Designed to complement The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Contemporary Editions presents both modernized and old-spelling editions of texts not only by women but also for and about women. Contents of a volume can range from a single text to an anthology depending on the subject and the audience. Introductions to the editions are written with the general reader as well as the specialist in mind. They are designed to provide an introduction not only to the edited text itself but also to the larger historical discourses expressed through the text.
By Cristina León Alfar, Emily Sherwood
September 26, 2022
The documents contained in Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies tell a story of Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and the ongoing dispute between Mistress Bourne and her husband about their marriage and separation, and subsequently ...
By Nicky Hallett
July 02, 2021
Nicky Hallett has uncovered a major new source of material by and about English nuns living in exile in the Low Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume presents the women's voices in unmediated form, direct in all their vibrancy, with an extensive introduction that ...
Edited
By Anna Fitzer
June 10, 2019
Frances Sheridan’s Eugenia and Adelaide is an astonishing first novel of parental tyranny, infidelity, kidnap, blackmail, and violence played out over two volumes against the backdrop of continental Europe. The friendship of Eugenia and Adelaide endures in spite of their separation at the beginning...
Edited
By Paula Humfrey
January 03, 2019
The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts presented here describe female servants' experiences of work in early modern London. Domestics' court depositions offer qualitative evidence that female servants were an important support of emergent capitalism in the early modern metropolis....
Edited
By Robert Matz
September 10, 2018
This critical edition of two early modern marriage sermons provides an important resource for students and scholars of early modern literature and history, allowing them to experience firsthand the competing and historically layered ideas about marriage that circulated in the wake of the English ...
Edited
By Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon
August 23, 2018
Though all but three of Robert Sidney's 332 extant letters to his wife Barbara Gamage Sidney have been in the Sidney family archive, they have never previously been fully transcribed or edited. This edition of the surviving letters, which Sidney wrote to his wife when they were separated for long ...
By Melvyn New, E. Derek Taylor
August 23, 2018
Given the progress made in recent years in recovering the writings of early modern women, one might expect that a complete set of the important works of Mary Astell (1666-1731) would have been reissued long before now. Instead, only portions of the thought of the 'First English Feminist' have ...
Edited
By Susan Paterson Glover
February 07, 2018
Susan Paterson Glover here presents, in modern type, a critical edition of the first printed work by an English woman writer, Sarah Chapone, on the inequity of the common law regime for married women. Glover's extended, original introduction provides an account of Chapone's life; a discussion of ...
Edited
By Alexandra G. Bennett
August 25, 2017
The first scholarly edition of the complete works of Jane Cavendish, this volume presents as complete a collection as possible of works and historical documents pertaining to a particularly compelling figure from the English Civil War. These include two manuscript poem and play collections, family ...
Edited
By Susan M. Felch
March 28, 2008
In 1574, Christopher Barker published a volume of prayers and poems collected and composed by Elizabeth Tyrwhit, an intimate member of Katherine Parr's circle, governess to the princess Elizabeth, wife of a Tudor court functionary, and a wealthy widow. Later, Tyrwhit's Morning and Evening Prayers ...
By Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon
October 28, 2010
The letters of Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester, dating predominantly from about 1636 until 1643, cover a wide range of issues and vividly illustrate her centrality to her illustrious family's personal and public affairs. These c.100 letters are here for the first time fully transcribed ...
Edited
By Katharine Hodgkin
October 28, 2010
A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the ...