Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works & Printed Writings, 1641-1700: Series II, Part Four – serie

Sarah Fyge Egerton (1668-1723) is an intriguing poet who wrote a great deal of poetry during a period when women poets were relatively rare. Her career also began at an astonishingly early age: she was barely fourteen years old when one of her poems was first printed in London. Throughout much of her life Egerton used poetry to share her thoughts, vent her feelings, and participate, to a highly unusual degree, in the public discourse of her times. The Female Advocate is perhaps her most famous single work. It was her very first publication and was printed three times in her own lifetime”in 1686, in a revised edition in 1687 and once more in 1707. The original 1686 edition is included in this volume along with the third edition of 1707, which is very rare. Alongside The Female Advocate in this volume is Egerton's Poems on Several Occasions, Together with a Pastoral. This is a diverse volume with no obvious pattern or design but which includes many poems which display real talent and can express surprisingly assertive or unexpected views, suggesting the volume deserves far more analytical attention than it has yet received.

Jane Barker (1652-1732) is increasingly being recognised as one of the most important English women writers of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. The author of both poems and novels (including novels containing numerous poems), Barker was largely ignored for many years but has recently been the subject of intense interest and investigation. Despite this, no complete, collected edition of Barker's poems has yet appeared, and the present volume is the first reproduction of her important early published volume, Poetical Recreations, to be issued in facsimile as a printed book (rather than on microfilm). Jane Barker's life was rich in incident. Her early poetry was enthusiastically advocated by the male students at St. John's College, Cambridge. A persecuted Catholic and a subsequent longtime exiled supporter of the Jacobite cause in France following the 'Bloodless Revolution', she was also physically disabled and without great financial means, in part because she never married. Almost certainly her decision to begin publishing novels was motivated, on some level, by financial need. By the time she died, in March 1732, at the age of seventy-nine, she had lived a life that had been long, eventful, and accomplished, but by no means easy.

In 1625 Lady Eleanor Davies' life took a dramatic turn when, by her account in 1641, a "Heavenly voice" told her "There is Ninteene yeares and a halfe to the day of Judgement, and you as the meek Virgin". That same year she published her first treatise, A Warning to the Dragon, initiating her controversial career as a writer of prophetic tracts. Between 1641 and 1652 she would produce some 66 of them, using the Bible to gauge the cosmic significance of events, great and small, taking place in her nation and in her personal life. They focus on a complex of personal and political events that Lady Eleanor thought indicated the fast approach of the "last days" foretold by the biblical prophets Daniel and John of Patmos. A complement to Teresa Feroli's facsimile edition of Eleanor Davies' pre-1640 texts (Ashgate, 2000), this pair of volumes reproduces 60 texts from the corpus of 66 printed between 1641 and 1652.

In 1625 Lady Eleanor Davies' life took a dramatic turn when, by her account in 1641, a "Heavenly voice" told her "There is Ninteene yeares and a halfe to the day of Judgement, and you as the meek Virgin". That same year she published her first treatise, A Warning to the Dragon, initiating her controversial career as a writer of prophetic tracts. Between 1641 and 1652 she would produce some 66 of them, using the Bible to gauge the cosmic significance of events, great and small, taking place in her nation and in her personal life. They focus on a complex of personal and political events that Lady Eleanor thought indicated the fast approach of the "last days" foretold by the biblical prophets Daniel and John of Patmos. A complement to Teresa Feroli's facsimile edition of Eleanor Davies' pre-1640 texts (Ashgate, 2000), this pair of volumes reproduces 60 texts from the corpus of 66 printed between 1641 and 1652.

Katherine Chidley was a religious and political activist who dissented from the established church throughout the 1620s, 30s and 40s; supported the parliamentarian cause against the royalists during the English civil wars of the 1640s; and sided with the proto-democratic Levellers against the more authoritarian regime of Oliver Cromwell during England’s short-lived but influential republican era of the 1650s. During the early years of the English civil wars, debates raged between radical separatists and those such as the Presbyterians who opposed the Anglican Church and its bishops while insisting that some sort of state control over religion be maintained. Thomas Edwards was one of those who hoped to persuade Parliament that a compromise should be reached between total conformity and complete religious freedom. Between 1641 and 1645, Chidley published three works disputing his anti-separatist arguments and promoting the far-reaching principle of the separation of church and state. These are reprinted in this volume along with Katharine Gillespie's excellent introduction to Chidley's life and works.

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.

In 1625 Lady Eleanor Davies' life took a dramatic turn when, by her account in 1641, a "Heavenly voice" told her "There is Ninteene yeares and a halfe to the day of Judgement, and you as the meek Virgin". That same year she published her first treatise, A Warning to the Dragon, initiating her controversial career as a writer of prophetic tracts. Between 1641 and 1652 she would produce some 66 of them, using the Bible to gauge the cosmic significance of events, great and small, taking place in her nation and in her personal life. They focus on a complex of personal and political events that Lady Eleanor thought indicated the fast approach of the "last days" foretold by the biblical prophets Daniel and John of Patmos. A complement to Teresa Feroli's facsimile edition of Eleanor Davies' pre-1640 texts (Ashgate, 2000), this pair of volumes reproduces 60 texts from the corpus of 66 printed between 1641 and 1652.

In 1625 Lady Eleanor Davies' life took a dramatic turn when, by her account in 1641, a "Heavenly voice" told her "There is Ninteene yeares and a halfe to the day of Judgement, and you as the meek Virgin". That same year she published her first treatise, A Warning to the Dragon, initiating her controversial career as a writer of prophetic tracts. Between 1641 and 1652 she would produce some 66 of them, using the Bible to gauge the cosmic significance of events, great and small, taking place in her nation and in her personal life. They focus on a complex of personal and political events that Lady Eleanor thought indicated the fast approach of the "last days" foretold by the biblical prophets Daniel and John of Patmos. A complement to Teresa Feroli's facsimile edition of Eleanor Davies' pre-1640 texts (Ashgate, 2000), this pair of volumes reproduces 60 texts from the corpus of 66 printed between 1641 and 1652.

Sarah Fyge Egerton (1668-1723) is an intriguing poet who wrote a great deal of poetry during a period when women poets were relatively rare. Her career also began at an astonishingly early age: she was barely fourteen years old when one of her poems was first printed in London. Throughout much of her life Egerton used poetry to share her thoughts, vent her feelings, and participate, to a highly unusual degree, in the public discourse of her times. The Female Advocate is perhaps her most famous single work. It was her very first publication and was printed three times in her own lifetime”in 1686, in a revised edition in 1687 and once more in 1707. The original 1686 edition is included in this volume along with the third edition of 1707, which is very rare. Alongside The Female Advocate in this volume is Egerton's Poems on Several Occasions, Together with a Pastoral. This is a diverse volume with no obvious pattern or design but which includes many poems which display real talent and can express surprisingly assertive or unexpected views, suggesting the volume deserves far more analytical attention than it has yet received.

Gertrude More belongs to a tradition of mystical writers who believed in the value of the via negativa, a path to union with God by way of total self-abnegation and the emptying of the mind of set ideas and images. Her only book-length work, THE SPIRITVAL EXERCISES (Paris, 1658), is a collection of her writing assembled by Dom Augustine Baker, OSB, and published some thirty-three years after her death. Some of More’s other verse and prose appears in the biography that Baker composed, but her SPIRITVAL EXERCISES remains the main text she has bequeathed to her order and to posterity. It is reprinted here in full with Arthur F. Marotti's introductory note outlining Gertrude More's life and work.