An important contribution to recent critical discussions about gender, sexuality, and material culture in Renaissance England, this study analyzes female- and male-authored lyrics to illuminate how gender and sexuality inflected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets' conceptualization of relations among people and things, human and non-human subjects and objects. Pamela S. Hammons examines lyrics from both manuscript and print collections"including the verse of authors ranging from Robert Herrick, John Donne, and Ben Jonson to Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aemilia Lanyer"and situates them in relation to legal theories, autobiographies, biographies, plays, and epics. Her approach fills a crucial gap in the conversation, which has focused upon drama and male-authored works, by foregrounding the significance of the lyric and women's writing. Hammons exposes the poetic strategies sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women used to assert themselves as subjects of property and economic agents"in relation to material items ranging from personal property to real estate"despite the dominant patriarchal ideology insisting they were ideally temporary, passive vehicles for men's wealth. The study details how women imagined their multiple, complex interactions with the material world:the author shows that how a woman poet represents herself in relation to material objects is a flexible fiction she can mobilize for diverse purposes. Because this book analyzes men's and women's poems together, it isolates important gendered differences in how the poets envision human subjects' use, control, possession, and ownership of things and the influences, effects, and power of things over humans. It also adds to the increasing evidence for the pervasiveness of patriarchal anxieties associated with female economic agency in a culture in which women were often treated as objects.

This book answers three simple questions. First, what mistaken assumptions do we make about the early modern period when we ignore women's literary contributions? Second, how might we come to recognise women's influence on the history of literature and culture, as well as those instances of outright pathbreaking mastery for which they are so often responsible? Finally, is it possible to see some women writers as world-makers in their own right, individuals whose craft cut into cultural practice so incisively that their shaping authority can be traced well beyond their own moment? The essays in this volume pursue these questions through intense archival investigation, intricate close reading, and painstaking literary-historical tracking, tracing in concrete terms sixteen remarkable women and their world-shaping activities.

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, composed and revised between 1650 and 1658, were important enough to her inner circle, however, that her autograph manuscript was carefully copied by another hand in 1681. In addition to providing us with key insights into women’s multidimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century in England, Carey’s work teaches us a great deal about a woman’s deepest emotional and spiritual states while confronting the hardships of life—from the fears of childbearing to the sorrows over child loss to the terrors of war.  

This excellent piece of work brings a new and fascinating seventeenth-century voice to twenty-first-century readers interested in women's studies, literature, and history. Book M by the London widow Katherine Austen lends itself well to modernization, which Professor Hammons has handled in a light and tactful manner. This book will be an excellent choice for classes on life writing in general and on early modern women's writing in particular, and it will be a great contextual reading for courses on British Restoration culture and literature. -Margaret J. M. Ezell Distinguished Professor of English and John and Sara Lindsay Chair of Liberal Arts Texas A&M University