Early Modern Women's Manuscript Poetry

Book excerpt: Early modern women's manuscript poetry is an anthology of texts by fourteen women poets writing between 1589 and 1706. It is the only currently available anthology of early modern women's writing which focuses exclusively on manuscript material. Authors include Mary Sidney, Lucy Hutchinson and Katherine Philips; central figures in the emerging canon of early modern women writers, but whose work appears in a fresh and very different light in the manuscript context emphasised by this anthology. The volume also includes substantial excerpts from a recently discovered verse paraphrase of Genesis, thought to be by the previously unknown seventeenth-century writer Mary Roper, as well as selections from the unjustly neglected poet, Hester Pulter.