smith), and her teaching anthology
with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Women Poets of the English Civil War (2017), won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's prize for Best Teaching Edition in 2018. She is completing a project on early modern women's complaint, and is a section editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of
Early Modern Women's Writing in English.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction: What is Early Modern Women's Writing?, Danielle Clarke, Sarah C. E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
PART I. VOICE AND KNOWLEDGE
2. Authorship, Attribution, and Voice in Early Modern Women's Writing, Rosalind Smith
3. How Lady Jane Grey May Have Used her Education, Jennifer Richards
4. Women and Knowledge: Latin and Greek, Jane Stevenson
5. 'At My Petition': Embroidering Esther, Michele Osherow
6. Practical Texts: Women, Instruction, and the Household, Carrie Griffin
7. Cultures of Correspondence: Women and Natural Philosophy, Helen Smith
8. Libraries Not Their Own: Networking Women's Books and Reading in Early Modern England, Leah Knight
PART II. FORMS AND ORIGINS
9. The Querelle des Femmes, the Overbury Scandal, and the Politics of the Swetnam Controversy in Early Modern England, Christina Luckyj
10. The Songscapes of Early Modern Women, Katherine Larson
11. Receiving Early Modern Women's Drama, Ramona Wray
12. 'Sing and let the song be new': Early Modern Women's Devotional Lyrics, Helen Wilcox
13. Lyric Backwardness, Dianne Mitchell
14. 'People of a Deeper Speech': Anna Trapnel, Enthusiasm, and the Aesthetics of Incoherence, Kevin Killeen
15. Commonplacing, Making Miscellanies, and Interpreting Literature, Victoria Burke
16. Women's Life Writing and the Labour of Textual Stewardship, Julie A. Eckerle
17. Women and Fiction, Lara Dodds
18. Romance and Race, V. M. Braganza
PART III. PLACES
19. A Place-Based Approach to Early Modern Women's Writing, Paula McQuade
20. London and the Book Trade: Isabella Whitney, Jane Anger, and the 'Maydens of London', Michelle O'Callaghan
21. The Self-Portrayal of Widows in the Early Modern English Courts of Law, Lotte Fikkers
22. The World of Recipes: Intellectual Culture in and around the Seventeenth-Century Household, Wendy Wall
23. Daughters of the House: Women, Theatre, and Place in the Seventeenth Century, Julie Sanders
24. Changing Places: Relocating the Court Masque in Early Modern Women's Writing, Laura L. Knoppers
25. Race and Geographies of Escape in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Meghan E. Hall
26. Archipelagic Feminism: Anglophone Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, Sarah Prescott
PART IV. TRANSLINGUAL AND TRANSNATIONAL
27. 'Mistresses of tongues': Early Modern Englishwomen, Multilingual Practice, and Translingual Communication, Brenda M. Hosington
28. The Surplusage': Margaret Tyler and the Englishing of Spanish Chivalric Romance, Jake Arthur
29. French Connections: English Women's Writing and Préciosité, Line Cottegnies
30. Old England And New in Anne Bradstreet's Poetry, Peter Auger
31. Early Modern Dutch and English Women Across Borders, Martine van Elk
32. Political Theory Across Borders, Mihoko Suzuki
PART V. NETWORKS AND COMMUNITIES
33. Networked Authorship in English Convents Abroad: The Writings of Lucy Knatchbull, Jaime Goodrich
34. Gifts That Matter': Katherine Parr, Princess Elizabeth, and the Prayers Or Meditations (1545), Patricia Pender
35. Elizabeth Melville: Protestant Poetics, Publication, and Propaganda, Sebastiaan Verweij
36. Desire, Dreams, Disguise: The Letters of Elizabeth Bourne, Daniel Starza Smith and Leah Veronese
37. Women's Letters and Cryptological Coteries, Nadine Akkerman
38. Non-Elite Networks and Women, Susan Wiseman
39. On the Picture of Ye Prisoner': Lucy Hutchinson and the Image of the Imprisoned King, Hero Chalmers
40. The Topopoetics of Retirement in Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson, James Loxley
41. Early Modern Women in Print, and Margaret Cavendish, Woman in Print, Liza Blake
PART VI. TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES
42. Editing Early Modern Women's Writing: Tradition and Innovation, Paul Salzman
43. Reception, Reputation, and Afterlives, Marie-Louise Coolahan
44. A Telescope for the Mind': Digital Modelling and Analysis of Early Modern Women's Writing, Julia Flanders
45. Material Texts: Women's Paperwork in Early Modern England and Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, Anna Reynolds
46. Memory and Matter: Lady Anne Clifford's 'Life of Mee', Patricia Phillippy
47. Early Modern Women, Race, and Writing Revisited, Bernadette Andrea
48. Touches Across Time: Queer Feminism, Early Modern Studies, and Aemilia Lanyer's 'Rich Chains', Erin Murphy
49. Untimely Developments: Periodisation, Early Modern Women's Writing, and Literary History, Michelle M. Dowd