Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England

by Betty S. Travitsky (Editor), Anne Lake Prescott (Editor)

Most anthologies of Renaissance writing include only (or predominantly) male writers, whereas those that focus on women include women exclusively. This book is the first to survey both in an integrated fashion. Its texts comprise a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing -including some new and important discoveries. The texts are arranged so that writing by women and men is presented together, not in a "point-counterpoint" system that would "square off" female and male writers against one another, but rather in pairs, sometimes clusters, of texts in which women´s writing is foregrounded even as it appears with writing by men. The anthology arranges recently recovered texts into intriguing patterns, juxtaposing, for example, Aemelia Lanyer´s country house poem with an expression of a different type of nostalgia by Surrey. It includes unconventional voices, as in the homoerotic poems by Richard Barnfield or the possibly lesbian poems by Katherine Philips. It makes newly available the voices of English Marrano women (secret Jews) and the Miltonic poetry of Jean Lead.

432 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2000

Reviews

[Sherwood Smith]

This anthology is a selection of letters, poetry, and instructional material written by people whose names are not famed in the world of letters. Some are aristocrats, others are ordinary folk: there is a very early text on midwifery, written by a woman, intended to convey the latest biological data; there are fascinating glimpses into relationships and cultural assumptions about gender, domestic life, religion, politics, and sexuality.

This is the sort of book one can dip into anywhere, as the examples are pretty short. Footnotes and supplemental data provide context.