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

This facsimile edition reproduces the extant works of the seventeenth-century poet, 'Ephelia'. By tradition, the identity of 'Ephelia' has been a long-contested debate in English letters. In her extended Introductory Note, Maureen Mulvihill culls evidence from the 'Ephelia' texts and from contemporary sources to show that the most likely candidate is Mary Villiers, later Stuart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (1622-1685). The volume opens with the reproduction of A Poem To His Sacred Majesty, On the Plot... (1678) from the copy held at the Bodleian Library. This is a large broadsheet poem prompted by The Popish Plot, expressing support for King Charles II. A new addition to the corpus of 'Ephelia's work is a variant of this 1678 parent-text, displaying a woodcut printer's ornament (factotum, with inset typepiece 'H'), which may hold special significance. This volume reproduces the copy preserved at the Huntington Library, and supplies with the facsimile an enlarged image of the ornament. Female Poems on several Occasions (1679) offers a rich variety of material: political verse, excerpted material from the poet's 'lost' play, love poetry and coterie verse critical of the moral decline of the Stuart court. The copy of the book reproduced here is that preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The final printed work in the volume is Advice To His Grace ([1681]) in which 'Ephelia' admonishes the Duke of Monmouth and advocates the purity of the Stuart line and the integrity of the Stuart succession. The copy reproduced here is preserved at the Beinecke Library. The volume concludes with three appendices: two Van Dyck portraits of Lady Mary Villiers; a signed manuscript elegy, preserved at Nottingham, with an enlarged image of its armorial watermark; and the title-page of the poet's Female Poems (1682).

This facsimile edition features the intimately related writings of a mother, Lady Frances Norton (1640-1731), and her daughter, Lady Grace Gethin (1676-97). The posthumous publication of Gethin's collection of essays Misery's Virtues Whet-Stone (1699) was sponsored by her mother; subsequently Norton invoked her maternal grief as the grounds for publishing her own essay collection The Applause of Virtue to which is appended Memento Mori: Or, Meditations on Death (1705). These essay collections unconventionally privilege a female perspective on traditional topics such as friendship, love, marriage and death. Accordingly, they hold an intrinsic interest for their gendered point of view, as well as an extrinsic interest for their conditions of production. Norton's final published work, A Miscellany of Poems, Compos'd and work'd with a Needle, on the Backs and Seats &c. Of several Chairs and Stools (1714), further reprises the theme of maternal grief as the justification for women's writing. This extremely rare volume, which has not been listed in the English Short-Title Catalogue until now, is being reissued here for the first time since 1714.

An Collins' Divine Songs and Meditacions were first printed in a small octavo volume in London in 1653. The only extant copy is presently held at The Huntington Library and it is, therefore, this copy that is reproduced in this facsimile edition. It is an important text because it is one of the earliest volumes of collected poems by an English woman in the seventeenth century. The poems are especially intriguing because of the glimpses they provide into the life and mind of a woman writer during this period and because of the social, political, historical and religious contexts in which they are embedded. The precise identity of An Collins' remains a mystery, and scholars have had to rely on the Divine Songs and Meditacions for most of their understanding of its author, often drawing very different conclusions about her religious, social and political beliefs. To date critics have focused on the biographical and historical interest of the poems, but as Robert Evans highlights in his Introductory Note to the volume, these works also exhibit a rhetorical power and skill that merits further attention.

Born Alice Clarke, the daughter of Oxford university's 'first director of printing', Alicia D'Anvers' poetry demonstrates an intimate familiarity with Oxford and especially with the workings of the press. This volume reproduces three works: A Poem Upon His Sacred Majesty, His Voyage for Holland (1691), Academia: or, the Humours of the University of Oxford in Burlesque Verse (1691), and The Oxford-Act: A Poem (1693). A Poem Upon His Sacred Majesty... responds to William III's decision to visit his native Holland to negotiate with fellow Protestants about their conflict with Catholic France. William, often impatient with English political wrangling, sometimes hinted that he might abdicate and return to Holland. D'Anvers' poem reflects real anxieties about such an event, as well as solid support for the Protestant king. The copy reproduced in this edition is from the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Academia and The Oxford-Act concern more local matters. Probably D'Anvers' best poem, Academia satirises some of Oxford University's 'younger sort', often adopting language that seems as rough and coarse as that of the men that she mocks. The Oxford-Act focuses on the annual university 'Act' or commencement ceremony which lasted for several days and included many rituals. The copy reproduced here is from The Huntington Library. The copy of Academia is reproduced from that held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This facsimile edition reproduces the work titled Eliza's Babes which was first published in 1652. The volume comprises devotional and political verse and prose meditations. The poems cover a wide range of forms from verse epistles to poetic petitions, religious love lyrics to poems on earthly marriage, exultant poetic prayers to stern spiritual admonitions. The meditations are fine examples of the Puritan believer's plain-style response to various biblical texts, theological issues and political events. The text is historically and aesthetically unique. It reveals its anonymous author to be perhaps the first woman to publish substantial creative imitations of poems printed in George Herbert's The Temple (1633) and to rely upon and respond to Robert Herrick's Hesperides (1648). Eliza's Babes is a literary work of great originality. The narrator lives out her estate of salvation as an almost literally experienced marriage of election to Christ her Saviour. In a series of poems, 'Eliza' overcomes her initial shock and disappointment that her heavenly spouse has chosen an earthly partner for her, though this partner's prerogative is noticeably confined to the subservient role of facilitating his wife's heavenly marriage. The copy reproduced in this edition is the British Library text.

The Females Legacy is the only surviving work of Amey Howard about whom very little is known. While rarely political or even topical, The Females Legacy generally conforms to much of the same militantly Protestant ideology of the sort Harris spent his life advocating. The volume contains twenty-six devotional poems nearly all of which feature a male speaker. Some are 'meditations' in which the speaker considers the import of an Old or New Testament narrative. Others are 'dialogues' between speakers who grapple with a sudden realisation of their own sinful natures and a biblical figure who introduces them to Christ's redemptive majesty. Interspersed amongst these two kinds of verse are a few other poems which directly address women or deploy them as protagonists. This edition reproduces the sole surviving copy of The Females Legacy held in the British Library.

During Anne Killigrew's lifetime (1660-1685) most of her known living relatives were connected to the court, yet very little is known about Anne herself. The twenty-five complete poems and five fragments that were collected and published by her father soon after her death probably represent only a portion of her output. They are reproduced here from the copy held in the Folger Shakespeare Library. These works suggest a poet quite conversant with the period's propensity to comment and compliment in verse. They suggest a sometimes conventional, sometimes merely competent, but often quite promising writer. Moreover, unlike many of her contemporaries, Killigrew never uses Latin, or French, or Italian in her verse. From the evidence of the poems here there is good reason to think that Killigrew would have been a fine eighteenth-century poet.

Elizabeth Major was inspired to write Honey on the Rod (1656) as a result of lameness brought on by a bout of fever in her mid-twenties. The experience left her fiercely devoted to her Christian religion, but also filled with indignation against the sins of nominal Christians. Honey on the Rod was written to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The work is in two parts. The first is a lengthy prose meditation in the form of a dialogue between a 'Soul' and 'Consolation'. The second is a sequence of poems on conventional Calvinistic themes, scourging common vices and praising the humble soul that accepts God's rod of affliction. The speaking voice of Honey on the Rod is unmistakeably that of a woman and as such the work contributes a woman's voice to the devotional literature dominated by men in the seventeenth century. This facsimile edition reproduces the copy held in the British Library.