Series: The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series

An important contribution to early public debates on the nature of women written by a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Pompeo Colonna's In Defense of Women (1530), presented in this volume in Latin and English translation, is one of several important defences of women composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by male advocates of women's moral and intellectual...

Key insights into women’s multi-dimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century. Lady Mary Carey (c. 1609–c. 1680) was a noblewoman who examined her life and expressed her views in a handwritten manuscript that she intended for self-reflection and for sharing with restricted audiences of family and friends, rather than for print publication. Her poetry and prose,...

This anthology of four plays written or performed between 1662 and 1677 offers a unique snapshot of the diverse nature of Restoration drama by women. Restoration Women's Drama collects four Restoration plays by women: the highly acclaimed Katherine Philips, the successful professional Aphra Behn, the confidently original Margaret Cavendish, and the obscure pioneer Frances Boothby. This anthology includes Behn's only...

An early Tudor translation of the Cité des dames, a crucial argument written by Christine de Pizan on the importance of women. Christine de Pizan's defence of women against centuries of misogyny, Cité des dames, was the only work of literature translated into English by Brian Anslay, an administrator in the household of King Henry VII. While numerous manuscripts were...

The first translation of the works of early modern French woman scientists Martine de Bertereau and Marie Meurdrac. The writings of mineralogist and hydrogeologist Martine de Bertereau (ca. 1584–ca. 1643) and alchemist and chemist Marie Meurdrac (ca. 1610–80) stand at the crossroads of the Scientific Revolution, a significant period between Copernicus and Newton that oversaw a new ferment in both...

The first translated collection of Hortense Mancini's correspondence. During the seventeenth century, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin (1646–99), became an icon of women's emancipation. In 1668, she shocked Europe when she fled her coercive husband and began a nomadic exile. Her notoriety increased in 1675 with the publication of her memoir—one of the first to appear in French by a...

The first published defense of women by a Netherlandish author. Jehan Baptista Houwaert's Excellence and Nobility of Women constitutes the eighth book of his Plain of the Nine Muses, or The Pleasure Garden of Virtuous Women (1582–1583), an immense conduct book for women in rhymed verse based on the many querelle texts of the French and Burgundian tradition but especially,...

A bilingual edition of the devotional poems of Dutch scholar and poet Anna Maria van Schurman, illuminating the period of her withdrawal from public life. The life and reputation of Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78) swung dramatically from her early fame as a prodigy and femme savante to the infamy she bore in the wake of her late affiliation with...