ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some issues surrounding the ownership of, and investment in, a selection of texts by early modern women. It explores connections between the way certain early modern aristocratic women allowed their texts to circulate while maintaining a particular kind of possession of them, and the possession and recirculation of them after they were first written. The chapter examines Anne Clifford and Margaret Cavendish as examples of early modern women who wrote in very different ways and in different genres but who were particularly concerned with the reception of their writing and the way that reception might be controlled. As an aristocratic woman writing prophecy, Davies was very different from nonaristocratic women, who seem to have viewed their prophetic visions as embodied within themselves, rather than in a text, so that they might have their work written out by someone else or at least be more willing to relinquish possession of the written text.
