The four works in this volume are the only known exclusively medical texts written by women during the Restoration. Their importance is denoted by their dramatic challenge to the generalisations once made about medical practice and female healers in this period. Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book was the first and only midwifery manual to be printed in English before 1700, and continued to be influential into the early eighteenth century. The principal focus of Elizabeth Cellier's To Dr.--- (1688) is the attempt to legitimate the notion of a female corporation of midwives through historical...

Almanacs were highly influential on popular opinion during the early modern period. They were the least expensive kinds of books and had a practical use as a calendar, literary miscellany, weather guide and advertising medium. The almanacs in this volume contribute to our understanding of women's participation in popular culture, astrology, medicine and prophecy. Sarah Jinner's almanacs for the years 1658, 1659 and 1664, and Mary Holden's almanacs for 1688 and 1689 show a conscious effort to distance themselves from other female religious prophets of the period by relying on the status of...

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, English society started to become preoccupied with education and how people acquired it. It is all the more surprising, then, that there should be relatively few early modern texts by Englishwomen devoted to the question of how one should learn. The four texts printed here are principally concerned with language and arithemetic. One of the reasons for the paucity of such writings is that many commentators viewed women's ability to write as a threat to social stability. The education of women was at best ad hoc. A few attended dame schools, and...

The four plays in this volume represent just a small fraction of the total output by early modern women dramatists. Other plays will appear in later volumes in the facsimile series devoted to individual authors. Marcelia (1660), The Perjur'd Husband (1700), She Ventures and He Wins (1695) and The Unnatural Mother (1698) were written at a point in time when women playwrights were becoming a significant force in the theatre. Many of these plays were first performed in key theatrical venues by well-established drama companies. The scant critical attention paid to these works since they were...

A form of courtesy literature, Mother's Advice Books were texts written by mothers to instruct their children in religious, educational, and occasionally wordly matters. The three texts included in this volume, Elizabeth Richardson's A Ladies Legacie to her Davghters, Susanna Bell's The Legacy of a Dying Mother To Her Mourning Children, and the unattributed The Mothers Blessing, offer interesting alternatives to the many published male views of the family from the period. Indeed, this volume features an appendix with two much shorter portions of predominantly male-authored texts: Mary...

Early modern men and women represented their lives very differently from twentieth-century autobiographers, sharing none of the current preoccupation with individuality and the unique self. The writers represented in this two-volume collection sought connections between particular events in their lives and the larger pattern of Christian salvation. The texts reproduced here are united in the way they interconnect personal experiences and feelings with scriptural passages in an attempt to understand daily life in spiritual terms. Almost all the women whose works appear in these volumes would...

Printed Writings 1641-1700, Series II, Part One consists of seven volumes of writings grouped by genre. The set comprises the following titles: Volume 1: Life Writings I Volume 2: Life Writings II Volume 3: Mother's Advice Books Volume 4: Writings on Medicine Volume 5: Educational and Vocational Books Volume 6: Almanacs Volume 7: Miscellaneous Plays