Introduction: "voice that is mine"; the word and the throne - John Knox's "The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women"; engendering penitence - Nicholas Breton and "the Countesse of Penbrooke"; women writers and women readers - the case of Aemilia Lanier; the canonization of Elizabeth Cary; Dionys Fitzherbert and the anatomy of madness; the torture of Limena - sex and violence in Lady Mary Wroth's "Urania"; the iconography of the blush - Marian literature of the 1630s; playing the "masculine part" - finding a difference within Behn's poetry; read within - gender, cultural difference and quaker women's travel narratives; contra-dictions - women as figures of exclusion and resistance in John Bunyan and Agnes Beaumont's narratives; seditious sisterhood - women publishers of opposition literature at the restoration.