RECENT STUDIES IN WOMEN WRITERS OF THE ENGLISH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (1604-1674)

Recent scholarship on seventeenth-century women writers demonstrates that the relationship between women's writing and Renaissance culture is complex and multifaceted; that women's writing is important in the history of a number of genres—among them, biography, autobiography, prose fiction, the sonnet, even drama—and in religious and political (and scientific) history as well; that many Renaissance women thought of themselves as writing to and for women; and that the writing of Renaissance women is well worth careful attention. Perhaps most surprising are the revelations that so many of the women writers recently rediscovered were read—in printed books and in manuscript— and admired by their contemporaries, both male and female, and that Renaissance women wrote so many different kinds of literature. Works by some seventeenth-century Englishwomen—Ann Halkett, Anne Fanshawe, and Mary Wroth, for example—are available in superb editions by scholars such as John Loftis and Josephine Roberts; we are in urgent need of similar texts by other women writers— most notably Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips.