This volume includes leading scholarship on five writers active in the first half of the sixteenth century: Margaret More Roper, Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon. The essays represent a range of theoretical approaches and provide valuable insights into the religious, social, economic and political contexts essential for understanding these writers' texts. The introduction surveys the development of the field as an interdisciplinary project involving literature, history, classics, religion and cultural studies.

This volume includes leading scholarship on five writers active in the first half of the sixteenth century: Margaret More Roper, Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon. The essays represent a range of theoretical approaches and provide valuable insights into the religious, social, economic and political contexts essential for understanding these writers' texts. Scholars examine the significance of Margaret More Roper's translations and letters in the contexts of humanism, family relationships and changing cultural forces; the contributions of Katherine Parr and Anne Askew to Reformation discourses and debates; and the material presence of Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon in the intellectual, religious and political life of their time. The introduction surveys the development of the field as an interdisciplinary project involving literature, history, classics, religion and cultural studies.

A maverick in her own time, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) was dismissed for three centuries as an eccentric crank. Yet the past few decades have witnessed a true renaissance in Cavendish studies, as scholars from diverse academic disciplines produce books, articles and theses on every aspect of her oeuvre. Cavendish's literary creations hold a wide appeal for modern readers because of her talent for thinking outside the rigid box that delimited the hierarchies of class, race and gender in seventeenth-century Europe. In so doing, she challenged the ultimate building blocks of early modern society, whether the tenets of Christianity, the social and political imperatives of patriarchy, or the arrogant claims of the new Baconian science. At the same time, Cavendish offers keen insights into current social issues. Her works have become a springboard for critical discourse on such topics as the nature of gender difference and the role of science in human life. Sara Mendelson's aim in compiling this volume is to convey to readers some idea of the scope and variety of scholarship on Cavendish, not only in terms of dominant themes, but of critical controversies and intriguing new pathways for investigation.

Until recently, Anne Clifford has been known primarily for her Knole Diary, edited by Vita Sackville-West, which recounted her steadfast resistance to the most authoritative figures of her culture, including James I, as she insisted on her right to inherit her father's title and lands. Lucy Hutchinson was known primarily as the biographer of her husband, a Puritan leader during the English Civil Wars. The essays collected here examine not only these texts but, in Clifford's case, her architectural restorations and both the Great Book which she had compiled and the Great Picture which she commissioned, in order to explore the identity she fashioned for herself as a property owner, matriarchal head of her family, patron and historian. In Hutchinson's case, recent scholars have turned their attention to her poetry, her translation of Lucretius and her biblical epic, Order and Disorder, to analyze her contributions to early modern scientific and political writing and to place her work in relation to Milton's Paradise Lost.

Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer have emerged as important literary figures in the past ten years and scholars have increasingly realized that their bold and often unorthodox works challenge previously-held conceptions about women's engagement with early modern secular and religious literary culture. This volume collects some of the most influential and innovative essays that elucidate these women's works from a wide range of feminist, literary, aesthetic, economic, racial, sexual and theological perspectives. The volume is prefaced by an extended editorial overview of scholarship in the field.

Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, the first original drama written in English by a woman, has been a touchstone for feminist scholarship in the period for several decades and is now one of the most anthologized works by a Renaissance woman writer. Her History of ... Edward II has provided fertile ground for questions about authorship and historical form. The essays included in this volume highlight the many evolving debates about Cary's works, from their complicated generic characteristics, to the social and political contexts they reflect, to the ways in which Cary's writing enters into dialogue with texts by male writers of her time. In its critical introduction, the volume offers a thorough analysis of where Cary criticism has been and where it might venture in the future.

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was renowned in her own time for her metrical translation of biblical Psalms, several original poems, translations from French and Italian, and her literary patronage. William Shakespeare used her Antonius as a source, Edmund Spenser celebrated her original poems, John Donne praised her Psalmes, and Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer depicted her as an exemplary poet. Arguably the first Englishwoman to be celebrated as a literary figure, she has also attracted considerable modern attention, including more than two hundred critical studies. This volume offers a brief introduction to her life and an extensive overview of the critical reception of her works, reprints some of the most essential and least accessible essays about her life and writings, and includes a full bibliography.