Poems by a Sixteenth-Century Gentlewoman, Maid, and Servant New

This edition of writings published by Isabella Whitney and poems attributed to her by later editors is so important to women’s literary history that it is hard to believe it has not yet appeared. Whitney’s poetry is intelligent, perceptive, witty, vibrant, and direct; it will be widely read and enjoyed by students and more advanced scholars interested in early modern women’s literature, history, feminist and gender studies, as well as cultural studies more generally.
-Sara Jayne Steen, Former Professor of English and Dean of Letters and Sciences at Montana State University and President Emerita of Plymouth State University in New Hampshire

Isabella Whitney published two poetic miscellanies of secular poems: The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573), each of which includes her own work and a total of six poems by five different male authors across both publications. The present edition of her writings prints modernized texts of the complete miscellanies and also six poems attributed to Whitney by largely twentieth-century critics. These poems provide a rich portrait of sixteenth-century female courtship and its dangers, a unique view of class and gender in Whitney’s lifetime, and a portrait of London as a burgeoning market of practical goods and luxury items from foodstuffs to imported silk.

SHANNON MILLER is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Dean of the College of Humanities and the Arts at San José State University. She has authored two monographs, Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World (1998) and Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers (2008), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has also published numerous articles on early modern women writers from Mary Sidney (1561–1621) to Mary Astell (1666–1731).