Marie-Louise Coolahan

Ideal Communities and Planter Women's Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

For New English settlers, seventeenth-century Ireland offered opportunities for career advancement and economic reward. But moving to Ireland also entailed the establishment of new social connections. For members of the planter class, writing was a means of building networks and consolidating a minority community that was often diffuse and spread across the country. Equally, the act of imagining community prompted their writing. The letters of Susan Montgomery, who arrived in Ulster on her husbands appointment as bishop of Derry, are a primary example of the aspiration to ideal community, envisaged in epistolary writing. The community available to Montgomery in Ulster and its evolution through the petitionary writing of the next generation are discussed. This is then related to the literary strategies of the poet, Anne Southwell, whose construction of ideal community is illuminated by new research on her friend, Cicely, Lady Ridgeway.

Identity Politics and Nuns’ Writing

This article focuses on the texts produced in the seventeenth century by the English and Irish nuns of the Order of St Clare in order to explore questions of individual and collective authorship, the expression of identity, and the exercise of political agency. It examines the conditions of exile, persecution, and internal controversy, arguing that translation, in particular, is the vehicle for asserting a range of competing positions pertaining to the religious house, the religious order, and national and transnational allegiance. It locates these texts in relation to the Counter-Reformation politics of the vernacular, showing that they participate in wider debates about national identity.

The Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing

On balance, however, the number of women found in the extended Perdita Project far outweighs those who remain lost to one or other of its digital forms. Perdita remains one of the seminal digital projects in early modern studies of the last twenty years, exemplifying how digital humanities can transform research by providing new ways of locating, understanding, analyzing, and disseminating textual cultures. Yet the contingency of the outcomes of the project also exemplify some of the problems attendant on these forms of publishing, connected to structural questions of infrastructure, funding, and storage that underpin their conditions of production. This raises the unsettling possibility that what has been found might be lost again, despite the continued importance of the Perdita Project’s discoveries for early women’s writing.

‘There Are Numbers of Very Choice Books’*: Book Ownership and the Circulation of Women’s Texts, 1680–98

Introducing an auction catalogue that lists more than 1000 works from the combined libraries of the Dutch bibliophiles Gaspar Fagel and Stephen Le Moyne, the London bookseller John Bullord pushes quantity and exclusivity: ‘numbers of very choice books’. This essay narrows the selection of choice books further than the trader intended by focusing on the female-authored texts that were advertised for sale in such catalogues in the late seventeenth century; what number of books written by women were held in early modern libraries? It emerges from our work on the RECIRC project (Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700), which runs until 2019.1 RECIRC is researching the impact made by women writers in the early modern period from the perspectives of reception and circulation, building on scholarly work of recent decades that has centred on recovery and analysis of women’s literary production. It participates in a shift away from recovery research toward interrogating women’s place in literary history via the assessment of textual transmission and audience. Our use of the concept of impact cannot be untouched (and is therefore informed) by the contemporary drive to measure academic scholarship in sometimes controversial ways. Elsewhere in this volume, Katherine Binhammer critiques ‘the neo-liberal university’s appetite for quantification and empirical research’. We cannot claim to be independent of the moment in which we research and write, and our project responds, in a historicist way, to the debates generated by that appetite. We argue that the quantitative moves advocated in this essay can generate new grand narratives as well as raising research questions that return us anew to the qualitative and particular.

‘One of the Finest Poems of that Nature I ever Read’: Quantitative Methodologies and the Reception of Early Modern Women’s Writing

In a letter to Charles Cotterell on 18 March 1662, Katherine Philips reported her reception of an elegy in French by Henriette de Coligny, relating that it was: ‘One of the finest Poems of that nature I ever read’. She identifies for particular praise the ideas and style of the French original: ‘the Thoughts are great and noble, and represent to the Life the vastness of her excellent Soul; the Language is pure, and hardly to be parallell’d’.1 Philips’s letter unfurls two layers of international reception: Cotterell’s receipt and endorsement of the poem as well as her own. This is a single case of the cross-channel circulation and critique of a woman poet. But we know that Coligny was widely read in other countries. Her Poesies (Paris, 1666) is listed in 10 per cent of the eighteenth-century Dutch library catalogues analysed by Alicia Montoya.2 The WomenWriters database (described below) yields further references: her authorial reputation is alluded to in one eighteenth-century Russian, one Dutch and five French sources; her Poesies in one eighteenth-century and one early twentieth-century source.3 This chapter proposes some preliminary methodologies for researching the reception of early modern women’s writing on a large scale, in order to open up a transnational perspective on its circulation and influence.