Introduction: Researching early modern women and the poem – Susan WisemanPart I: Inheritance1. Women’s poetry and classical authors: Lucy Hutchinson and the classicisation of scripture – Edward Paleit2. Elizabeth Melville and the religious sonnet sequence in Scotland and England – Sarah CE Ross3. The Sapphic sontext of Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus – Line Cottegnies4. Women poets and men’s sentences: genre and literary tradition in Katherine Philips’s early poetry – Gillian WrightPart II: Circulation5. ‘We thy Sydnean Psalmes shall celebrate’: collaborative authorship, Sidney’s Sister and the English devotional lyric – Suzanne Trill6. ‘Mary Wroth and hermaphroditic circulation’ – Paul Salzman7. Sisterhood and female friendship in Constance Aston Fowler’s verse miscellany – Helen Hackett8. Late seventeenth-century women poets and the anxiety of attribution – Margaret JM EzellPart III: Narrative9. Rethinking authorial reluctance in the paratexts to Anne Bradstreet’s poetry – Patricia Pender10. A ‘goodly sample’: exemplarity, female complaint and early modern women’s poetry – Ros Smith11. ‘The nine-liv’d Sex’: women and justice in seventeenth-century popular poetry – Judith Hudson12. ‘The contemplative woman’s recreation? Kaherine Austen ad the estate poem – Susan WisemanAfterword: Reading and early modern women and the poem – Patricia Pender and Rosalind SmithIndex

Viewing the poem as a social agent and product in women’s lives, the essays in this collection examine factors influencing the relationships between writers and readers of poetry in seventeenth-century England and Scotland. The archival and theoretical research on literary authorship, textual transmission and socio-literary networks invites a re-examination of the production and reception of poetry, and alters our understanding of the way poetry participated in social, literary and political life.The volume takes account of the expansion and changes to the canon of women’s poetry and emerging research on key aspects of literary production and reception. It builds on and responds to both recent critical emphasis on literary form and on archival scholarship in women’s writing, understanding the two emphases to be mutually informative. This book explores the way women understood the poem, examines how the poem was shared, circulated and rewritten, and traces its path through wider social relations. Poets discussed at length include Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Melville, Mary Wroth, Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, Anne Finch, Anne Killigrew and Katherine Austen. The essays elucidate poetic practices such as women’s reception of classical texts, the uses of claims to ‘modesty’, translation, collaboration and revision, as well as exploring the use of women in poems. The book will appeal to any scholar of literature and gender working in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, and anyone interested in women’s poetry.

‘Susan Wiseman’s edited collection Early Modern Women and the Poem, recently reissued in paperback, draws together twelve cohesive essays which ask in exciting ways ‘how women use poetry, and how poems use women’.’Dianne Mitchell, Renaissance Studies