This collaborative book of twenty-two chapters offers an expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production in the period stretching from the English Reformation to the Restoration. Chapters work together to trace the contours of a diverse body of early modern women's writing, aligning women's texts with the major literary, political, and cultural currents with which they engage. Contributors examine and take account of developments in critical theory, feminism, and gender studies that have influenced the reception, reading, and interpretation of early modern women's writing. This book explicates and interrogates significant methodological and critical developments in the past four decades, guiding and testing scholarship in this period of intense activity in the recovery, dissemination, and interpretation of women's writing.

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction: Sparkling multiplicity / Patricia Phillippy -- Part I. Critical approaches and methodologies -- Invisibility optics: Aphra Behn, Esther Inglis and the fortunes of women's works / Margaret J.M. Ezell -- Reconsidering the woman writer: the identity politics of Anne Cooke Bacon / Jaime L. Goodrich -- The critical fortunes of the tenth muse: canonicity and its discontents / Patricia Pender -- When we swear to tell the truth: the Carleton debates and archival methodology / Megan Matchinske -- Part II. The Tudor era (1526-1603) -- Common and competing faiths / Susan M. Felch -- Isabella Whitney's "slips": poetry, collaboration, and coterie / Dana E. Lawrence -- Transmitting faith: Elizabeth Tudor, Anne Askew, and Jane Grey / Elaine V. Beilin -- Humanism, religion, and early modern Englishwomen in their transnational contexts / Julie D. Campbell -- Women in worship: continuity and change in the prayers of Elizabeth Tyrwhit and Frances Aburgavenny / Micheline White -- Spatial texts: women as devisers of environments and iconographies / Peter Davidson -- Part III. The early Stuart period (1603-1642) -- Aemilia Lanyer's radical art: "The passion of Christ" / Pamela J. Benson -- Memory, materiality and maternity in the Tanfield/Cary archive / Ramona Wray -- Mary Wroth romances Ovid: refiguring metamorphosis and complaint in The countess of Montgomery's Urania / Clare R. Kinney -- Nuns' writing: translation, textual mobility and transnational networks / Marie-Louise Coolahan -- Motherhood and women's writing in early seventeenth-century England: legacies, catechisms, and popular polemic / Paula McQuade -- Monuments and memory / Peter Sherlock -- Part IV. The English Civil War, interregnum, and restoration (1642-1676) -- Prophecy, power, and religious dissent / W. Scott Howard -- Coteries, circles, networks: the Cavendish circle and Civil War women's writing / Sarah C.E. Ross -- Inventing fame / Jane B. Stevenson -- Political writing across borders / Mihoko Suzuki -- English women's writing and indigenous medical knowledge in the early modern Atlantic world / Edith Snook -- Lady Anne Clifford's Great books of record: remembrances of a dynasty / Jessica L. Malay.