EARLY MODERN WOMEN'S MANUSCRIPT WRITING: SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE TRINITY/TRENT COLLOQUIUM; ED. BY VICTORIA E. BURKE

By examining some of the many different ways in which women participated in manuscript culture, the essays in this volume make important contributions to the field of women's writing in the early modern period when print publishing was less accessible to women. 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 Contents: Foreword Introduction 'Desiring women writing': female voices and courtly 'balets' in some early Tudor manuscript albums, Elizabeth Heale Katherine Parr, Princess Elizabeth and the crucified Christ, Jonathan Gibson Mildred Cecil, Lady Burleigh: poetry, politics and protestantism, Jane Stevenson Reading friends: women's participation in 'masculine' literary culture, Victoria E. Burke CaitlA-n Dubh's Keens: literary negotiations in early modern Ireland, Marie-Louise Coolahan Lady Anne Southwell's indictment of Adam, Erica Longfellow Reading bells and loose papers: reading and writing practices of the English Benedictine nuns of Cambrai and Paris, Heather Wolfe The notebooks of Rachael Fane: education for authorship?, Caroline Bowden 'And Trophes of his praises make': providence and poetry in Katherine Austen's Book M, 1664-1668, Sarah Ross The books, manuscripts and literary patronage of Mrs Anne Sadleir (1585-1670), Arnold Hunt Perfecting practice? Women, manuscript recipes and knowledge in early modern England, Sara Pennell 'Often to my Self I make my mone': early modern women's poetry from the Feilding Family, Alison Shell Index. Emphasizing manuscript writings in English and their social, political, and religious contexts, the contributors to this collection challenge commonly held notions about women's writing in the early modern period, and bring to light many women whose work has not been considered before. Over the past twenty years or so, the work of scholars such as Peter Beal, Henry Woudhuysen, Arthur Marotti, Mary Hobbs and Harold Love has led to a rapid expansion in the study of early modern English manuscripts.