Unfamiliar today, The saints legacies... by Anne Fenwick (pseudonym Anne Phoenix) was a modest but unquestionable best seller. First published in 1629, it went through no fewer than thirteen editions between then and 1688. Most of the many thousands of Stuart readers would not have known that it was such a rare specimen: a work of godly practical divinity written by a woman. Anne Fenwick was a charismatic puritan, known for her zealous and radical non-conformist activities. She was arrested and tried before the Durham High Commission, after being targeted by the notoriously anti-puritan...

This volume includes two early seventeenth-century translations of Roman Catholic books by English recusant nuns - Catherine Greenbury (a Franciscan) and Mary Percy (a Benedictine). To practise their faith on the continent both these women fled Elizabethan England where Roman Catholic practice had been outlawed under pain of severe penalty (even death). Catherine Greenbury was born at York into a wealthy upper middle-class family but left England after the death of her husband, shortly after the birth of her daughter in or around 1616. After establishing herself in Brussels in a convent...

Elizabeth Evelinge, now firmly believed to have been the translator of The admirable life of the holy virgin S. Catharine of Bologna, entered the English Poor Clare monastery in Gravelines in 1620. After ongoing dissension at Gravelines, along with Catharine Bentley (originally believed to be the translator) she founded a new cloister at Aire. Evelinge served as abbess here for 25 years. Her 1621 translation of Catharine of Bologna's life and Spiritual weapons, with their exemplary advice about how to survive the temptations and conflicts of cloistered life, aimed at assisting the troubled...

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...