ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores relationships between writing and gender in the early modern period through a focus upon various genres deployed by women writers in the years 1558-1640. The field of early modern women's writing has a history and a well-defined if contested politics. This book explores a politics which might go beyond a gynocritical feminism, while recognising the importance and necessity of debating questions relating to women's subjectivity, lack of status under the law and exclusion from education. The organising principle of this book is the category of 'woman writer'. The majority of printed works by women are theological in nature, a category that ranges from books of mother's advice to translations of texts on the nature of the sacrament to partisan devotional poetry. Translation was an activity that lay at the heart of the Renaissance educational programme.
