Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works & Printed Writings, 1500-1640: Series I, Part Four – serie

The religious, historical and rhetorical significance of the Confessions written by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, can hardly be overstated: the book is one of the unifying texts of Western Christianity and a seminal work for Roman Catholic Europe. The publication in 1622 of Duchess Anne Campbell's selections in Spanish of parts of Augustine's Confessions has been little remarked, in part at least because of the obscurity of her feat. Yet Campbell's work is worthy of attention because of the evidence it gives of one woman's education and literary interests.

Unfamiliar today, The saints legacies... by Anne Fenwick (pseudonym Anne Phoenix) was a modest but unquestionable best seller. First published in 1629, it went through no fewer than thirteen editions between then and 1688. Most of the many thousands of Stuart readers would not have known that it was such a rare specimen: a work of godly practical divinity written by a woman. Anne Fenwick was a charismatic puritan, known for her zealous and radical non-conformist activities. She was arrested and tried before the Durham High Commission, after being targeted by the notoriously anti-puritan Bishop Neile, escaped from house arrest by May 1624 and became a noted author of religious writings. In 1629 one of her manuscripts, A collection of certaine promises out of the word of God, was published without her knowledge by the printer Robert Swayne, but the more definitive edition reproduced here was published by Michael Sparke in 1631. This edition was published with her consent and includes her prefatory letter, in which she explains the circumstances of the initial publication, and notes that she passed her own 'perfect copy' of the book to Swayne. It is reasonable to assume that this edition represents the version most faithful to the author's own manuscript and intentions. The knowledge that there was space for such a woman within the early Stuart puritan community - simultaneously prophetess, scriptual exegete and published writer - offers insight into the dramatic explosion of women's preaching and writing in the 1640s and 1650s.

This volume includes the works of three Englishwomen: Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) whose Revelations were first printed in 1670; Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1438) from whose Boke of Marjorie Kempe a few extracts were printed in 1501 and again in 1512; Juliana Berners (possibly c.1388) whose treatise on hawkyng and huntyng was first printed in 1486, with a second edition containing an additional treatise on fishing. The writings of these three women are brought together in this book because they are amongst the earliest female writers in the English language, they each reflected everyday lives, and reveal with passion, insight and compassion spiritualities not separate from the physical world but entwined with it. Julian of Norwich brings contemplative insights of God's love to a sinful and suffering humanity; Margery Kempe actively weeps for her own sin and the sins and suffering of the world and Juliana Berners lives actively with expertise and serenity in the world of nature.

This volume includes two early seventeenth-century translations of Roman Catholic books by English recusant nuns - Catherine Greenbury (a Franciscan) and Mary Percy (a Benedictine). To practise their faith on the continent both these women fled Elizabethan England where Roman Catholic practice had been outlawed under pain of severe penalty (even death). Catherine Greenbury was born at York into a wealthy upper middle-class family but left England after the death of her husband, shortly after the birth of her daughter in or around 1616. After establishing herself in Brussels in a convent dedicated to St Elizabeth, she became its first elected 'Mother' in 1626. During her early years here she translated the work included in this volume - François van den Broecke's biography in Dutch of the saintly Queen Elizabeth of Portugal. A comparison of Greenbury's version with the Dutch text shows not only that the translation is very competent and faithful, but also that she takes the editorial freedom to improve the text. Lady Mary Percy, daughter of Thomas Percy the seventh Earl of Northumberland, left England for Flanders and in 1598 she founded a Benedictine convent in Brussels especially for Englishwomen. Here Mary Percy translated a 1598 French edition of Breve compendio, by the Italian Jesuit Achille Gagliardi with his student Isabella Berinzaga, a mystical handbook which guides the reader through a series of elaborately defined stages striving towards 'deiformitie' - a state in which the soul is 'united unto the will of God'.

Susanna Hopton was born in 1627 to a wealthy mercantile family. By 1651 she was collaborating with her future husband Richard Hopton in his activities as a royalist agent and around the same time she was converted to Roman Catholicism by Henry Turberville, a secular priest and distinguished controversialist. After her marriage to Richard Hopton she was persuaded to rejoin the Church of England after 'long, and serious search and deliberation'. Her engagement with Roman Catholicism remained the defining event in her spiritual development and had a powerful influence on her writing, much of which consists of the adaptation of Roman Catholic devotional sources for Anglican use. Her first printed work, Daily Devotions, set the pattern for all her subsequent publications which were published anonymously through the mediation of male, clerical friends. In spite of her anonymity during the lifetime, Susanna Hopton had a flourishing posthumous reputation. Her works were frequently reprinted, and she herself was commemorated in compilations of the lives of celebrated women for a hundred and fifty years after her death.