Whitney Isabella - Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemelia Lanyer: Renaissance women poets

I am grateful to the following for permission to reproduce the texts in this volume: the British Library for Whitneys The copy of a letter and The lamentacion of a Gentilwoman, Sidney, A Dialogue betweene two shepheards and Lanyer, The Description of Cooke-ham; the Bodleian Library for Whitneys A sweet Nosgay, Mary Sidney, Psalmes and Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judorum; the Master and Benchers of the Inner Temple for Mary Sidneys The Triumph of Death; Oxford University Press for To the Angell spirit, taken from William A. Ringler Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney; and Penguin Press for Even now that Care, taken from David Norbrook and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse.

Editing texts is a collaborative undertaking which requires the expertise of many minds, and I have been fortunate to have been able to draw upon the burgeoning scholarship on early modern women writers as well as the work of early pioneers. My indebtedness to Margaret Hannays work on Mary Sidney is clear on virtually every page, and I have learned much from the emerging generation of critics whose work is now beginning to appear: I would like to thank them collectively here. In a more proximate way, I have benefited from discussions of this material and the questions it raises over the course of the last few years. For support, inspiration and criticism I would like to thank Ros Ballaster, Julia Briggs, Elizabeth Clarke, Lorna Hutson, David Norbrook and Diane Purkiss. Many of the ideas presented here have been aired in earlier incarnations, and I would like to thank audiences in Belfast, Dublin, Reading and Oxford for their attention. For specific acts of kindness and pieces of information, I thank Ron Callan, Andrew Carpenter, Janet Clare, Anne-Marie DArcy, Mare Doyle, Emily Hamer, Anne Macdona, Susan McNulty, Jim Mays, Clona Gallchir, Catherine Pratt, Philippa Semper, Maria Stuart and Moynagh Sullivan. Elizabeth Macfarlane has facilitated this book in more ways than she knows, providing texts, books, references and, above all, encouragement. I am deeply grateful for her friendship. At Penguin I would like to thank Robert Mighall. Monica Schmoller has been an exemplary copy-editor and I owe her much gratitude. All errors which remain after her careful ministrations are, of course, my own. Finally, I would like to thank Risn, who has patiently endured these dead poets, and their preoccupied editor, for far too long.

This edition, by bringing together three women poets Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer suggests that they are usefully read alongside one another. The assumption is that we can isolate and identify women as a category in the Renaissance, marked by ideological position, and by their difference from male writers. Although feminism led readers and critics to these texts, it has often served to obscure how we read them; anachronistic notions of gender construction, female community and opposition to prevailing ideologies have failed to read these writers and texts on their own terms. This edition aims to re-place women writers in the Renaissance by putting them in context, by explaining the poems with reference to the texts and ideas circulating in their contemporary world, and by providing information on the literary, historical and cultural background to each text. This edition does not seek to limit the extent to which these writers reaction and response to the world and texts around them is determined by their gender, but it does hope to avoid reducing their experience solely to their gender. While it is undoubtedly possible to conclude that women writers literary choices generic, linguistic, form of publication may be to some extent determined by their gendered position, it does not follow that the resulting texts are necessarily about gender. Each of these writers displays some concern with the female subject position, but it cannot be said that this is their primary motivation for writing. Women writers are engaged in the imitation of texts and traditions much as male writers in the period are. It might be argued that women writers are using the written medium to explore a process of self-fashioning and political intervention which was off-limits to them in terms of direct access to the centres of power. These three women poets, who come from differing social, cultural and historical contexts, demonstrate the emergence of the Renaissance female self.