Editing Early Modern Women

This collection of new essays is a comprehensive exploration of the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the editing of texts by early modern women. The chapters consider the latest developments in the field and address a wide range of topics, including the 'ideologies' of editing, genre and gender, feminism, editing for student or general readers, print publishing, and new and possible future developments in editing early modern writing, including digital publishing. The works of writers such as Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, Anne Halkett, Katherine Philips and Katherine Austen are examined, and the issues discussed are related to the ways editing in general has evolved in recent years. This book offers readers an original overview of the central issues in this growing field and will interest students and scholars of early modern literature and drama, textual studies, the history of editing, gender studies and book history.

1. Introduction: editing early modern women Sarah C. E. Ross and Paul Salzman; Part I. Editorial Ideologies: 2. The backward gaze: editing Elizabeth Tyrwhit's prayerbook Susan M. Felch; 3. Producing gender: Mary Sidney Herbert and her editors Danielle Clarke; 4. Editing the feminist agenda: the power of the textual critic and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam Ramona Wray; 5. Contextualizing the woman writer: editing Lucy Hutchinson's religious prose Elizabeth Clarke; Part II. Editing Female Forms: Gender, Genre, and Editing: 6. Critical categories: toward an archaeology of Anne, Lady Halkett's archive Suzanne Trill; 7. Editing early modern women's letters for publication Diana Barnes; 8. Editing Queen Elizabeth I Leah Marcus; 9. Editing early modern women's dramatic writing for performance Marion Wynne-Davies; 10. Single-author manuscripts, poems (1664), and the editing of Katherine Philips Marie-Louise Coolahan; Part III. Out of the Archives, into the Classroom: 11. Out of the archives: Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania Mary Ellen Lamb; 12. Anthologizing early modern women's poetry: women poets of the English Civil War Sarah C. E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann; 13. Modernizing Katherine Austen's Book M (1664) for the twenty-first-century, non-expert reader Pamela S. Hammons; Part IV. Editorial Possibilities: 14. Editing early modern women in the digital age Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith.

Sarah C. E. Ross is Senior Lecturer in the English Programme, at Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2015) and the editor of Katherine Austen's Book M: British Library, Additional Manuscript 4454 (2011). She has written numerous articles on early modern women writers, religious writing, and manuscript culture.
Paul Salzman is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University, Victoria. His most recent publications include Reading Early Modern Women's Writing (2006) and Literature and Politics in the 1620s: Whisper'd Counsells' (2014). He is the editor of four World's Classics volumes, including Early Modern Women's Writing: An Anthology (2008) and Oroonoko and Other Writings (2009), and of an online edition of Mary Wroth's poetry, which won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's Digital Scholarship Award.