Printed Writings 1641-1700: Series II, Part Two, consists of seven volumes of writings as follows: Volume 1: An Collins Volume 2: Alicia D'Anvers Volume 3: 'Eliza' Volume 4: Amey Hayward Volume 5: Anne Killigrew Volume 6: Elizabeth Major Volume 7: Elizabeth Singer [Rowe]

Elizabeth Major was inspired to write Honey on the Rod (1656) as a result of lameness brought on by a bout of fever in her mid-twenties. The experience left her fiercely devoted to her Christian religion, but also filled with indignation against the sins of nominal Christians. Honey on the Rod was written to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The work is in two parts. The first is a lengthy prose meditation in the form of a dialogue between a 'Soul' and 'Consolation'. The second is a sequence of poems on conventional Calvinistic themes, scourging common vices and praising the...

This facsimile edition reproduces the work titled Eliza's Babes which was first published in 1652. The volume comprises devotional and political verse and prose meditations. The poems cover a wide range of forms from verse epistles to poetic petitions, religious love lyrics to poems on earthly marriage, exultant poetic prayers to stern spiritual admonitions. The meditations are fine examples of the Puritan believer's plain-style response to various biblical texts, theological issues and political events. The text is historically and aesthetically unique. It reveals its anonymous author to be...

An Collins' Divine Songs and Meditacions were first printed in a small octavo volume in London in 1653. The only extant copy is presently held at The Huntington Library and it is, therefore, this copy that is reproduced in this facsimile edition. It is an important text because it is one of the earliest volumes of collected poems by an English woman in the seventeenth century. The poems are especially intriguing because of the glimpses they provide into the life and mind of a woman writer during this period and because of the social, political, historical and religious contexts in which they...

The Females Legacy is the only surviving work of Amey Howard about whom very little is known. While rarely political or even topical, The Females Legacy generally conforms to much of the same militantly Protestant ideology of the sort Harris spent his life advocating. The volume contains twenty-six devotional poems nearly all of which feature a male speaker. Some are 'meditations' in which the speaker considers the import of an Old or New Testament narrative. Others are 'dialogues' between speakers who grapple with a sudden realisation of their own sinful natures and a biblical figure who...

The three series of Printed Writings (1500-1640, 1641-1700, and 1701-1750) provide a comprehensive, if not entirely complete, collection of separately published writings by women. In reprinting these writings it is intended to remedy one of the major obstacles to the advancement of feminist criticism of the early modern period, namely the unavailability of the very texts upon which the field is based. The volumes in the facsimile library reproduce carefully chosen copies of these texts, incorporating a short introduction providing an overview of the life and work of a writer along with a...