The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

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.


About the Author
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, King's College London, Danielle Clarke, Professor of English Renaissance Language and Literature, University College Dublin, Sarah C. E. Ross, Associate Professor of English, Victoria University of Wellington

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King's College London and her monograph Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 published in 2013. She has co-edited essay collections including The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680 (with Johanna Harris, 2010); The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (with Ben Burton, 2014); Shakespeare's Sonnets: The State of Play (with Hannah Crawforth and Clare Whitehead, 2017) and two collections of poems, On Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Poets' Celebration (with Hannah Crawforth, 2016) and Women Poets of the English Civil War (with Sarah C.E. Ross, 2017, winner of the 'Best Teaching Edition' prize of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender).

Danielle Clarke is Professor of English Renaissance Language and Literature at University College Dublin. She has published widely on women's writing, gender, and poetry. Recent articles include work on the reception of Teresa de Ávila, on complaint, and on recipe books. She has just completed an edition of the recipe books from Birr Castle, Co. Offaly, Ireland (Irish Manuscripts Commission) and is working on a book called Becoming Human: Women's Writing, Time, Nature and Devotion 1550-1700. She is a section editor (Theories and Methodologies) for The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women's Writing in English.

Sarah C. E. Ross is Associate Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has published widely on early modern women's poetry, religious and political writing, and manuscript and print culture, and she is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2015) and editor of Katherine Austen's Book M: Additional Manuscript 4454 (2011). She has co-edited Editing Early Modern Women (2016, with Paul Salzman) and Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics (2020, with Rosalind Smith), and her teaching anthology with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Women Poets of the English Civil War (2017), won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's prize for Best Teaching Edition in 2018. She is completing a project on early modern women's complaint, and is a section editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing in English.