Women Writers in Early Modern England Women Writers in Early Modern England Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Education Humanism Literacy Literature and the Arts Conduct Literature Manuscripts Publication Translation Women Writers Published file. Updated metadata proofed Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Women Becoming Writers

The period from about 1500 to 1700 CE saw a noticeable increase in the number of women writers in England. Only a few works are known to have been published by women in England before 1500, but the printing trade was in its infancy during the last decades of the 15th century. However, over 100 works were composed or translated by English women between 1500 and 1640. Although this is an impressive increase, it is a mere fraction of the thousands of works written by men.

Elizabethan and Jacobean women wrote prose narratives, poetry, prayers, essays, confessions, letters, diaries, prefaces, and translations. Noblewomen, women from the gentry, and middle-class women wrote on subjects ranging from religion to motherhood to social commentary. Most of the published works by English women in the period were religious or literary, while more personal works were usually left in manuscript form. Dramatic works by William Shakespeare shows many literate women characters in his plays, such as Beatrice, Lady Macbeth, and Juliet, typically shown reading and writing letters.

Restrictions on Women Writers

Margaret Tyler, in a letter To the Reader prefacing her 1578 Spanish-to-English translation of The Mirrour of Princely Deeds, protested restrictions on women’s writing: if men may and do bestow such of their travails upon gentlewomen, then may we women read such of their works as they dedicate unto us, and if we may read them, why not farther wade in them to the search of a truth?my persuasion hath been thus, that it is all one for a woman to pen a story, as for a man to address his story to a woman.

Women and Humanism

Before the Church of England was established in 1533, women with intellectual ambitions often entered a nunnery to get an education. When Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church, this opportunity vanished because of the dissolution of monasteries. Many intellectual women lost an important refuge due to this cataclysmic change in religion and society. Part of this upheaval was also the result of the humanist movement, which emphasized the potential, freedom, and dignity of mankind. Humanists, however, were divided as to whether this potential extended to women, or whether women were too inferior to properly benefit from secular education. Yet many elite Elizabethan and Jacobean women received extensive humanist educations from private tutors that enabled them to read and write in English, Latin, and sometimes Greek. A fre notable examples of women who received a humanist education include: Margaret Roper (1505–1544), daughter of Sir Thomas More, famous for her fluency in Latin and Greek, as well as her correspondence with the humanist author Erasmus. Katherine Parr (1512–1548), sixth wife of King Henry VIII, who wrote religious works in English and advocated for women’s education. Elizabeth Cooke Russell (1527–1609), a noted patron of literature and music, who corresponded with leading intellectuals and supported Protestant causes. Anne Cooke Bacon (1528–1610), known for her translations of religious texts and her proficiency in Latin and Greek, as well as being the mother of statesman and author Sir Francis Bacon. Elizabeth I (1533–1603), who became fluent in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, in addition to having studied rhetoric, philosophy, and classical literature. Mary Sidney Herbert (1561–1621), poet, translator, and literary patron But even those early modern Englishmen (and some Englishwomen) that believed women should be educated and allowed to write reasoned that it would make the women better Christians and better wives, rather than being seen as a way of liberating their minds.

Women Writers Under Elizabeth I

However, at least briefly, due in large part to Elizabeth I, women gained some status and opportunity for education. While women were given the education to become writers, they became increasingly sheltered from the largely male worlds of commerce and government, and so there were still fewer women writing than men. The death of Queen Elizabeth I was followed by a reaction against women’s intellectual aspirations, with a corresponding decline in published secular works by women. James I, whose writings reveal him as deeply misogynist, is said to have remarked about one educated woman, But can she spin?

Specific Women Writers

Early modern Englishwomen wrote in a variety of genres. Here is a list of popular genres and some women who wrote in them:

Prose Katherine Parr, Queen of England (1512–48) Anne Askew (c. 1520–46) Jane Anger (fl. 1589) Dorothy Leigh (? –1616) Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1585–1639) Autobiography Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633) Mary Ward (1585–1645) Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) Verse Isabella Whitney (fl. 1567–78) Mary (Sidney) Herbert (1561–1621) Mary (Sidney) Wroth (c. 1586–1651)
Key Print Sources Knoppers, Laura. The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Ashgate Critical Essays on Early Modern Women Writers, vols. 1–7. Ashgate, 2009. Martin, Randall. Women Writers in Renaissance England: An Annotated Anthology. 2nd ed. Harlow-Pearson, 2010. Salzman, Paul. Early Modern Women Writers: An Anthology 1560–1700. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. Women Writers. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/women%20writers/women.html. Accessed 25 May 2018. Elk, Martine Van. Early Modern Women: Lives, Texts, Objects. https://martinevanelk.wordpress.com/. Accessed 25 May 2018. Jokinen, Annlina. 16th Century Renaissance English Literature. Luminarium. https://www.luminarium.org/renlit/. Accessed 25 May 2018. Jokinen, Annlina. 17th Century Renaissance English Literature. Luminarium. https://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/. Accessed 25 May 2018. Women’s Early Modern Letters Online. http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?page_id=2595. Accessed 25 May 2018.
Image Source Lanyer, Aemelia. Salve Deus Rex Judeorum <supplied>Hail, Christ, King of the Jews</supplied>. 1611. MS. British Lib., London.