Early Modern Women's Manuscript Writing

Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium

Jonathan Gibson, Victoria E. Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754604693
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351942348
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Because print publishing was often neither possible nor desirable for women in the early modern period, in order to understand the range of writing by women and indeed women's literary history itself, it is important that scholars consider women's writing in manuscript. Since the body of critical studies on women's writing for the most part prioritizes print over manuscript, this essay collection provides an essential corrective. The essays in this volume discuss many of the ways in which women participated in early modern manuscript culture. The manuscripts studied by the contributors originated in a wide range of different milieux, including the royal Court, the universities, gentry and aristocratic households in England and Ireland, and French convents. Their contents are similarly varied: original and transcribed secular and devotional verse, religious meditations, letters, moral precepts in French and English, and recipes are among the genres represented. Emphasizing the manuscripts' social, political and religious contexts, the contributors challenge commonly held notions about women's writing in English in the early modern period, and bring to light many women whose work has not been considered before.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 'Desiring Women Writing': Female Voices and Courtly 'Balets' in some Early Tudor Manuscript Albums
• 2 Katherine Parr, Princess Elizabeth and the Crucified Christ
• 3 Mildred Cecil, Lady Burleigh: Poetry, Politics and Protestantism
• 4 Reading Friends: Women's Participation in 'Masculine' Literary Culture
• 5 Caitlín Dubh's Keens: Literary Negotiations in Early Modern Ireland
• 6 Lady Anne Southwell's Indictment of Adam
• 7 Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris
• 8 The Notebooks of Rachael Fane: Education for Authorship?
• 9 'And Trophes of his praises make': Providence and Poetry in Katherine Austen's Book M, 1664-1668
• 10 The Books, Manuscripts and Literary Patronage of Mrs Anne Sadleir (1585-1670)
• 11 Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England
• 12 'Often to my Self I make my mone': Early Modern Women's Poetry From the Feilding Family
• Index