The History of British Women's Writing, 1500-1610 (Vol. 2)

This volume initiates a new history of early women's writing.  Focusing on a wide variety of texts--from verse and drama to household records and recipes--it reconsiders what writing meant to the women who produced and used it.  The 110 years of British history that define this volume's scope (1500-1610) witnessed dramatic upheavals in politics, religion, society, and culture.  As these illuminating essays reveal, women actively participated, through their writings, in key developments of the period:  new media technologies, emergent performance spaces, reformation and Counter-Reformation movements, and shifting representations of nation and race that marked colonial expansion.  Bringing together an exciting group of leading and emerging scholars in the field, this volume both establishes the importance of women's writing to sixteenth-century literary culture and offers a new paradigm for reading the diversity of textual forms that emerged at this seminal moment in the history of British literature.