Books in the The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions series

Although Lady Anne Halkett is beginning to receive much warranted critical attention, to date scholars have concentrated almost exclusively on her autobiographical 'Memoirs'. Consequently, her extensive 'Select and Occasional Meditations,' have been neglected or marginalised. This title offers an examination of Lady Anne Halkett's writing.

The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts presented here describe female servants'' experiences of work in early modern London. Domestics'' court depositions offer qualitative evidence that female servants were an important support of emergent capitalism in the early modern metropolis. Exposed here are the contractual underpinnings of domestic service for women; the mobility that domestic servants enjoyed; and the concern that this mobility generated in the authorities. Paid domestic work has traditionally been regarded by historians simply as a pre-marital phase of women''s lives. In fact, the depositions in this volume show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour. While some women left service once they married, others relied on domestic positions as an avenue to generating income as life-long single women, as married women, and as widows. Even though they usually lived in poverty, labouring women who worked as servants in London had considerably more agency than has earlier been recognized. Female servants who deposed before London ecclesiastical and parish courts three centuries ago were mostly non-literate. Strikingly, their individual voices are clear and distinct as they present information about their working and personal circumstances.

This critical edition of two early modern marriage sermons provides an important resource for students and scholars of early modern literature and history, allowing them to experience firsthand the competing and historically layered ideas about marriage that circulated in the wake of the English Reformation. Read in their entirety these sermons, by turns engaging and infuriating, resist easy characterization. The edition includes an extended critical introduction to the sermons. In the introduction Robert Matz offers evidence for a view of post-Reformation marriage advice that neither overstates nor minimizes historical change. He shows that if some earlier scholars exaggerated the break between Protestant and earlier ideas of marriage, so the criticism of this view has sometimes exaggerated the continuities-especially with regard to writing about marriage. The introduction also provides biblical, theological, political and discursive contexts for the sermons, including the place of the sermon in English early modern print culture, biographies of each of the sermon''s authors, and an account of the textual differences among the editions of each sermon. The texts follow the spelling and punctuation of the originals. Annotations are provided to identify references, gloss words with unfamiliar or altered meanings, clarify difficult syntax, and mark variations between editions.

The first scholarly edition of the known writings of Jane Cavendish, this volume presents a wide-ranging collection as possible of works and historical documents pertaining to a particularly compelling figure from the English Civil War.

This is a critical edition of the correspondence between Astell and John Norris of Bemerton, which had a profound significance in 18th-century intellectual and religious circles and which represents a crucial step in the development of Norris and Astell's opposition to John Locke.

Elizabeth Cooper's "The Rival Widows" provides an opportunity to restore to scholarly and pedagogical attention a neglected female writer and a play with significant implications for studies of 18th-century history, culture and gender. This book presents cultural and historical information that highlights the scholarly implications of this play.

A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman''s experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author''s manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode. The edition will also give a modernized version of the original text. Katharine Hodgkin supplies a substantial introduction that places this autobiography in the context of current scholarship on early modern women, addressing the overarching issues in the field that this text touches upon. In an appendix to the volume, Hodgkin compares the two versions of the text, considering the grounds for the occasional exclusion or substitution of specific words or passages. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England adds an important new dimension to the field of early modern women studies.

This collection of self-writings from the 17th century covers a wide variety of subjects including marriage, parenting and family conflicts, slavery, torture, madness, childbirth, religious experience, international travel and trading, illness and death.

Presents the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts that describes female servants' experiences of work in early modern London. This title shows that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour.

This text looks at female monastic life in the context of English society in early Tudor England. The book covers many translations of the Benedictine Rule for Women 1517, but focuses on Richard Fox's translation. It also looks at the changing definitions of monastic life for women.

Talks about a source of material by and about English nuns living in exile in the Low Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume draws upon several sets of papers, which show that religious women developed an astute system of auto/biographical practice within a protean political situation.

Susan Paterson Glover here presents a critical edition of the first printed work by an English woman writer, Sarah Chapone, on the inequity of the common law regime for married women. The text is bookended by an extended, original introduction, and a set of appendices providing supplemental historical documents relating to Chapone's life and work.