Women Poets of the Renaissance

by Wynne-Davies,Marion

• ISBN13: 9780415923507
• ISBN10: 0415923506
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1999-03-16
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Although women of the Renaissance were expected to be "chaste, silent and obedient", many women poets risked the disapproval of their own society and transcended the strictures of contemporary female behavior in words that still resonate today. Their meditations on the danger and sufferings of motherhood and their descriptions of the vagaries of love, while couched in the formal style of Renaissance poetry, often appear startlingly close to modern experience. As a consequence, the range of poetry produced by Renaissance women is remarkably broad. InWomen Poets of the Renaissancethe poetry of these women is collected for the first time in an anthology that offers the twentieth-century reader a fresh and unique approach to literature of the period.

Table of Contents

Note on the Editor	vii
Chronology	viii
Introduction	xix
Acknowledgements	xxx
Her Will to London	1	(10)
Isabella Whitney
Poems	11	(5)
Elizabeth I
Epitaphs	16	(2)
Anne Cecil de Vere
The French History	18	(41)
Anne Dowriche
Poems	59	(7)
Mary Sidney
The Tragedy of Antonie	66	(6)
Psalm Translations	72	(27)
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum	99	(49)
Aemilia Lanyer
The Description of Cooke-Ham	148	(6)
A Mouzell for Melastomus	154	(8)
Rachel Speght
Mortality's Memorandum	162	(21)
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus	183	(46)
Mary Wroth
A Chain of Pearl	229	(10)
Diana Primrose
Meditations of Man's Mortality	239	(16)
Alice Sutcliffe
The Concealed Fancies	255	(2)
Jane
Elizabeth Cavendish
Poems	257	(3)
Poems	260	(9)
Anne Bradstreet
Notes	269	(79)
Notes on the Authors	348	(26)
Select Bibliography	374