Acknowledgements

We have many people to thank for their support for this book, but first and foremost we would like to pay tribute to the enthusiasm, determination, and resilience of our contributors who never wavered in their commitment to the project despite the very real challenges posed by Covid-19. The project has for the most part been completed over two years of lockdowns and travel restrictions, and the scholars represented in this volume have been a community of conversation and a mainstay of hope through global networks realised only electronically. We would also like to thank here the librarians and archivists who worked so hard to enable access to collections and texts and the wider community of early modern scholars who assisted with locating articles and primary texts, often from their personal archives.

We have been privileged to work with Emma Rayner, Victoria Coldham-Fussell, Emer McHugh, and Harriet Hughes, each of whom brought their insight and vision to the project. We are grateful to them for all of their careful work on these chapters and for their support for the Handbook’s aims and principles—it is a better piece of scholarship because of their input.

We would like to thank Kate Chedgzoy, Jane Grogan, and Sarah McKibben for their incisive and perceptive comments on Chapter 1, and wish to acknowledge the generosity of Jaime Goodrich and Paula McQuade, and the contributors to the double special issue of Criticism, ‘Beyond Canonicity: The Future(s) of Early Modern Women’s Writing’ (2021) for allowing us to read these provocative and challenging essays in advance of publication. These framed and guided our thinking in profound ways.

At Oxford University Press, we wish to thank Jacqueline Baker for her initial interest in this idea, and Eleanor Collins, Aimee Wright, Karen Raith, and Emma Collison for guiding us from commissioning to submission. We would also like to thank Marilyn Inglis, Dawn Preston, and Kayalvizli Ganesan for their copy-editing and production work. And thank you to Francis Young for the index.

Funding for editorial assistance and indexing is gratefully acknowledged from the College of Arts and Humanities at University College Dublin, the English Department at King’s College London, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

We are very grateful to the following institutions for allowing us to reproduce images: Victoria and Albert Museum London; The New York Public Library; Folger Shakespeare Library; Royal Collection Trust; Koninklijke Bibliotheek; Rijksmuseum; Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; National Records of Scotland; Lakeland Art Trust—Abbott Hall Gallery and Museum.

To say that the editing of this book presented some domestic challenges would be an understatement: between us we have children ranging from those on the cusp of adulthood to those born during this book’s production, and we think that we understood many of the women represented in this volume better, as we attempted to produce intellectual work in sometimes fraught and crowded domestic spaces. We would like to thank our families: Róisín, Asher, and Annie (Danielle); Benjie, Edward, Will, and Phoebe Way and Mike and Alison Scott-Baumann (Lizzie); and Andru, Milly, and Henry Isac (Sarah).