In 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a slave ship, sold to the Wheatley family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. Struck by Phillis' extraordinary precociousness, the Wheatleys provided her with an education that was unusual for a woman of the time and astonishing for a slave. After studying English and classical literature, geography, the Bible, and Latin, Phillis published her first poem in 1767 at the age of 14, winning much public attention and considerable fame. When Boston publishers who doubted its authenticity rejected an initial collection of her poetry, Wheatley sailed to London in 1773 and found a publisher there for Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

This volume collects both Wheatley's letters and her poetry: hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions-including a poignant plea to the Earl of Dartmouth urging freedom for America and comparing the country's condition to her own. With her contemplative elegies and her use of the poetic imagination to escape an unsatisfactory world, Wheatley anticipated the Romantic Movement of the following century. The appendices to this edition include poems of Wheatley's contemporary African-American poets: Lucy Terry, Jupiter Harmon, and Francis Williams.

Voltaire (1694-1778), novelist, dramatist, poet, philosopher, historian, and satirist, was one of the most renowned figures of the Age of Enlightenment. In this collection of anti-clerical works from the last twenty-five years of Voltaire's life, he roundly attacks the philosophical optimism of the deists, the so-called inspiration of the Bible, the papacy, and vulgar superstition. These great works reveal Voltaire not only as a polemicist but also as a profound humanitarian. The selections include "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster", "We Must Take Sides", "The Questions of Zapate" and "The Sermon of the Fifty," homilies on superstition and the interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, and his famous "Treatise on Toleration".

La Respuesta a Sor Filotea, the most famous prose work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is a passionate defense of the rights of women to study, teach, and write, and is one of the world’s earliest treatises on these subjects. Also included in this wide-ranging bilingual collection by Latin America’s finest baroque poet is a new translation of her masterpiece, the epistemological poem "Primero Sueño," as well as autobiographical sonnets, religious poetry, secular love poems, playful verses, and lyrical tributes to New World culture.

This is the first collection of the complete writings of Susanna Wesley, the mother of John, Charles, and Samuel Wesley, the founding fathers of Methodism. As an outstanding female figure of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, her writings should interest not only Methodists' but feminists and scholars of English social and religious history as well.

Sir Joshua Reynolds could never have anticipated an edition of his letters; he once told Boswell that “If I felt the same reluctance in taking a Pencil in my hand as I do a pen I should be as bad a Painter as I am a correspondent.” Yet although his surviving letters are those of a busy man, and many are perfunctory responses or requests, they remain of considerable interest to the reader. This is the first edition of letters by Reynolds to be published since 1929. Since that date the number of known letters has almost doubled. The new volume contains a total of 308 letters by the artist to friends, family, and patrons, all of which are accompanied by detailed notes to identify the recipient and illuminate the text. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

William Tyndale's first translation of the New Testament (1526) was printed in Germany, savagely suppressed in England and eventually led to his execution. Yet it makes him the single most important figure in laying the foundations for the English Reformation. Tyndale's vigorous direct English was substantially incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611, and it made the New Testament available for the first time - in Tyndale's famous determination - even to the 'boy that driveth the plough'. The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) boldly develops the argument that ordinary believers should take their spiritual sustenance direct from Scripture, without the intervention of (often worldly and corrupt) Popes and prelates. Its vivid discussion of sacraments and false signs, the duties of rulers and ruled, and valid and invalid readings of the Bible, makes the book a landmark in both political and religious thinking. This fine example of English prose also raises, even today, some powerful questions about the true challenge of living a Christian life.

Enthralling generations of readers, the narrative of capture by Native Americans is an archtype of American literature. Most such narratives were fact- based, but the stories themselves were often transformed into spiritual autobiographies, spellbinding adventure stories, sentimental tales, or anti-Indian propaganda. The ten narratives here span two hundred years (1682-1892), and depict the experiences of women such as Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dunstan, Sarah Wakefield, and Mary Jemison.

Four journeys by early Americans Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd II, and Dr. Alexander Hamilton recount the vivid physical and psychological challenges of colonial life. Essential primary texts in the study of early American cultural life, they are now conveniently collected in a single volume.

Not everyone is as innocent as this engaging complainant. Most people who read know something about Johnson, enough at least to summon up images of him asseverating No, Sir, knocking back endless cups of tea, rambling over the Hebrides, puffing out his breath like a whale, repressing Boswell, standing bareheaded in Uttoxeter Market, and having a frisk with Beauclerk and Langton. And now, thanks to the Johnsonians of Yale, Columbia, Oxford, and Lichfield, our knowledge of the man and his social environment has increased more than anyone fifty years ago could have imagined. But despite prodigies of research and documentation, an interest in Johnson that could be called literary has been wanting. One suspects that for every hundred persons familiar with the classic Johnson anecdotes there is perhaps only one who has actually read the Rambler or the Idler or even the Lives of the Poets. And if the writings are still little read for their own sake, they are almost as little written about as attractive objects of criticism. Yale s new edition of the writings, the first since the early nineteenth century, is an occasion to perceive that for all his value as conversational goad and wit and for all his attractiveness as a moral and religious hero, Johnson s identity remains stubbornly that of a writer."

"Of the hundreds of logbooks and journals I have examined, this is the most valuable for the slave trade in western Africa.... Mouser s] exhaustive background research and editing are exemplary." George Brooks

Captain Samuel Gamble s log contains the record of a slaving venture to Africa and Jamaica that nearly failed. It is one of the best firsthand narratives of the slave trade to survive. Bruce Mouser s faithfully transcribed and carefully annotated edition of Gamble s log provides a haunting perspective on slave trading at the end of the 18th century. Gamble was captain of the British merchant Sandown. During 1793 1794, the ship embarked on a commercial venture from England to Upper Guinea in West Africa to buy slaves and transport them for sale in Kingston, Jamaica. Gamble describes shipping at the beginning of the Anglo-French war in 1793, naval and nautical procedures for the English-African-West Indian trade, and the slave-trading patterns and institutions on the African coast and at Kingston, Jamaica. He recounts as well a yellow fever epidemic that swept the Atlantic and crippled commerce on both sides of the ocean. Mouser s extensive annotations place Gamble s account in historical context and explain for the reader Gamble s observations on commerce, disease, and African peoples along the Upper Guinea coast."