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Poems by a Sixteenth-Century Gentlewoman, Maid, and Servant (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series #102)

Poems by a Sixteenth-Century Gentlewoman, Maid, and Servant (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series #102)

Isabella Whitney, Shannon Miller (Editor)
$59.94
Publication Date: July 20th, 2024
Publisher:
Iter Press
ISBN:
9781649590916
Pages:
212
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Description

A collection of poems by the first English woman to publish secular poetry under her own name.

Isabella Whitney (c. 1547–after 1624) was the first English woman to publish original secular poetry under her own name. She published two poetic miscellanies of poems: The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573), which include her own work as well as a total of six poems by five different male authors. This edition of her writings prints modernized texts of the complete miscellanies and adds to them six poems attributed to Whitney by largely twentieth-century critics. These poems provide a rich portrait of sixteenth-century female courtship and its dangers, a unique view of class and gender in Whitney’s lifetime, and a portrait of London as a burgeoning market of practical goods and luxury items from foodstuffs to imported silk.
 

About the Author

Isabella Whitney (c. 1547–after 1624) was born in Chester and lived in London. Shannon Miller is professor of English and comparative literature and the dean of the College of Humanities and the Arts at San José State University. She is the author of Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World and Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers.
 

Praise for Poems by a Sixteenth-Century Gentlewoman, Maid, and Servant (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series #102)

"This edition of writings published by Isabella Whitney and poems attributed to her by later editors is so important to women's literary history that it is hard to believe it has not yet appeared. Whitney's poetry is intelligent, perceptive, witty, vibrant, and direct; it will be widely read and enjoyed by students and more advanced scholars interested in early modern women's literature, history, feminist and gender studies, as well as cultural studies more generally."

 
— Sara Jayne Steen, Former Professor of English and Dean of letters and Sciences at Montana State University and President Emerita of Plymouth State University in New Hampshire

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