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

Katherine Philips was a major seventeenth-century poet and playwright who became widely known for her innovative use of Donnean poetics to express passionate female friendship, her occasional verses on private friends and public figures, and her moral and political acuity. She had the mixed fortune of being enshrined in posthumous volumes that both celebrated and misrepresented her achievement. Fortunately recent research has clarified our understanding of who Philips was and how she conducted her literary career.

Katherine Philips was a major seventeenth-century poet and playwright who became widely known for her innovative use of Donnean poetics to express passionate female friendship, her occasional verses on private friends and public figures, and her moral and political acuity. She had the mixed fortune of being enshrined in posthumous volumes that both celebrated and misrepresented her achievement. Fortunately recent research has clarified our understanding of who Philips was and how she conducted her literary career.

The works included in this volume constitute Delarivier Manley's early oeuvre, written in the seventeenth century. They comprise one epistolary novella, Letters Written [sic] by Mrs Manley; one commendatory poem 'To the Author of Agnes de Castro'; one comedy, The Lost Lover, or The Jealous Husband, one tragedy, The Royal Mischief; and two commemorative poems, 'Melpomeme: The Tragick Muse' and 'Thalia: The Comick Muse'. In the light of new readings of Delarivier Manley's early work, this volume demonstrates her important contribution to the literary and theatrical milieu of the late seventeenth century.

The second of two volumes of 'Fiction of unknown or questionable authorship, 1641-1700,' this volume presents in facsimile two seventeenth-century novels, Alcander and Philocrates: Or, The Pleasures and Disquietudes of Marriage. A Novel. Written by a Young Lady (1696) and Peppa, or The Reward of Constant Love a novel: done out of French: with several songs set to musick for two voices / by a young-gentlewoman (1689). The first of these is an original, unattributed work written in English; the second is a translation from the French for which there is some evidence of a female translator. An original introduction to the volume provides information about the content of each novel; what the authors have discovered about each work's publication and authorship; and the physical copies of the seventeenth century books from which the facsimiles are taken.

The title page of the 1651 continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which is made available in facsimile in this volume, designates its author as 'Mris A. W.' It is now the convention to attribute the volume to Anna Weamys. Little is known about the author; the only other information about her is suggested by the substantial number of commendatory verses which precede the text. Though details about her and the specific motivations for continuing Sidney's work remain tantalisingly absent, Anna Weamys's text is important for understanding the reception of Sidney by women readers, as well as the development of prose fiction as it evolved towards the novel. Its female heroines illustrate a real concern with how women might navigate the straits of female behaviour in a judgmental and partisan society. The Introductory Note to this volume provides some analysis of how gender, class, and historical and cultural values affect what Weamys chose to pick up from Sidney's work and what seems to be of lesser interest to her. For example, in the three stories from Sidney's Arcadia on which she focuses, Weamys brings an awareness of the difficulties of women's position to bear on narrative in a way which prefigures the novel.

This volume reproduces twenty short texts written by named and unnamed women in the years 1641-1700. These texts, selected and introduced by various hands, are grouped in thematic clusters for the reader's ease - poetry on religion, on politics, on society, on domestic/social affairs and on mourning. The poems are arranged chronologically within each cluster. The volume closes with Anne Wentworth's pamphlet England's Spiritual Pill.

Elizabeth Cellier, the scandalous celebrity known as the 'Popish midwife', became the focus of a large number of pamphlets in 1680: accounts of her two trials, her self-vindication, Malice Defeated, her opponent Thomas Dangerfield's rejoinder, and various anonymous satiric attacks against her. She was tried twice: the first time for the more serious charge of treason, and the second for libel, for publishing Malice Defeated. She was acquitted the first time, but found guilty the second, though her punishment was to be pilloried, not executed. She reemerges as the author of tracts on midwifery, proposing to James II the establishment of a professional guild of midwives. Her writings exhibit her remarkable determination to publish her accusations of judicial torture and her advocacy of the licensing of midwives as professional women, as well as exemplifying the importance of the printing press for enabling women to participate in the political public sphere.

Katherine Philips was a major seventeenth-century poet and playwright who became widely known for her innovative use of Donnean poetics to express passionate female friendship, her occasional verses on private friends and public figures, and her moral and political acuity. She had the mixed fortune of being enshrined in posthumous volumes that both celebrated and misrepresented her achievement. Fortunately recent research has clarified our understanding of who Philips was and how she conducted her literary career.

Mary Carleton, commonly known as the German Princess, was a scandalous celebrity in Restoration London. Her notoriety arose from her 1663 trial and acquittal for bigamy, which became the occasion of the publication of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton. Here she narrates her version of her life as a 'German Princess', the daughter of the Earl of Cologne, though by most accounts she was born Mary Moders, the daughter of a Canterbury fiddler who married first a Canterbury shoemaker, Thomas Steadman, and then a surgeon, Thomas Day. Within her own time, Carleton was the subject of more than twenty-six pamphlets published in 1663 and 1673; this volume reprints Carleton's own The Case of Madam Mary Carleton along with representative selections of pamphlets written about her. Her trial produced its own 'pamphlet war' between Mary and her husband John and her story inspired a play and a mock epic, which significantly responded to Carleton's own emphasis on performance and epic romance in fashioning her aristocratic identity.

This volume makes available for the first time the complete surviving works of the London printer-author Elinor James (c.1645-1719). Uniquely in the history of early modern women, James wrote, printed and distributed more than ninety pamphlets and broadsides addressing political, religious and commercial concerns. Written over a period of 35 years, her works provide us with a running commentary on the major national events of a tumultuous period such as the Revolution of 1688, the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, and the Jacobite uprisings in 1715-16. During her lifetime, England saw the succession of six different monarchs. James petitioned all of them and claimed to have obtained audiences with three. In 1689 she was gaoled in Newgate prison, accused of disseminating seditious material condemning William III for accepting the English crown. James's texts address a staggeringly broad range of concerns. She petitioned Parliament concerning legislation affecting the printing trades and petitioned fellow printers concerning labour relations in London printing houses. She petitioned City authorities on issues such as the enforcement of bylaws or who to vote for in City and parliamentary elections. It is hoped that by making available all of James's known works, this volume will inspire the collective efforts of scholars from many different disciplines to decipher her references to contemporary events, issues and persons, as well as prompting further discoveries of as yet unidentified works.