This is a lively and erudite collection, unusual in an especially appealing way: not only are there essays about a range of queens and how they were represented in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but the book contains modern poetry and short plays about these same queens, allowing a multi-faceted way of understanding and appreciating them.

From the exemplary to the notorious to the obscure, this comprehensive and innovative encyclopedia showcases the worthy women of early modern England. Poets, princesses, or pirates, the women of power and agency found in these pages are indeed worth knowing, and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in early modern studies. Rather than using the conventional alphabetical format of the standard biographical encyclopedia, this volume is divided into categories of women. Since many women will fit in more than one category, each woman is placed in...