This anthology represents a re-examination of its field, based on extensive archival research. Each woman's work is accompanied by a headnote which combines biographic information with some guidance as to the context, intended audience and genre.

Early modern women's manuscript poetry is an anthology of texts by fourteen women poets writing between 1589 and 1706. It is the only currently available anthology of early modern women's writing which focuses exclusively on manuscript material. Authors include Mary Sidney, Lucy Hutchinson and Katherine Philips; central figures in the emerging canon of early modern women writers, but whose work appears in a fresh and very different light in the manuscript context emphasised by this anthology. The volume also includes substantial excerpts from a recently discovered verse paraphrase of Genesis, thought to be by the previously unknown seventeenth-century writer Mary Roper, as well as selections from the unjustly neglected poet, Hester Pulter.

Much has been written about women of the English Renaissance, but few examples of women's writing from that era have been readily available until now. This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women between 1550 and 1700 and reveals an unprecedented view of the intellectual and literary lives of women in early modern England. The writings range from poetry to philosophical treatises, addressing a wide array of subjects including law, gender, education, motherhood, medicine, religion, life-writing, and the arts. Each selection is paired with a beautifully reproduced facsimile of the text's original source manuscript, allowing a glimpse into the literary past that will lead the reader to truly appreciate the care and craft with which these women writers prepared their texts. This essential anthology is a captivating guide to the legacy of early modern women's literature and its authors that must not be overlooked.

Producing Women's Poetry is the first specialist study to consider English-language poetry by women across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Gillian Wright explores not only the forms and topics favoured by women, but also how their verse was enabled and shaped by their textual and biographical circumstances. She combines traditional literary and bibliographical approaches to address women's complex use of manuscript and print and their relationships with the male-generated genres of the traditional literary canon, as well as the role of agents such as scribes, publishers and editors in helping to determine how women's poetry was preserved, circulated and remembered. Wright focuses on key figures in the emerging canon of early modern women's writing, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch, alongside the work of lesser-known poets Anne Southwell and Mary Monck, to create a new and compelling account of early modern women's literary history.

This book contains the first comprehensive account of writing by women from the mid sixteenth century through to 1700. At the same time, it traces the way a representative sample of that writing was published, circulated in manuscript, read, anthologised, reprinted, and discussed from the time it was produced through to the present day. Salzman's study covers an enormous range of women from all areas of early modern society, and it covers examples of the many and varied genres produced by these women, from plays to prophecies, diaries to poems, autobiographies to philosophy. As well as introducing readers to the wealth of material produced by women in the early modern period, this book examines changing responses to what was written, tracing a history of reception and transmission that amounts to a cultural history of changing taste.

An anthology of previously unpublished and hard-to-find poetic material from early modern women who wrote in manuscript form. It features a broad and useful introduction examining the phenomenon of manuscript writing, and biographical notes preface the work of each author