The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680

This is the first study of puritan women's place in early modern intellectual culture. Puritan women have suffered a double prejudice: that women were excluded from male culture, and that puritanism was hostile to many forms of culture. This collection argues that early modern women's puritanism formed and developed rather than prohibited their substantial and leading contributions to their culture. The essays introduce recently discovered writers such as Elizabeth Isham and Elizabeth Melville and new analyses of well-known writers such as Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Locke, and also highlight the local, national, and international dimensions of early modern puritan culture. With a foreword by N. H. Keeble and afterword by David Norbrook and fifteen essays by leading scholars of early modern literature and history, this collection reveals an intellectual culture characterized by networks of patronage, translation, manuscript circulation and correspondence.

Johanna Harris is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of articles and chapters on Brilliana Harley, letter-writing communities, Andrew Marvell, English puritanism, and sectarian groups, and her monograph on puritan epistolary communities is forthcoming. She is the co-general editor of a project to edit Richard Baxter's correspondence.

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is Lecturer in Early Modern English at King's College London, UK. She is the author of Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 (2013) and has co-edited The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (2014, with Ben Burton). She is editing Women Poets of the English Civil War (with Sarah C. E. Ross) and current research interests include gender and early modern literary criticism, Shakespeare's poetry, and poetic form.