Digital Editions of Early Modern Women's Writing

Martine Van Elk

doi:10.13110/criticism.63.1-2.0185

Abstract

Abstract: Martine van Elk on Mary Wroth's Poetry: An Electronic Edition, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, and Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition

Highlights

The past decade has seen the publication of exciting new editions of early modern English women’s writing
Editing early modern women’s writing poses specific challenges and is, as shown by the 2016 collection of essays edited by Sarah Ross and Paul Salzman and entitled Editing Early Modern Women, the subject of continued debate.[4]
Given the danger of reductive readings based on limited sets of facts, how much should editions foreground women writers’ biographies? How should the mixed and fluid genres in which women wrote be presented? Should women’s writing receive the same treatment as writing by men? How should we deal with recent arguments for “unediting” the early modern text when texts by many women have not been edited in the first place? how should we represent the textual transmission and history of women’s works, given that “the ‘production’ of the seventeenthcentury woman poet occurred through multiple mediations of editorial collaboration and intervention, and in overlapping practices of manuscript and print publication”

Summary

Mary Wroth

Wroth’s sonnets exist in two contemporary forms: the manuscript version held by the Folger Library (a fair copy by Wroth herself) and the printed version, included in the first volume of Wroth’s romance Urania (1621). Between these two, there are differences in ordering, word choices, and punctuation. The sonnet features a series of contrasts between the female speaker and “others,” defined as a leisured, courtly group that engages in elite pastimes of various kinds. The juxtaposition of manuscript and print gives both equal weight and opens the poem up to complex interpretation

Margaret Cavendish

And by their several actions they may make

Hester Pulter