Valuing Early Modern Women’s Verse in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Early modern women poets, in the last two decades, have undergone a second renaissance. From the 1988 publication of Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse, to the production of editions of individual women’s verse, to the development of electronic databases of women’s writing such as the Brown University Women Writers Project and the Perdita Project, seventeenth-century women’s poetry has become increasingly available to a wide audience.1 Scholarship in the last twenty years has been enabled — indeed, radically reconfigured — by the emergence of these important resources, which have provided substantial introductory essays, glosses, and notes to accompany their accessible copies of the poems. Much of this scholarship, not surprisingly, is grounded in various feminisms and gender theories; however, there tends to be a divide between scholars performing archival work and those focusing their analyses upon the best known, most accessible — and by now, effectively canonical — women poets (e.g., Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn).