Introduction

In her article “The Cultural Geographies of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Journeys across Spaces and Times,” Kate Chedgzoy calls for greater attention to an international and comparative approach to early modern women’s writing. The critic, she suggests, must become a traveler attuned to the interweaving of race, gender, status, religion, and especially “the full complexities of the locations the writing comes from, and how and why that locatedness matters.”2 Feminist theorists and anthropologists have already for some time reminded us that, as Sara Blair notes, “theory travels, knowledges are situated, subjects localized, communities and public spheres diasporic and globalized.”3 Literary critics must these days undertake journeys across spaces and times, mindful of the cultural geographies of the changing early modern world. Fresh ways of reading early modern women’s writing entail new maps that consider such issues as the interconnections between sites of women’s literary activity, women’s belonging and displacement in relation to colonial and imperial history, their bilingualism and multilingualism in crossing linguistic and national cultural and literary borders, their sense of identity mediated by local, regional, national, and transnational affiliations and conflicts, and the interrelations of English and Continental women’s writings.