Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Although women of the Renaissance were expected to be chaste, silent and obedient, many women poets risked the disapproval of their own society and transcended the strictures of contemporary female behavior in words that still resonate today. Their meditations on the danger and sufferings of motherhood and their descriptions of the vagaries of love, while couched in the formal style of Renaissance poetry, often appear startlingly close to modern experience. As a consequence, the range of poetry produced by Renaissance women is remarkably broad. In Women Poets of the Renaissance the poetry of these women is collected for the first time in an anthology that offers the twentieth-century reader a fresh and unique approach to literature of the period.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [374]-382).
Table of Contents
Her will to London / Isabella Whitney -- Poems / Elizabeth I -- Epitaphs / Anne Cecil de Vere -- The French history / Anne Dowriche -- Poems ; The tragedy of Antonie ; Psalm translations / Mary Sidney -- Salve deus rex Judaeorum ; The description of cooke-ham / Aemilia Lanyer -- A mouzell for melastomus ; Mortality's memorandum / Rachel Speght -- Pamphilia to Amphilanthus / Mary Wroth -- A chain of pearl / Diana Primrose -- Meditations of man's mortality / Alice Sutcliffe -- The concealed fancies ; Poems / Jane and Elizabeth Cavendish -- Poems / Anne Bradstreet.