This book reveals that seventeenth-century women's very marginality to traditional institutions of church and state made them catalysts for imagining an expanded public culture beyond these institutions. Women authors such as the conduct writer Dorothy Leigh, the prophet Sarah Wight, and the poet Katherine Philips recast sites of private dialogue-the extended family, the religious coventicle, and the poetic coterie-as the bases of public debate that crossed national borders. By revealing women writers' key role in the heated controversies of this period, Gray offers a new reading of those...

By bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.

By bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.

This book reveals women writers' key role in constituting seventeenth-century public culture and, in doing so, offers a new reading of that culture as begun in intimate circles of private dialogue and extended along transnational networks of public debate.