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.
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.
'... an important contribution to the growing field of manuscript studies... an impressive range of writers and texts...' Early Modern Literary Studies '... beautifully produced... provide[s] fascinating empirical studies of specific cases... usefully expand[s] our understanding of women's lived experience in early modern England.' Renaissance Quarterly 'The essays included in this volume, most of them based on original archival research, illustrate the surprising heterogeneity of women's writing in manuscript during this period - poems, devotional tracts, translations, letters, commonplace books, collections of recipes - and [...] implicitly challenge the conventional distinction between 'public' and 'private' writing... several [essays] are particularly valuable in the way they present familiar material, making the results of archival research available, with illuminating commentary...' The Library '... the kind of archival material that escaped notice over centuries in boxes labelled (literally or figuratively) 'of no importance', the collection makes for absorbing reading, largely because the contributors so effectively combine their expert studies of manuscript texts with a complex and engaging analysis of relevant historical contexts in their efforts to make the contributions of early modern women more fully visible... Overall, the volume constitutes a fine contribution to the present extraordinary renaissance in the study of early modern women's writing.' Universtiy of Toronto Quarterly
