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(s): Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Danielle Clarke, Sarah C. E. Ross
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 885
City: Oxford
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540–1700
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
1. What is Early Modern Women’s Writing?
PART I VOICE AND KNOWLEDGE
2. Authorship, Attribution, and Voice in Early Modern Women’s Writing
3. How Lady Jane Grey May Have Used her Education
4. Latin and Greek
5. ‘At My Petition’: Embroidering Esther
6. Practical Texts: Women, Instruction, and the Household
7. Cultures of Correspondence: Women and Natural Philosophy
8. Libraries Not Only Their Own: Networking Women’s Books and Reading in Early Modern England
PART II FORMS AND ORIGINS
9. The Querelle des Femmes, the Overbury Scandal, and the Politics of the Swetnam Controversy in Early Modern England
10. The Songscapes of Early Modern Women
11. Receiving Early Modern Women’s Drama
12. ‘Sing and let the song be new’: Early Modern Women’s Devotional Lyrics
13. Lyric Backwardness
14. ‘People of a Deeper Speech’: Anna Trapnel, Enthusiasm, and the Aesthetics of Incoherence
15. Commonplacing, Making Miscellanies, and Interpreting Literature
16. Women’s Life Writing and the Labour of Textual Stewardship
17. Women and Fiction
18. Romance and Race
PART III PLACES
19. A Place-Based Approach to Early Modern Women’s Writing
20. London and the Book Trade: Isabella Whitney, Jane Anger, and the ‘Maydens of London’
21. The Self-Portrayal of Widows in the Early Modern English Courts of Law
22. The World of Recipes: Intellectual Culture in and around the Seventeenth-Century Household
23. Daughters of the House: Women, Theatre, and Place in the Seventeenth Century
24. Changing Places: Relocating the Court Masque in Early Modern Women’s Writing
25. Race and Geographies of Escape in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam
26. Archipelagic Feminism: Anglophone Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales
PART IV TRANSLINGUAL AND TRANSNATIONAL
27. ‘Mistresses of tongues’: Early Modern Englishwomen, Multilingual Practice, and Translingual Communication
28. ‘The Surplusage’: Margaret Tyler and the Englishing of Spanish Chivalric Romance
29. French Connections: English Women’s Writing and Préciosité
30. Old England And New in Anne Bradstreet’s Poetry
31. Early Modern Dutch and English Women Across Borders
32. Political Theory Across Borders
PART V NETWORKS AND COMMUNITIES
33. Networked Authorship in English Convents Abroad: The Writings of Lucy Knatchbull
34. Gifts That Matter: Katherine Parr, Princess Elizabeth, and the Prayers Or Meditations (1545)
35. Elizabeth Melville: Protestant Poetics, Publication, and Propaganda
36. Desire, Dreams, Disguise: The Letters of Elizabeth Bourne
37. Women’s Letters and Cryptological Coteries
38. Non-Elite Women and the Network, 1600–1700
39. ‘On the Picture of Ye Prisoner’: Lucy Hutchinson and the Image of the Imprisoned King
40. The Topopoetics of Retirement in Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson
41. Early Modern Women in Print and Margaret Cavendish, Woman in Print
PART VI TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES
42. Editing Early Modern Women’s Writing: Tradition and Innovation
43. Reception, Reputation, and Afterlives
44. ‘A Telescope for the Mind’: Digital Modelling and Analysis of Early Modern Women’s Writing
45. Material Texts: Women’s Paperwork in Early Modern England and Mary Wroth’s Urania
46. Memory and Matter: Lady Anne Clifford’s ‘Life of Mee’
47. Early Modern Women, Race, and Writing Revisited
48. Touches Across Time: Queer Feminism, Early Modern Studies, and Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Rich Chains’
49. Untimely Developments: Periodisation, Early Modern Women’s Writing, and Literary History
Bibliography
Index
