Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England

Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England considers the roles women played as literary patrons, dedicatees, readers, and writers in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, and the intimate relationship between these literary activities and what has often been called ‘politically active’ humanism. Illuminating women’s constitutive involvement in everything from the genres of the texts produced DL romances, verse letters, texts of religious controversy DL to the places in which those texts were produced and circulated - -the estates of Wilton, Penshurst, Hackness, Twickenham, and Loughton DL and the conditions in and hermeneutics by which they were read, Mediatrix offers an account of early modern English literary production with women at the center and political activism as one of its primary, rather than merely topical, concerns.