A History Of Early Modern Women S Literature

This book contains expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production from the Reformation to the Restoration.

Offering a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing, the essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures across Italy, France, England, and the Low Countries. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers. The collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and in exploring familial, political, and religious communities.

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.

Dowd investigates literature's engagement with the gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists created to describe the lives of working women.

Ideal for courses, this Companion examines the range, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain, 1500-1700.

Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women’s reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women’s Bookscapesin Early Modern Britain brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women’s figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women’s readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women’s libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume’s three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence—lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example—as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship. Interdisciplinary, timely, cohesive, and concise, this collection’s fresh, revisionary approaches represent substantial contributions to scholarship in early modern material culture; book history and print culture; women’s literary and cultural history; library studies; and reading and collecting practices more generally.

Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals.