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

Online ISBN:
9780191892653
Print ISBN:
9780198860631
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

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

Danielle Clarke (ed.),
Danielle Clarke
(ed.)
School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin
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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 currently working on a book called Becoming Human: Women’s Writing, Time, Nature and Devotion 1550–1700. She is a section editor (Theories) for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English.

Sarah C. E. Ross (ed.),
Sarah C. E. Ross
(ed.)
School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
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Sarah C. E. Ross is Associate Professor of English at Te Herenga WakaVictoria 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 currently 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.

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (ed.)
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
(ed.)
English, King's College London
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Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is Reader in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London and her monograph Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640–1680 came out 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). She is also a contributing editor for The Pulter Project http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Her articles appear in The Seventeenth Century, English Literary History, Women’s Writing, and Huntington Library Quarterly. She has held fellowships at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, Chawton House Library, and Massey University, New Zealand.

Published online:
19 December 2022
Published in print:
14 October 2022
Online ISBN:
9780191892653
Print ISBN:
9780198860631
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This Handbook is a research-based book that attempts to define the field, and to gesture towards future configurations in the light of developments over the past thirty years. The Handbook will build on and complement existing overviews of early modern women’s writing but will have a more conceptual and theoretical focus in addition to extending historical and critical work. It will also integrate the disciplinary challenges raised by early modern women’s writing more fully into critical work on the Renaissance—again, this differentiates this work from other wide-ranging volumes on the topic. It seeks, through a range of approaches, to ask larger questions about women’s writing and its relationship(s) to writing and culture more generally. Implicitly it questions the category of ‘women’s’ writing, by examining how far gender and constructions of gender inflect authorship, reception, and style, and how we can integrate provisional and partial identifications into our understanding of early modern women’s discourse. We are keen to integrate intersectionality into the analysis of early modern women’s writing, focusing on a range of key issues—region, class, race, ethnic identity, marital status, profession, language. In particular, the chapters will interrogate the degree to which women’s writings and their innovations in fact spearhead a number of key developments in thought and writing over the course of the seventeenth century. The emphasis throughout is on innovation as a response to specific cultural, ideological and sometimes very local conditions.

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