Katherine Philips was a major seventeenth-century poet and playwright who became widely known for her innovative use of Donnean poetics to express passionate female friendship, her occasional verses on private friends and public figures, and her moral and political acuity. She had the mixed fortune of being enshrined in posthumous volumes that both celebrated and misrepresented her achievement. Fortunately recent research has clarified our understanding of who Philips was and how she conducted her literary career.

The title page of the 1651 continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which is made available in facsimile in this volume, designates its author as 'Mris A. W.' It is now the convention to attribute the volume to Anna Weamys. Little is known about the author; the only other information about her is suggested by the substantial number of commendatory verses which precede the text. Though details about her and the specific motivations for continuing Sidney's work remain tantalisingly absent, Anna Weamys's text is important for understanding the reception of Sidney by women readers, as...

The second of two volumes of 'Fiction of unknown or questionable authorship, 1641-1700,' this volume presents in facsimile two seventeenth-century novels, Alcander and Philocrates: Or, The Pleasures and Disquietudes of Marriage. A Novel. Written by a Young Lady (1696) and Peppa, or The Reward of Constant Love a novel: done out of French: with several songs set to musick for two voices / by a young-gentlewoman (1689). The first of these is an original, unattributed work written in English; the second is a translation from the French for which there is some evidence of a female translator. ...

Little is known of Anna Hume except as the translator of the first three of Petrach's Trionfi and also as the daughter of David Hume of Godscroft whose History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus she edited in one of its troubled versions. This volume reprints her translation of Petrarch's The Triumphs of Love - a series of six poems celebrating Petrarch's purported devotion to Laura. The poems tell a tale of Love's triumph over the poet, superseded by the triumph of chastity (in that Laura did not yield to Petrarch's love) which is in turn superseded by the triumph of death over Laura....