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GENDER, AUTHORSHIP,
AND EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S
COLLABORATION
Edited by
Patricia Pender
EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY

General Editors: Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield
Early Modern Literature in History
Series Editors
Cedric C. Brown
Department of English
University of Reading
Reading, UK
Andrew Hadfield
School of English
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
Within the period 1520–1740, this large, long-running series, with inter-
national representation discusses many kinds of writing, both within and
outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theo-
retical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest
in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive
cultures.
Editorial Board Members

Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford, UK
John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge, UK
Richard C. McCoy, Columbia University, USA
Jean Howard, Columbia University, USA
Adam Smyth, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield, UK
Michelle O’Callaghan, University of Reading, UK
Steven Zwicker, Washington University, USA
Katie Larson, University of Toronto, Canada
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14199
Patricia Pender
Editor
Gender, Authorship,
and Early
Modern Women’s
Collaboration
Editor
Patricia Pender
University of Newcastle
Callaghan, NSW, Australia
Early Modern Literature in History

ISBN 978-3-319-58776-9 ISBN 978-3-319-58777-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58777-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944552
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Andrea Abernathy Lunsford
teacher, scholar, mentor, friend
Acknowledgements
In many ways this book has been a pleasure to produce. The chance to
bring these scholars and these essays together has been an honour, and
I am grateful to all the contributors for the ways in which they engaged
with the volume and its concerns. In planning the collection, I was
motivated by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s provocative understand-
ing that “despite vigorous debates over theories and methods surround-
ing issues of subjectivity and authorship, ideologies of the individual and
the author have remained largely unchallenged in scholarly practice.”
The collection was conceived in response to their still-potent conten-
tion that academics who wish to “resist late capitalist tendencies of com-
modification will need not only to critique conventional understandings
of authorship but to enact alternatives as well.”1 The production of the
book was thus designed as an experiment in international collabora-
tion—in putting the theories of collaboration that are explored in the
volume into scholarly practice. I wanted to provide opportunities for the
scholars involved to not only discuss their essays online (which actually
didn’t happen—my understanding of Dropbox remains negligible) but
also be involved in face-to-face collaboration. Eight of the ten contribu-
tors were able to meet to discuss the collection and their work-in-pro-
gress at the 2016 Renaissance Society of America conference in Boston
and, assisted by some truly stupendous catering, the results were unusu-
ally stimulating and rewarding. I thank the Australian Research Council
for the Discovery Project grant which helped fund this event, along with
vii
viii Acknowledgements
the School of Humanities and Social Science and Faculty or Arts and
Education at the University of Newcastle.
I need to thank the members of the Early Modern Women’s Research
Network (EMWRN), Rosalind Smith, Paul Salzman, Kate Lilley, Sarah
C.E. Ross, Susan Wiseman, and Michelle O’Callaghan, who make pur-
suing this research so rewarding and enjoyable. Much of what I have
learnt about collaboration has come from our work and non-work time
together. Colleagues at the University of Newcastle, some of whom could
not be less interested in early modern concerns, also played their part in
keeping this ship afloat: for their gifts of sustenance and support I thank
Brooke Collins-Gearing, Dianne Osland, Keri Glastonbury, Caroline
Webb, Jane Shadbolt, and Rebecca Bierne. Much needed research assis-
tance and technological savvy was provided by EMWRN interns Amy
Dewar, Elizabeth McGrath, and Kelly Peihopa. Alexandra Day’s research
assistance has been simply invaluable, a fact recognized most obviously
but not only in our co-written introduction. My parents, Anne and
Gordon, my partner James warrant special mention for distracting me
with the real world and making it a good place to come back to.
My interest in collaboration was initially inspired by Andrea
Lunsford’s radical pedagogy and she remains my exemplar of generous,
ethical, and transformative scholarship. This book is dedicated to her.
Note
1. Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford. 2001. Collaboration and concepts of
authorship. PMLA 116 (2): 358–359.
Contents
1 Introduction: Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern

Women’s Collaboration 1
Patricia Pender and Alexandra Day
Part I Literary and Intertextual Co-labor
2 Katherine Parr, Henry VIII, and Royal

Literary Collaboration 23
Micheline White
3 Collaboration in the Parliamentary Speeches of Queen

Elizabeth I 47
Leah S. Marcus
4 Conflicted Collaboration in The Mothers Legacy 71

Rebecca Stark-Gendrano
5 Collaboration, Authorship, and Gender in the Paratexts

Accompanying Translations by Susan Du Verger
and Judith Man 95
Brenda M. Hosington
ix
x Contents
Part II Collective Contexts and Material Co-production
6 Literary Gifts: Performance and Collaboration in the

Arundel/Lumley Family Manuscripts 125
Alexandra Day
7 The Clerics and the Learned Lady: Intertextuality in the

Religious Writings of Lady Jane Grey 149
Louise Horton
8 Paratextual Marginalia, Early Modern Women,

and Collaboration 175
Rosalind Smith
9 “All Fell Not in Pharsalias Field”: Lucy Harington

Russell and the Historical Epic 201
Julie Crawford
10 “A Veray Patronesse”: Margaret Beaufort and the Early

English Printers 219
Patricia Pender
11 Afterword: “Her Book” and Early Modern Modes

of Collaboration 245
Margaret J.M. Ezell
Bibliography 259
Index 283
Notes on Contributors
Julie Crawford is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at

Columbia University. She has published widely on authors ranging from
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher to Anne Clifford and Margaret
Hoby, and on topics ranging from the history of reading to the his-
tory of sexuality. She is the author of a book about cheap print and the
English reformation entitled Marvelous Protestantism, and Mediatrix:
Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early Modern England. She
is currently completing a book called “Margaret Cavendish’s Political
Career.”
Alexandra Day is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Newcastle,
Australia. Her research project uses literary and materialist methods to
investigate early modern women’s writing and collaborative production.
She is also interested in both contemporary and historical performances
of early modern dramatic texts.
Margaret J. M. Ezell is Distinguished Professor of English and the
John and Sara Lindsey Chair of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University.
She is the author of Writing Women’s Literary History, Social Authorship
and the Advent of Print, and The Oxford English Literary History Volume
V: 1645–1714 The Later Seventeenth Century.
Louise Horton is a Ph.D. student at Birkbeck, University of London.
She is researching the material history of women’s writing and is cur-
rently working on collaborative practices within Katherine Willoughby’s
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
kinship and patronage network. She has previously published an essay on

gender and authorship in The Monument of Matrones.
Brenda M. Hosington, formerly Professor of Translation Studies
(Université de Montréal, Canada) and at present Research Associate
in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (University of Warwick,
UK), has published widely on medieval and Renaissance translation,
and particularly on women translators. She also specializes in Neo-Latin
translation and women’s writings and is the co-editor of Jane Weston.
Collected Works. Creator and principal editor of the Renaissance Cultural
Crossroads Online Catalogue of Translations in Britain 1473–1640, she
is currently co-editor of the forthcoming Cultural Crosscurrents in
Stuart and Commonwealth Britain. An Online Analytical Catalogue of
Translations, 1641–1660, and co-director of a funded research project on
translation and print.
Leah S. Marcus is Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt
University in the USA. She has had wide interests over a long career,
beginning with books titled Childhood and Cultural Despair, The Politics
of Mirth, Puzzling Shakespeare, and Unediting the Renaissance. She has
edited Shakespeare, John Webster, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, co-edited
with Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, and a volume of Autograph
Compositions and Foreign Language Originals, co-edited with Janel
Mueller. Her most recent book is How Shakespeare Became Colonial:
Editorial Tradition and the British Empire.
Patricia Pender is a Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at the
University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Early Modern
Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty and co-editor (with
Rosalind Smith) of Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing.
She is currently working on an Australian Research Council Discovery
Project on Early Modern Women and the Institutions of Authorship
(2014–2017).
Rosalind Smith is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Newcastle, Australia. She works on the politics of form and transmission
in the early modern period, and has published numerous book chap-
ters, articles, and books on early modern women’s writing, including
Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence
and, with Patricia Pender, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s
Writing. Her current research is as lead investigator on a collaborative,
Notes on Contributors xiii
Australian Research Council-funded project on early modern women and

complaint.
Rebecca Stark-Gendrano, Ph.D is the Assistant Director of the
Campion Institute and Office of Prestigious Fellowships at Fordham
University in New York, where she also lectures in the English
Department. She has published on book history, editorial theory, and
material culture. Her current project is a book examining the literary
responses of early modern editors, adaptors, and sequel-writers to works
perceived as incomplete.
Micheline White is Associate Professor in the College of the
Humanities and Department of English at Carleton University in
Canada. She is the editor of English Women, Religion and Textual
Production, 1500–1625 and Secondary Work on Early Modern Women
Writers: Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Lock. She has
published on women and religion in venues such as the Times Literary
Supplement, Renaissance Studies, ELR, Modern Philology, and Sixteenth-
Century Journal. Her work on Katherine Parr has been featured in inter-
views with the CBC’s Tapestry, Radio Canada’s les voies de retour, and the
Anglican Communion News Service.
List of Figures
Fig. 8.1 Poem in the hand of Elizabeth I, in a presentation copy

of Myles Coverdale, trans., The newe testamente (Antwerp:
G. Montanus, 1538?). © The British Library Board.
C.45.a.13. flyleaf 9 verso 177
Fig. 8.2 Poem in the hand of Anne Poyntz, in a presentation copy
of Myles Coverdale, trans., The newe testamente (Antwerp:
G. Montanus, 1538?). © The British Library Board.
C.45.a.13. flyleaf 10 recto 178
Fig. 8.3 Poem in the hand of Elizabeth I, with a hand-drawn
armillary sphere on the facing page, in a French psalter
(Psaultier de David) held in the Royal Library at Windsor
Castle. Royal Collection Trust/All Rights Reserved.
RCIN 1051956 179
Fig. 8.4 Ink drawing of Windsor Castle (coloured), in a presentation
copy of Myles Coverdale, trans., The newe testamente
(Antwerp: G. Montanus, 1538?). © The British
Library Board. C.45.a.13. flyleaf 3 recto 185
Fig. 8.5 Title page, Dante Alaghieri, LO’NFERNO E’L
PVRGATORIO E’L Paradiso. Venice: Speranza, 1545.
Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, Indiana 193
Fig. 9.1 Michael Drayton’s dedicatory epistle to Lucy Harington,
in Matilda The faire and chaste daughter of the Lord Robert
Fitzwater. The true glorie of the noble house of Sussex (London:
Printed by Iames Roberts, for N[icholas] L[ing] and
Iohn Busby, 1594), A3. Reproduced by permission of the
Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery 204
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 9.2 Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. Arthur Gorges (London, 1614),

p. 335. Reproduced by permission of the Henry E.
Huntington Library and Art Gallery 208
Fig. 10.1 Prologue to A full deuout and gostely treatyse of the imytacion
and folowynge the blessed lyfe of oure moste mercyfull sauyoure
criste, translated by William Atkinson (Books 1–3) and
Margaret Beaufort (Book 4). London: Rycharde Pynson,
1503. © The British Library Board. General Reference
Collection C.21.c.5 228
Fig. 10.2 Prologue to the Fourth Book, A full deuout and gostely
treatyse of the imytacion and folowynge the blessed lyfe of
oure moste mercyfull sauyoure criste, translated by Margaret
Beaufort. London: Rycharde Pynson, 1503. © The British
Library Board. General Reference Collection C.21.c.5 229
Fig. 10.3 Title page to a funeral sermon for King Henry VII:
This sermon folowynge was compyled [and] sayd in the
cathedrall chyrche of saynt Poule within ye cyte of London by the
ryght reuerende fader in god Iohn bysshop of Rochester, the body
beyinge present of the moost famouse prynce kynge Henry the.
Vij […], by John Fisher. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509.
© The British Library Board. General Reference
Collection G. 1201 233
Fig. 10.4 Title page to a sermon for Margaret Beaufort: Here after
foloweth a mornynge remembrau[n]ce had at the moneth
mynde of the noble prynces Margarete countesse of
Rychemonde [et] Darbye, by John Fisher. London:
Wynkyn de Worde, 1509. © The British Library Board.
General Reference Collection G. 1202 234
Fig. 11.1 Self-portrait of Esther Inglis, Octonaries upon the vanitie
and inconstancie of the world [manuscript], 1600/01 January
1 /writin by Esther Inglis. By permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library. MS V.a.91, leaf 1 verso 250
Fig. 11.2 Title page, “Her Book 1684,” Cookbook of Elizabeth Fowler
[manuscript]. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare
Library. MS V.a. 468, leaf 1 recto 252
Fig. 11.3 Elizabeth Cellier, Malice Defeated (1680). RB 72389,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 253
List of Tables
Table 7.1 Grey first lines comparison with Becon 157

Table 7.2 Grey and Becon similarities in “An Exhortation.” 158
Table 7.3 Grey and Becon similarities in “An Epistle.” 158
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Gender, Authorship,

and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration
Patricia Pender and Alexandra Day
Interested as it has been in recovering the work of neglected writers, early

modern women’s studies has developed an understandably equivocal rela-
tionship to conventional notions of authorship. In ways that we are by
now exhaustively familiar with, the dominance of the “Dead White Male”
in Renaissance literary scholarship has been seen—not without reason—as
having relegated his female contemporaries to comparative oblivion. In
response, however, as Danielle Clarke astutely notes, by placing women
writers at the center of focus, scholars of early modern women have often
sought to establish them as authors in canonical terms, even according to
the same criteria that caused their neglect in the first place.1 Introducing
“collaboration” into this context is something of a critical double-edged
sword. From one perspective, viewing early modern women’s writing as
collaborative threatens to threaten, if you will, the hard-won legitimacy
P. Pender (*) · A. Day

University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia
e-mail: patricia.j.pender@newcastle.edu.au
A. Day
e-mail: alexandra.day@uon.edu.au
© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Pender (ed.), Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern
Women’s Collaboration, Early Modern Literature in History,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58777-6_1
2 P. Pender and A. Day
of the women writers we have already recovered, at least in terms of

the conventional categories of originality, autonomy, and authority.
Acknowledging the role that John Bale played in bringing Anne Askew’s
Examinations to print, for instance, could undermine Askew’s claim to
authorship—if this is conceived of in autonomous terms.2 But recon-
sidering Mary Sidney Herbert’s role in editing, revising, and publishing
her brother Philip Sidney’s works can conversely position her in more
authorial roles than previous centuries of scholarship have been willing
to imagine.3 Instead of trying to simply shift, disaggregate, or adjudicate
between competing claims for male or female priority in the production
of early modern texts, this volume aims to investigate, in discrete though
sometimes surprisingly simpatico case studies, the role that gender has
played—and might continue to play—in understanding early modern col-
laboration and its consequences for women’s literary history.
In her thoroughgoing survey of “Early Modern Collaboration and
Theories of Authorship” for PMLA in 2001, Heather Hirschfeld claims
that “the appeal of the topic of collaborative work—and perhaps the inevi-
table danger of this appeal—is witnessed in the number and diversity of
studies deploying the term collaboration to discuss not a precise mode or
form of composition and publication but the general nature of literary pro-
duction and consumption.” She suggests that “[c]ollaboration and collabo-
rative authorship are terms now used to designate a range of interactions,
from the efforts of two writers working closely together to the activities of
printers, patrons, and readers in shaping the meaning and significance of
a text.”4 Nevertheless, Hirschfeld argues that “[s]uch a wide definition of
collaboration—as any kind of cooperative endeavor behind a literary per-
formance—opens the field or function of the author to a variety of other
roles: commendatory poet […], patron, translator.”5 Particularly pertinent
for this collection is her claim that “[t]he roles of patron and translator are
particularly important for assessing the early modern woman writer.”6
Hirschfeld’s double move here is instructive in its clarity.
Collaboration as a concept, she suggests, may have been over-enthusias-
tically applied in our analyses of canonical male writers (“If we are going
to use collaboration to refer to the host of activities that support literary
production,” she writes, “we will need a new term to designate shared
writing”),7 but the same concept should nevertheless be energetically
pursued in response to early modern women’s writing: “It is incumbent
1 INTRODUCTION … 3
on scholars who wish to reclaim lost or forgotten female voices,” she

argues, “to move beyond the dominant Romantic definition of the indi-
vidual author and to recognize, in the diversified processes of textual
production, alternative formulations or experiences of authorship.8 This
recalibration of scholarly standards is not new for the study of early mod-
ern women’s writing or indeed for difference-driven studies of literature
more broadly: in its ramifications it is not unlike Gayatri Spivak’s call for
strategic essentialism.9 On one level, Hirschfeld points to an asymmetry
between what we might think of as broad and narrow definitions of col-
laboration and advocates for a finer grain of specificity in deploying this
term. On another, she understands the efficacy of opening up “author-
ship” as widely as possible to writers and writing practices that have been
marginalized by canonical literary history.
Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration has
been produced at a juncture in early modern women’s studies marked
by increasing calls to investigate collaboration and authorship in produc-
tive tension, rather than (or in addition to) simple opposition. It is a call
that responds to the demands of the archives as much as from a theo-
retical orientation. For example, revising print-driven accounts of literary
history, Margaret Ezell argues strongly for the need to pay attention to
the social and material conditions of manuscript production in the early
modern period—a project she expressly theorizes as “a history of author-
ship.”10 And Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith, in their recent edited
collection, advocate “opening up” both “textuality” and “authorship” to
include processes of collective production.11 In response, this collection
examines some, but by no means all, of the many collaborative practices
that women undertook from the Late Middle Ages to the Restoration. In
doing so it aims to explore the benefits—and potential pitfalls—of devel-
oping our understanding of literary agency beyond capital “A” author-
ship, by considering the variety of roles women played in literary and
material collaboration. Collectively, therefore, the chapters in this volume
attempt to address two ongoing methodological concerns. How does
conceiving early modern texts as collaborations between authors, readers,
annotators, editors, printers, and other textual agents uphold or disrupt
currently dominant understandings of authorship? And how does recon-
ceiving women’s writing as collaborative illuminate some of the unre-
solved discontinuities and competing agenda in feminist literary history?
Canonical Early Modern Literary Collaboration

Under Pressure: A Tale of Two Jeffries
“Collaboration” owes its current prevalence in literary studies generally
to its development in feminist and queer theory, and in early modern lit-
erary studies in particular to its useful application to the London stage
as well as to book history.12 The publication of Jeffrey Masten’s Textual
Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance
Drama in 1997 marks a significant moment in the life of the concept,
both for Masten’s innovative approach and the book’s subsequent
acclaim and notoriety. Masten draws on a number of understandings of
collaboration to make a series of complex claims about literary collabora-
tion in early modern English drama, and indeed literature more broadly.
Following Michel Foucault, he argues that authorship is an institution
with a history. Arguing for a slightly earlier development than does
Foucault, Masten nominates the second half of the seventeenth century
as the time of its emergence because, he claims, it is at this time that the
word “anonymous” takes on its current meaning in relation to literary
texts: “The author’s emergence is marked by the notice of its absence.”13
He then asks how literary creation was understood and practiced prior to
the emergence of the (single) author function, proposing in answer a re-
theorization of collaboration that does not focus on the contributions of
discreet authors, but rather on collaboration as a joint practice—as crea-
tive fusion.14 Like Wayne Koestenbaum before him, Masten aligns col-
laboration with male homoerotics, but focuses in contrast on a particular
historical moment, one that “insistently figured writing as mutual imita-
tion, collaboration, and homoerotic exchange.”15 Unlike Koestenbaum,
Masten also engages with collaboration in a broad, material sense,
pointing to the frequency with which dramatic texts were revised, sup-
plemented with new material (prologues, epilogues, songs, and charac-
ters), changed in the course of theatrical production, and censored, all
of which render the subsequent construction of “authorial univocality”
problematic.16 Thus while Masten acknowledges that qualitatively differ-
ent collaborative partnerships would certainly have existed in the early
modern theatre, his more pressing point is that “collaborative texts pro-
duced before the emergence of authorship are of a kind different […]
from collaborations produced within the regime of the author.”17 In this
respect, Masten suggests that attempts at early modern attribution are
not only misguided but anachronistic—a view that puts him defiantly at
odds with scholars of attribution.
In his provocative 2005 article “What is a Co-Author?” Jeffrey Knapp
makes a spirited case against what he sees as the “current scholarly ortho-
doxy” that (to quote, as he does, Stephen Orgel), “most literature in the
period […] must be seen as basically collaborative in nature.”18 Taking
particular aim at the rapidly adopted scholarship on collaboration pro-
duced in the 1990s by scholars such as Orgel, Masten, and Richard
Helgerson, Knapp asserts that “an idealizing and therefore totaliz-
ing tendency in recent scholarship on authorship” has “overestimated”
the collaborative nature of literary production in the period.19 He sug-
gests that while, “[a]t the start, this scholarly insistence on the histori-
cal contingency of the author revolutionized the study of Renaissance
drama in several ways,” the narrative of authors supplanting collabora-
tors “has fostered a prejudicial image of the dramatic author as a funda-
mentally unethical creature, a high-handed misappropriator of communal
funds.”20 Knapp is Masten’s most vocal critic, contesting not only his
thesis in particular, but also more generally what he sees as the “new
orthodoxy” that views collaboration as a precursor to the seventeenth-
century emergence of authorship proper.21 Knapp’s concerns are mani-
fold, and range from accusations that Masten misrepresents (or at least
relies on incomplete) evidence, to critiques of an unblinking acceptance
of Foucault’s claims that authorship was something that developed only
in the seventeenth century. This leads to a misconception, according to
Knapp, of authorship as a theoretical rather than empirical concern.22
In some respects, Knapp’s critique does not sufficiently consider the
distinction, made both by Foucault and Masten, between the function
of literary authorship and authorship in general—an oversight that fuels
their conflicting views over the evidence. While Knapp cites numerous
examples from the sixteenth century of authors’ names on title pages,
this evidence does not directly speak to the argument he is trying to
counter, for Masten deploys the notion of anonymity to clarify a discur-
sive shift in the significance of the author. Nevertheless Knapp makes an
important point: to generalize that all Renaissance plays were collabora-
tions “is to erase the relative distinction of single from multiple authors
and with it the historically specific conception of collective playwriting
that recent scholars are aiming to recover.”23 In this respect Knapp’s cri-
tique is incisive: by framing collaboration as the norm in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth century, we do limit our ability to understand the
specificity of particular writing partnerships. As noted above, Masten

himself acknowledges in passing that there would have been qualitatively
different collaborative relationships within this pre-authorship period,
and herein may lie the solution to this theoretical impasse. This work of
refinement has not yet been undertaken by any of the principal contest-
ants in this debate, although we argue below that recent work in feminist
scholarship is beginning to do just this. Knapp’s point therefore remains
a strong one. It forms the kernel of the heated contestation around attri-
bution versus collaboration in current literary scholarship.
It is an enduring debate. In Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical
Study of Five Collaborative Plays (2002) Brian Vickers includes a tenden-
tiously titled appendix, “Abolishing the Author? Theory versus History,”
in which he writes: “[t]he assumption governing my research, and that
of all the scholars who have worked in attribution studies, is that writers
have distinct and individual styles, both at the conscious level […] and
at the unconscious.”24 Strongly critical of the Foucauldian conception of
the “author function” and dubious about the postmodern turn in gen-
eral, attribution studies seeks to prioritize “empirical results” over “theo-
retical positions” and to uncover the hand of the individual, historical
author. With twentieth- and twenty-first century technological advances,
the opportunities for collecting such “evidence” apparently increases.
“Individuality in authorship” argues digital humanities scholar Hugh
Craig, “re-emerges through computational stylistics in a new form: not
a mysterious, ultimately theological interiority but a pressure to create
a distinctive identity in language, part cultural and part biological.”25
According to Craig, computational stylistics “can endorse the dethroning
of the older hegemonic author-subject and at the same time challenge
the newer absolutism of those who deny authorial style ex cathedra any
role in the functioning of the text.”26 In the opposing camp, Gordon
McMullan, a vocal advocate for collaborative conceptions of authorship,
lays down the consequences of postmodern editorial theory in the fol-
lowing terms: “it is essential to acknowledge that collaboration is the par-
adigmatic mode of textual production. It is the condition towards which
all texts tend, even if (or as) they aspire to unity and autonomy.”27 In
this view all authorship should be viewed as collaborative: “it has begun
to be clear that collaboration—in its insistent ‘impurity’ and multiplic-
ity—is a much more appropriate model for textual production in general
than is ostensibly ‘solo’ writing.”28 Our current period of history, writes
McMullan, heralds “the renaissance of the collaborative text.”29
As these debates indicate, the concept of collaboration remains sub-

ject to strong disagreements, and perhaps nowhere more intensely than
in Shakespeare studies, where the struggle has most recently taken shape
around the representation of Shakespeare as “a literary poet-playwright”
as opposed to “a collaborative man of the theater.”30 A recent edition
of Shakespeare Studies edited by Patrick Cheney and dedicated to taking
stock of the authorship question under the suggestive title “The Return
of the Author,” places advocates from either side of this debate in con-
versation and so brings many of the issues discussed above to the fore.
As Cheney himself notes, however, the contributors are positioned either
“on one side of the divide or the other, whether individuation or col-
laboration, literary authorship or socially constructed theatricality. And no
one seems to be budging.”31 Clearly, this is not a “renaissance of the col-
laborative text” in a theoretically monolithic sense. No unified position
exists within the field, and the landscape is contoured by disagreement.32
Nevertheless collaboration seems an increasingly indispensable and ines-
capable topic in early modern studies and it is of particular significance
historically, theoretically, and politically for scholars of early modern
women writers.
Taxonomies of Early Modern Women’s Collaboration

When pioneering feminist scholars of the late 1970s and 1980s began to
“recover” women’s writing from the archives, they initiated what is still a
relatively new process of reassessing, and in some cases assessing for the
first time, works by early modern women writers.33 Given this context, the-
oretical issues of authorship have significant political, material, and practi-
cal consequences, since the status of the author is in some sense at stake.
This is not unfamiliar territory for feminist scholarship, where attempts
to meld High Theory with the political recovery of women writers can
seem to court contradiction. Danielle Clarke articulates the problem suc-
cinctly: “the assumption of female subjectivity as given and distinct on
the one hand, and the notion that the discourse of gender is just that on
the other, leaves us with two apparently irreconcilable positions. Either
women can be situated as historical subjects, or we interrogate gender in
such a way as to negate not only the specificity of the female subject, but
it’s very possibility.”34 Early modern women’s studies’ concerted interest
in gender—a category which demands the scholar take into account cul-
tural codes and norms outside the traditional liberal subject’s atomistic
individuality—means that it is predisposed to finding ways to describe the

impact and operation of social forces. This can mean a focus on illuminat-
ing the limiting and oppressive operations of patriarchy in early modern
society, as in more traditional feminist critique; attending to the creative
ways women operated within their social codes, as in revisionist accounts;
or, as in several recent studies, a blend of both approaches. Significantly,
the notion of collaboration is a useful tool in each of these cases.
In addition, and sometimes opposition, to the terminology adum-
brated in debates about canonical collaboration, early modern women’s
studies is developing its own taxonomy of collaborative categories. Thus,
in order to overcome the theoretical limits of the single author para-
digm, Susan Frye and Karen Robertson’s Maids and Mistresses, Cousins
and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England (1999) extends
beyond the purely literary, and uses the term “alliance” to designate
“deliberate associations.”35 The term “family discourse” is coined by
Marion Wynne-Davies to denote the ways women writers worked within
and furthered their families’ interests36; “the intellectual family” is taken
up by Sarah Gwyneth Ross as a means of investigating male–female liter-
ary collaborations37; and “amateur, social literary culture” is the focus of
Margaret Ezell’s historical materialist approach in Social Authorship and
the Advent of Print (1999)—a description designed to refute both the
notion of authorship as a “universal, transcendent phenomenon” and
materialist assumptions that the relationships between writers and read-
ers are “governed only by commercial exchange or professional advance-
ment.”38 Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith’s Material Cultures of Early
Modern Women’s Writing (2014) adopts Matt Cohen’s conception of
the “publication event” to foreground the “networks of exchange” that
mark early modern women’s texts as emphatically “choral.”39 Further
heuristics for examining early modern women’s collaboration are pro-
vided in individual case studies, for example: Susan Felch’s study of
Anne Lock’s political “circle”40; Micheline White’s study of two early
modern “power couples”41; Patricia Demers’ investigation of Mary and
Phillip Sidney’s “deferred collaboration” on the Psalms42; Mary Ellen
Lamb on Margaret Roper and Thomas More’s humanist collaboration43;
Pender on Anne Askew and John Bale’s “contested collaboration”44; and
Deborah Shuger on the “multilevel, and largely female, collaborative
authorship” of the Collett sisters at Little Gidding.45
In addition, the last five years have witnessed the publication of
two substantial studies of early modern women’s writing that impact
directly on issues of authorship and collaboration. Helen Smith’s metic-

ulously researched book history “Grossly Material Things”: Women and
Book Production in Early Modern England (2012) demonstrates that
women participated at every stage of book production in early modern
England. Her study “contributes to an understanding of book creation
as collaborative and contingent, and insists that all texts, not simply those
attributed to women, were marked and mediated by numerous agents,
rendering books more mobile and more complexly sexed than has been
allowed.”46 Smith’s theoretical approach considers material “things”
(objects and environments) not as simply reflecting or preserving
human-generated meaning, but as integral to meaning making in early
modern England.47 The human subject, in this account, is porous rather
than sovereign, and is positioned alongside objects in mutually affective
relations rather than in a hierarchical position over them. Such a perspec-
tive renders all human action collaborative in a very deep sense indeed.
Through an impressive collection of examples, Smith argues persuasively
not only that book production in early modern England was “collabora-
tive and contingent,” but that the various putatively menial or secondary
tasks associated with book production were understood as “co-labours
and granted a potent originary power” in their own time.48 We there-
fore need, according to Smith, “a more flexible language to elaborate the
dynamics of textual co-presence” in early modern literature.49
Julie Crawford’s Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production
in Early Modern England (2014) examines the roles that four fascinating
elite women (the Countess of Pembroke, Margaret Hoby, the Countess
of Bedford, and Mary Wroth) played in the literary and political machi-
nations of their time. Situating these women’s extensive textual engage-
ments (writing, reading, circulating, editing, and patronizing) in their
localized, national, and international contexts, Crawford’s research shows
the crucial roles such women played in the literary production and polit-
ico-religious activism of their networks: all (with the exception of Hoby)
used the production and circulation of literary works to support their
ascension to the role of key spokesperson for their Protestant network.50
Crawford, like Smith, intervenes in the traditional narrative of the history
of English letters as peopled by independent and individualized male
authors. Unlike Smith, she retains a notion of the individual agent in his-
tory, however hers is not the ahistorical subject of New Criticism, but
a thoroughly socialized iteration of a particular kind of individual agent
(i.e., the “mediatrix”). As such, “communities, coteries and alliances” are
integral to her project. “Larger than the ‘little commonwealth’ of mar-

riage, and smaller than the body politic of the nation,” Crawford states,
“these structures of affiliation were at once heuristics of interpretation,
and materially real; indeed it is precisely this duality that makes them
such interesting subjects of study.”51
In spite of their divergent approaches, both of these signal contribu-
tions to the field open up new avenues of inquiry that this volume is eager
to address. “Grossly Material Things” and Mediatrix are deliberately dif-
ferent projects: Smith’s is a work of book history that ventures into liter-
ary criticism very rarely, while Crawford’s project is presented as “equal
parts literary history and literary criticism.”52 Alongside the terminology
of early modern women’s collaborative practices described above, these
works illuminate the interpretive possibilities that become available when
we take early modern women’s collaborations seriously. Collectively these
taxonomies provide an indication of the variety of ways feminist scholars
have and continue to utilize collaboration to different ends.
The chapters that follow divide into two categories: “Literary
and Intertextual Co-Labor” and “Collective Contexts and Material
Co-Production,” with the real interest, however, lying in the ways these
approaches are bridged within and across chapters. This productive con-
fluence of approaches is epitomized in Micheline White’s pioneering
investigation of the “royal co-authorship” of Henry VIII and Katherine
Parr, particularly in the construction of Parr’s Psalms or Prayers taken out
of Holy Scripture and the couple’s royal proclamations. White painstak-
ingly reconstructs the collective contexts within which these texts were
produced, and in doing so paints a startling new picture of the mate-
rial co-production of key Henrician texts. Arguably, however, it is in
bringing to light the unexpectedly extensive literary and intertextual
co-labor of Henry and Katherine and in foregrounding Katherine’s pre-
viously unacknowledged contribution to Henrician policy and propa-
ganda that White’s chapter makes its most incisive contribution. The
following chapter also examines sovereign co-authorship, this time
though the example of Elizabeth I’s speeches. Leah S. Marcus revisits
her groundbreaking editorial work on Elizabeth’s corpus to foreground
the variety of textual processes involved in the material co-production of
these often famous texts, including oral performance, audience report-
age, revisions, emendation, editing (both authorial and otherwise), and
circulation in manuscript and print. Marcus effectively demolishes any
lingering notion of Elizabeth’s sole authorship of the speeches and yet
she resists any vacuous conflation of the individual agencies involved.

The different types of collaborations she thereby reveals are historicized
and differentiated.
Rebecca Stark-Gendrano’s chapter is similarly concerned with textual
emendation and editing—in the form of Thomas Goad’s posthumous
publication of Elizabeth Jocelin’s Mother’s Legacy. Stark-Gendrano’s
detailed consideration of differences between the original manuscript
and later printed versions of this text contributes an unusually extended
example to the study of male editing of female-authored works. Her
analysis of the intertextual frame of reference within which Goad worked
moreover provides valuable fresh insights into his editorial rationale. The
final chapter in Part I is Brenda M. Hosington’s examination of the para-
texts accompanying two lesser-studied early modern women translators,
Suzanne du Verger and Judith Man. Translation represents a particularly
fertile field for the study of collaboration, and Hosington extends her
important work in this area by considering the textual apparatus through
which these women’s works were presented to the public. Dedicatory
addresses emerge from this analysis as important sites of meta-textual
commentary on gendered authorship and collaborative relationships.
The first chapter in Part II of the volume, “Collective Contexts and
Material Co-Production,” is Alexandra Day’s archival investigation of
manuscripts associated with the sixteenth-century Lumley/Fitzalan
schoolroom. Most of these texts are translations, and in analyzing their
dedications to Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, this chapter provides
a useful complement and counterpart to the previous one. Day exam-
ines the literary and intertextual co-labours that inform these works
through the lens of the literary gift, in which the materiality of the book
is invoked in the performance of a surprising variety of collaborative
connections. Louise Horton’s chapter makes a highly original contribu-
tion to the scholarship on Lady Jane Grey. Excavating the complex cir-
cuits of transmission through which the texts attributed to Grey came
to be published—and revised—in print, Horton reveals a range of extra-
authorial agents who are likely to have participated in their material co-
production. As with Marcus’s analysis of Elizabeth’s speeches, Horton’s
research poses a decided challenge to ideas about sole authorship, and
speaks directly to the conundrum, broached at the beginning of this
introduction, about the potentially volatile consequences of bringing
concepts of collaboration to bear on the canon of early modern women’s
writing.
If Horton’s chapter poses one kind of challenge to traditional under-

standings of this canon, Rosalind Smith’s chapter on early modern wom-
en’s marginalia poses another, in this instance by introducing writing not
previously considered part of this corpus. Analyzing relatively neglected
examples of Elizabeth I’s marginalia that circulated in devotional works
prior to her accession to the throne, Smith mounts a persuasive case that
the princess’s marginal annotations are unexpectedly revealing testaments
to the strategic intertextual, interpersonal, and political negotiations she
undertook in the last years of Mary’s reign. The final two chapters in the
volume address more directly a recurring interest in the collection with
the issue of patronage. Julie Crawford expands in her chapter on her
demonstrated understanding of Lucy, Countess of Bedford’s poetic and
political machinations as “Mediatrix” by considering printed appeals to
Bedford’s patronage as versions of “virtual” collaboration, focusing spe-
cifically on instances of dedications to historical epics. Patricia Pender’s
chapter extends the volume’s interest in royal textual production by
examining Lady Margaret Beaufort’s patronage, focusing on her collabo-
ration with the first English printers, as represented in paratexts to books
they produced together. Pushing against the traditional demarcations of
the early modern period, Pender argues that Henry VIII’s grandmother
provided an important precedent for the collaborative relationships
established by the royal Tudor women who followed her, including sev-
eral of the writers discussed in previous chapters.
As the preceding synopsis should make clear, Gender, Authorship
and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration does not prioritize one way
of viewing collaboration over another: approaches are blended in dif-
ferent proportions in individual chapters. Indeed, the collection as a
whole deliberately sets out to place in implicit dialogue more “literary”
and more “material” analyses of this topic, with the aim of creating a
space for future studies to uncover new points of contact and illumina-
tion, or—equally importantly—points of departure and disagreement.
Collectively, however, the collection does ask that we consider the variety
of different ways that the concept of collaboration has been—and con-
tinues to be—deployed in literary scholarship, and it advocates for the
application of a kind of “due diligence” analysis of the historical, ideo-
logical, and practical consequences of this term when it is deployed in
early modern women’s studies. The chapters in this volume are brought
together to further that process.
Notes
1. Danielle Clarke, “Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early
Modern Women’s Texts,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual
Studies 15 (2002): 187–209.
2. See Elaine Beilin, “Anne Askew’s Self-Portrait in the Examinations,”
in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and
Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Hannay (Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1985), 77–91; and “Anne Askew’s Dialogue
with Authority,” in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and
Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and
France, eds Marie-Rose Logan and Peter Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1991), 313–322. See also Kimberley Anne Coles,
Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 17–44; and Patricia Pender,
“Reading Bale Reading Anne Askew: Contested Collaboration in the
Examinations,” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and
American History and Literature 73, no. 3 (2010): 507–522.
3. See Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production
in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
30–85; Coles, Religion, Reform, 75–112; Patricia Demers, “‘Warpe’ and
‘Webb’ in the Sidney Psalms: The ‘Coupled Worke’ of the Countess of
Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney,” in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples,
Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, eds Marjorie Stone and
Judith Thompson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006),
41–58; Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric
of Modesty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 92–121.
4. Heather Hirschfeld, “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of
Authorship,” PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 3 (May 2001): 609–622, 610.
5. Ibid., 614–615.
6. Ibid., 615.
7. Ibid., 620.
8. Ibid., 615.
9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing
Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds Ranajit Guha and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 13.
10. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 12.
11. “Introduction: Early Modern Women’s Material Texts: Production,
Transmission and Reception,” in Material Cultures of Early Modern
Women’s Writing, eds Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2–3.
12. For groundbreaking work in each see Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede,
Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990); Wayne
Koestenbuam, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New
York: Routledge, 1989); Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist
in Shakespeare’s Time 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1971); Stephen Orgel, “What Is a Text?” in Staging the Renaissance:
Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, eds David Scott
Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), 83–87;
Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus: Proceedings of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 111, no. 3 (1982): 65–83.
13. Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and
Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 12.
14. Ibid., 7.
15. Ibid., 9.
16. Ibid., 14–15.
17. Ibid., 21.
18. Jeffrey Knapp, “What Is a Co-Author?” Representations 89 (2005): 6,
quoting Stephen Orgel, “What Is a Text?” in Staging the Renaissance:
Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, eds David Scott
Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), 87.
19. Ibid., 9, 1.
20. Ibid., 1, 2.
21. Ibid., 1.
22. Ibid., 7.
23. Ibid., 7.
24. Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five
Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 506.
25. Hugh Craig, “Style, Statistics, and New Models of Authorship,” Early
Modern Literary Studies 15, no. 1 (2009): para. 41.
26. Craig, “Style, Statistics,” para. 41.
27. Gordon McMullan, “‘Our Whole Life Is Like a Play’: Collaboration
and the Problem of Editing,” Textus 9 (1996): 437–460, 454 (original
italics).
28. Ibid., 438.
29. Ibid., 459.
30. Patrick Cheney, “Introduction,” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 19–25,

25.
31. Ibid., 20.
32. It may be that the battleground rhetoric is somewhat overblown. Even
Gordon McMullan, in his more recent book, acknowledges certain co-
dependencies between his own work and that of attributionists (see
Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of
Death, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 243),
while attributionists may be more willing to countenance the role of cul-
ture in textual production than initially appears. Craig, for example, ulti-
mately explains authorship as “not a mysterious, ultimately theological
interiority but a pressure to create a distinctive identity in language, part
cultural and part biological” (see “Style, Statistics,” para 41).
33. See, for example Betty Travitsky, “The New Mother of the English
Renaissance (1489–1659): A Descriptive Catalogue,” Bulletin of Research
in the Humanities 82 (1979): 63–89; Margaret Hannay, ed., Silent
but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers
of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985);
Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Margaret Ezell, The
Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
34. Danielle Clarke, “Introduction” in “This Double Voice”: Gendered Writing
in Early Modern England, eds Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke
(Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), 1–15, 10.
35. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, “Preface” in Maids and Mistresses,
Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England,
eds Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), vii.
36. Marion Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the
English Renaissance: Relative Values (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 1.
37. Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in
Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010), 2.
38. Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 13, 12.
39. Pender and Smith, “Introduction,” 2; Matt Cohen, The Networked
Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
40. Susan M. Felch, “‘Noble Gentlewomen Famous for Their Learning’: The

London Circle of Anne Vaughan Lock,” ANQ 16.2 (2003): 14–19.
41. Micheline White, “Power Couples and Women Writers in Elizabethan
England: The Public Voices of Dorcas and Richard Martin and Anne and
Hugh Dowriche,” in Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation
in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, eds Rosalyn Voaden and Diane
Wolfthal (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, 2005), 119–138.
42. Demers, “‘Warpe’ and ‘Webb’ in the Sidney Psalms,” 41–58.
43. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Margaret Roper, the Humanist Political Project” in
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700 Vol. 1,
ed. Elaine Beilin (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009, first published 1994),
47–72.
44. Pender, “Reading Bale Reading Anne Askew,” 507–522.
45. Debora Shuger, “Laudian Feminism and the Household Republic of
Little Gidding,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44.1
(2014): 69–94.
46. Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in
Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6.
47. Ibid., 10–12.
48. Ibid., 6, 52.
49. Ibid., 52.
50. Crawford, Mediatrix, 72–73; 129–143; 202–203.
51. Ibid., 6.
52. Ibid., 29.
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of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, edited by David Scott Kastan and Peter
Stallybrass, 83–87. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Pender, Patricia. Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
———. “Reading Bale Reading Anne Askew: Contested Collaboration in
the Examinations.” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and
American History and Literature 73, no. 3 (2010): 507–522.
Pender, Patricia and Rosalind Smith. “Introduction: Early Modern Women’s
Material Texts: Production, Transmission and Reception.” In Material
Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Patricia Pender and
Rosalind Smith, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy
and England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Shuger, Debora. “Laudian Feminism and the Household Republic of Little
Gidding.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44, no.1 (2014):
69–94.
Smith, Helen. “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early
Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.”
In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, 3–32. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Travitsky, Betty. “The New Mother of the English Renaissance (1489–1659):
A Descriptive Catalogue.” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 82 (1979):
63–89.
Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative
Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
White, Micheline. “Power Couples and Women Writers in Elizabethan
England: The Public Voices of Dorcas and Richard Martin and Anne and
Hugh Dowriche.” In Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation
in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, edited by Rosalyn Voaden and
Diane Wolfthal, 119–138. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 2005.
Wynne-Davies, Marion. Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English
Renaissance: Relative Values. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Authors’ Biography
Patricia Pender is a Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at the University
of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Early Modern Women’s Writing
and the Rhetoric of Modesty and co-editor (with Rosalind Smith) of Material
Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing. She is currently working on an
Australian Research Council Discovery Project on Early Modern Women and the
Institutions of Authorship (2014–2017).
Alexandra Day is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Her research project uses literary and materialist methods to investigate early
modern women’s writing and collaborative production. She is also interested in
both contemporary and historical performances of early modern dramatic texts.
PART I
Literary and Intertextual Co-labor

CHAPTER 2
Katherine Parr, Henry VIII, and Royal

Literary Collaboration
Micheline White
The past fifty years have witnessed a series of critical re-assessments of the
concept of the “author” in western literary culture. As Patricia Pender and
Alexandra Day outline in the introduction, one of the many effects of such
a re-assessment has been a new interest in the concept of textual collabora-
tion. In the 1990s, scholars like Arthur Marotti, Wendy Wall, and Jeffrey
Masten argued that early modern authorship was often collaborative, a
fact obscured by a post-Enlightenment view of a text as the product of a
single authorial consciousness, and since then many scholars have turned
to examine various forms of textual collaborations, including co-author-
ship, team-authorship, coterie verse-exchanges, patronage, translation,
editing, paratextual contributions, posthumous publication, and printing.1
Surveying the body of work on early modern literary collaboration, Helen
Smith has recently noted that most of it has focused on men—men who
collaborated in the production of dramatic works or verse manuscripts.2
The phenomenon of mixed-sex literary collaboration has received less
attention, she observes, and has been taken up primarily by feminists stud-
ying texts that are attributed to women but were introduced or edited by
M. White (*)
Department of English, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
e-mail: micheline.white@carleton.ca
© The Author(s) 2017 23

P. Pender (ed.), Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern
Women’s Collaboration, Early Modern Literature in History,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58777-6_2
24 M. White
men, or, more recently, by those examining how women contributed to

the production of books attributed to men.3 Some kinds of male-female
literary collaborations have proved challenging, however, for scholars who
seek to excavate lost female voices, to produce critical editions of female-
authored texts, and to analyze the processes through which individual
women became “authors.”4 As Smith notes, it has been difficult to read
male editorial interventions in women’s texts as “collaborations” rather
than censorship or manipulation.5 And yet as Thomas Freeman, Wall, and
Pender have argued, it is more productive to abandon the futile quest to
recover unmediated female voices in many early modern texts and to dis-
cuss collaborative texts on their own terms.6 Such an approach asks us to
think more carefully about the ways in which certain kinds of texts were
generated by more than one person, and it opens our eyes to the ways in
which women engaged with the textual possibilities afforded by a literary
system so different from our own.
This chapter contributes to our understanding of mixed-sex liter-
ary collaboration by examining one book—Psalms or Prayers taken out
of Holy Scripture—a work that appeared without any authorial ascrip-
tions, but that is now understood to be a translation by Katherine
Parr.7 To explain: on April 18, 1544 Thomas Berthelet, Henry VIII’s
printer, issued Psalmi seu Precationes ex variis scripturae locis collectae
(RSTC 2994), an unattributed octavo edition of a work by Bishop John
Fisher printed around 1525 in Cologne and in 1544 in Antwerp. The
Psalmi seu Precationes consists of fifteen collage Psalms and two Psalm
paraphrases, and it concludes with a prayer for Henry VIII, “Precatio
Pro Rege.” On April 25, Berthelet printed an English translation of
the same work, Psalms or Prayers taken out of Holy Scripture (RSTC
3001.7). This book contains the same Psalms, an English version of “A
Prayer for the King,” and another unattributed prayer, “A Prayer for
Men to Say Entering into Battle.” Tiny sextodecimo editions contain a
third prayer, “For forgiveness of sins.”8 As Kimberly Coles and Brenda
Hosington have noted, the anonymous Psalms or Prayers was a best-
seller, being printed at least twenty three times between 1544 and 1613
(RSTC 3001.7–3013.5).9 The Psalms or Prayers has always had a close,
but complicated, relationship to Katherine Parr’s Prayers or Meditations,
a book that contains “A Prayer for the King” and “A Prayer for Men
to Say Entering into Battle,” and that was printed by Berthelet in June
1545 (RSTC 4818). Berthelet (and others) printed octavo and sextodec-
imo versions of both books under Henry, Edward, and Mary; William
Copland produced typographically similar editions in 1559; and from
2 KATHERINE PARR, HENRY VIII, AND ROYAL LITERARY COLLABORATION 25
1568 until 1613, the Psalms or Prayers was printed with the Prayers or
Meditations (and the Litany) as part of one volume in which the texts
were re-named The King’s Psalms and The Queen’s Prayers.10
I will begin this chapter by charting the ways in which Katherine Parr
has been associated (or disassociated) with the Psalms or Prayers over the
centuries, and has been variously identified as its composer, patron, or
translator. Building on the work of Susan James, Kimberly Coles, and
Janel Mueller, I will then argue that while Parr was indeed a skilled trans-
lator in her own right, the Psalms or Prayers is perhaps best seen as an
instance of a particular kind of “royal collaboration,” one in which she
(a queen) was writing for, writing with, and writing as Henry VIII as
he waged war against the Scots, the French, and the Turks. Specifically,
I will offer new evidence pertaining to some of Parr’s politically sensi-
tive sources, and I will argue that a detailed consideration of the con-
tents of the volume suggests that Henry’s military agenda was the force
driving the volume, and that Parr must have been engaged in extensive
consultations with Henry as she translated each of its parts. Further, I
will argue that a close reading of the rhetorical mode of the book enables
us to see that Parr was not only working for and with Henry, but was
also authorized to write as Henry through the use of a royal, devotional
“I.” I will conclude by briefly positing that the deluxe gift-copies of the
Psalms or Prayers perfectly encapsulate the degree to which the book was
an instance of royal collaboration: the books are obviously issued and
authorized by the king, but they were produced by the queen and dis-
tributed by her at court.11
The kind of collaboration described here is not one involving co-
authors (as we often find in Renaissance drama) nor one involving an
author and an explicit editor or patron. As J. Christopher Warner, Kevin
Sharpe, and others have noted, anonymous texts produced by the Tudor
crown often involved a particular kind of collaboration, one in which
royal servants wrote for the king and voiced his desires (with varying
degrees of consultation), but did not attach their names to the texts.12
The texts themselves appear only as works authorized and, in a sense,
“authored,” by the king.13 This is a mode of authorship that is par-
ticularly challenging for contemporary scholars because it is impossible
to determine how involved the monarch was in any particular text (or
part of the text), and because it is so far removed from our own sense
of authorial ownership and accountability. In spite of these difficul-
ties, the recognition that Parr produced such a work for Henry in the
spring of 1544 is valuable in two regards. First, it sheds new light on the
26 M. White
production of late Henrician propaganda. Parr’s book offers an unusu-

ally intimate royal devotional “I,” one that, I suggest, sought to reassure
Henry’s people that he was acting as an exemplary wartime monarch
and that served to inspire obedience to the royal voice that was issu-
ing commands in wartime Proclamations. Second, it offers new insight
into Parr’s position as queen. The fact that Henry allowed or asked Parr
(rather than a male courtier) to produce such an important piece of mili-
tary propaganda indicates that she was at the heart of his military strat-
egy before he set sail for France, and it provides a textual precedent for
his decision to appoint her as Regent in July 1544.
Recovering Katherine Parr as the Translator

of the Psalms or Prayers
It is well-known that many male and female writers published their

works anonymously in the early modern period, for a variety of reasons
pertaining to sex, class, religion, and politics. For feminists, the recov-
ery of anonymous books by female authors has been important, not only
for establishing a significant body of female-authored texts, but also for
understanding how women negotiated the concept of authorship as they
composed, circulated, and published their work. But the recovery of
anonymous female-authored works is laborious and difficult, and the his-
torical trajectory of the Psalms or Prayers is a case in point. It was printed
without ascription from 1544 until 1618, but in 1721, church historian
John Strype asserted that it had been written by Parr. Strype had observed
that Nicholas Udall had praised Parr in 1545 for having “set forth”
“Psalms and contemplative meditations” that were “read” by “many” in
a dedication to his translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrase on the Gospel of
Luke.14 Strype concluded that the “Psalms” mentioned by Udall could be
matched with a volume of Psalm prayers that were bound together with a
copy of Parr’s Prayers or Meditations from 1545.15 His detailed descrip-
tion of the contents of these “Psalms” makes it clear that he was working
with a copy of Berthelet’s Psalms or Prayers, but he does not give the full
title of the book or provide a date. He was also clearly unaware of the
Latin 1544 Psalmi, and so he asserted that the Psalms had been “made
in Imitation of David’s Psalms” by Parr, and he described the book as
“Her Psalms.”16 Strype’s claim that the Psalms were “made [by Parr]
in Imitation of David’s Psalms” was repeated by several eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century authors: Strype was quoted by George Ballard (1752);
in the Biographium Faemineum (1766); by Horace Walpole (1806); and

by James Anderson (1855).17 However, not all early biographers fol-
lowed Strype in attributing a volume of Psalms to Parr and some authors
referred only vaguely to “Psalms” with no indication of what they might
have entailed. In 1821 Mary Hays wrote that Parr “composed” “prayers,
psalms, and other devotional pieces”; in 1861, Jane Williams made no
mention of any Psalms; and in 1920 Myra Reynolds stated only that Parr
had written “many psalms, prayers, and meditations.”18
A turning point in the study of Parr and the Psalms or Prayers occurred
in 1965 with James McConica’s influential study of Parr’s support of
Erasmian Humanism. McConica devoted only two pages to Parr’s own
published writing, and he made no mention of Strype’s hypothesis about
Parr’s Psalms, even though he openly challenged Strype’s claim that Parr
was the translator of a work by Savonarola.19 The effect of McConica’s
decision to ignore Strype’s hypothesis about Parr’s “imitation” of David’s
Psalms was profound. Historians like William P. Haugaard and Anthony
Martienssen followed his lead, and so when feminist scholars turned to
the Short-Title Catalogue and to historians like McConica in the 1980s,
the idea that Parr had a connection to a volume of Psalms had com-
pletely disappeared from view.20 So, for example, there is no mention of
Parr’s Psalms in the valuable “Recent Studies in Women Writers of Tudor
England” essays printed in English Literary Renaissance in 1984, in 1990,
and in 1994.21 John King made no mention of any Psalms in his impor-
tant study of Parr’s piety and patronage published in 1985.22
In 1999, Susan E. James gave new life to the Psalms or Prayers, offer-
ing another way of understanding its relation to Parr. Crucially, James
realized (as Strype did not) that the Psalms or Prayers was a transla-
tion of the Psalmi seu Precationes printed only a week earlier, and that
Bishop John Fisher was named as the author of the Psalmi in an edi-
tion printed around 1525.23 James also assembled multiple pieces of
evidence to argue that Parr was the translator of Fisher’s Psalmi and
probably the author of the short concluding prayers.24 For example,
she noted that many copies of the Psalms or Prayers were bound with
Parr’s Prayers or Meditations; she listed numerous verbal echoes between
the collage Psalms and Parr’s other works; and she pointed out that
Udall had praised Parr for “diverse most godly Psalms and medita-
tions of your own penning and setting forth” in his 1548 dedication to
Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Acts.25 Importantly, James also drew attention
to the fact that Parr had paid for fourteen deluxe copies of “books of
28 M. White
the psalm prayers” on May 1 and 4, 1544, books that were described as
“gorgeously bound and gilt on the leather,” and for a copy of “Psalm
prayers” in 1547.26 James surmised that gender restrictions are what led
Parr to issue her translation anonymously.
James’s argument was largely accepted by literary scholars, and the
Psalms or Prayers re-entered scholarly discussions in relation to Parr.27
In 2008 Kimberly Coles discussed the possibility that Parr had trans-
lated the book and argued that it contributed to a larger crown-spon-
sored program of reformed, vernacular devotion.28 Psalms or Prayers was
attributed to Parr in “Renaissance Cultural Crossroads,” a database of
translations compiled by Brenda Hosington in 2010, and it was briefly
discussed in two recent studies of female translators.29 Most importantly,
Janel Mueller printed a modernized version of the text in Katherine
Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence (2011).30 In her introduc-
tion, Mueller added new details to the evidence assembled by James and
strengthened the argument that Parr was the translator of the text. She
observed that Udall had referred to Parr’s “Psalms” a third time in his
1548 dedication to Erasmus’s Paraphrase on the Gospel of John writing:
“England can never be able to render thanks sufficient” to Parr “for com-
posing and setting forth many godly Psalms and divers other contempla-
tive meditations.”31 Mueller also described two copies of the first 1544
printing, noting that they have hand-coloured images of Henry VIII’s
royal arms on the verso of the title pages, and that the copy preserved at
Elton Hall contains two marginal notes made by Henry VIII as well as
an “affectionate couplet” from Henry to Parr.32 In her extensive notes,
Mueller prints all of Fisher’s Latin text and identifies his Biblical sources,
thereby enabling readers to study Parr’s linguistic dexterity and creativity
for the first time. For both James and Mueller, the addition of the Psalms
or Prayers to Parr’s literary “oeuvre” is vital because it provides us with
new evidence of her engagement with Humanist writing, of her evolving
religious views, of her literary skills, of her response to court culture, and
of her ability to forge a public voice in print.
Writing for and with Henry: Parr’s Translations

of Fisher, Witzel, and Erasmus
If James and Mueller have successfully focused our attention on Parr as

a literary translator in her own right, they have also acknowledged that
her project was aided or enabled by powerful men. James, for instance,
proposed that George Day, Bishop of Chichester, Parr’s almoner and a

former chaplain to Fisher, had probably suggested that she translate the
Psalmi.33 James, Coles, and Mueller also have also drawn attention to
the relationship between Parr, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and the
king.34 Although Coles remained uncertain about whether Parr was
the patron or the translator of the Psalms or Prayers, she stressed that
the Psalms or Prayers, Parr’s Prayers and Meditations, and Cranmer’s
new wartime Litany were all printed by the king’s printer between 1544
and 1545 (and were later bound together), and she argued that they
all worked together to promote new official forms of vernacular devo-
tion. In particular, Coles astutely emphasized that Parr’s books were
“crown” publications printed by Thomas Berthelet, and that they were
made possible by the king. Henry, she stressed, was at war and wanted
to revise English forms of supplication and prayer, and she argues that
whether Parr was the translator or the patron of the Psalms or Prayers,
“[w]hat is certain is that she was a participant in the plan to revise devo-
tional practice—and, further, that her husband granted her power in this
domain.”35 Noting Henry’s inscription in one extant copy of the Psalms,
Coles states that Henry was “undoubtedly interested” in the book,
but “whether Henry’s attention was motivated by pride in his wife’s
achievement or by his own political initiatives is impossible to say.”36
In the discussion that follows, I will build on Coles’s observations
and will focus in greater detail on the relationship between Henry, Parr,
the Psalms or Prayers, and the war. Specifically, I will argue that by tak-
ing a closer look at the content and the politically sensitive sources of
the Psalms or Prayers, we can begin to see that the book was driven by
Henry’s military agenda and that Parr must have been involved in dis-
cussions with him (and maybe others) about the precise make-up of the
volume. For example, although Strype described the Psalm prayers as
generic “pious devotions,” when they are placed in the context of 1544,
it becomes clear that they were designed to enable the nation to pre-
pare for war through repentance and supplication and are thus perfectly
aligned with the short, obviously wartime prayers that conclude the vol-
ume.37 We must remember, here, that Henry and Cranmer repeatedly
explained that nationwide repentance and imprecation (cursing one’s
enemies) were essential for England’s military success. In response to the
Turkish incursion into Hungary in July 1543, for example, Henry and
Cranmer reminded the English people that it was necessary to “remem-
ber our sins,” and “confess[…] ourselves unto God,” and in June
30 M. White
1544 Henry noted that during a time of “cruel wars” it was imperative
that his people call upon God who alone could “help and remedy” the
situation and who would never “forsake” those who faithfully call upon
him for help.38 Fisher’s Psalmi were thus ideal texts to reprint and dis-
seminate: in the first four Psalms, the speaker repents and asks God for
mercy; in the fifth through seventh Psalms the speaker asks for wisdom
and strength; and in the ninth through seventeenth Psalms the speaker
asks God to destroy his enemies and offers thanksgiving for his triumph.
That Parr’s book was designed to assist Henry’s war effort is supported
by the fact that both the Latin and English volumes were printed on days
of military significance: the Latin book was printed on April 18, the day
that the English fleet set sail to raze Edinburgh to the ground, and the
English translation was printed on April 25, a Rogation day of liturgical
Processions that would have focused on the war.
If the book’s contents enable us to understand why Parr took the time
to translate such a lengthy book in the spring of 1544, it is important
to recognize that its pieces were all derived from politically sensitive
sources, and that the volume is, in some ways, an unlikely assemblage.
Indeed, recognizing the sensitive nature of all the sources is crucial to
my argument because it allows us to infer that Henry and Parr must have
engaged in serious political discussions as the materials were assembled,
translated, and edited. Although it is impossible to determine the pre-
cise nature of the conversations between Henry and Parr, it is impor-
tant to take into account the sorts of issues that the sources raised, and
to recognize that this book must have been thought-through from a
variety of political perspectives. For example, the decision to obtain
a copy of Bishop John Fisher’s Psalmi and to reprint and translate it
must have required some political and diplomatic calculus. Not surpris-
ingly, the title was adjusted so that the Psalm prayers are described as
being collected from “Scripture” without any reference to Fisher’s lit-
erary labour: the Psalmi seu Precationes. D. Jo. Episcopi Roffensis in the
1525 Cologne edition became Psalmi seu Precationes ex variis scripturae
locis collectae, translated as Psalms or Prayers taken out of Holy Scripture.
But even then, there must have been some discussion of its origins, for
Fisher was still a persona non grata in 1544 and Henry surely did not
want to be seen co-opting the words of a “traitor” to bolster his war
effort. As Richard Rex has shown, Henry had executed Fisher in 1535
for refusing to take the oath of supremacy, and had then mounted a “sys-
tematic campaign” to “eradicate his memory at home and to blacken it
abroad.”39 For instance, Henry had recalled his sermons in 1536; had
suppressed the memory of him at St. John’s College, Cambridge; and
had Richard Morison denounce him internationally in print as recently
as 1537.40 Fisher’s name was not returned to Psalmi in England until
much later, the first extant example being one printed in 1568 (RSTC
2995a). Henry must have assumed that many readers would not recog-
nize the 1544 Psalmi as Fisher’s, and he obviously decided that Fisher’s
text was timely and valuable enough to reprint in spite of its origins.41
He may also have hoped that the resuscitation of Fisher’s work would
please his military ally, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who (as the
nephew of Catharine of Aragon) had been sympathetic to Fisher’s refusal
to accept Henry’s divorce or the Royal Supremacy. Certainly, Henry val-
ued the Latin Psalmi as well as the English translation and a copy was
placed in his Royal Library (Westminster inventory number 1427).42
Henry and Parr must also have thought carefully about the deci-
sion to circulate the “Precatio Pro Rege”/“Prayer for the King.” These
prayers were innovative, being the first crown-sponsored non-liturgical
prayers for the monarch to be printed in England, and they must have
attracted considerable attention. Although Mueller attributed the Latin
prayer to Fisher in 2011, I have recently demonstrated that it was a
revision of a Latin prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor, “Precatio Pro
Romano Imperatore,” printed in a prayer book by the German Catholic
Reformer Georg Witzel in 1541.43 It is unclear who shortened Witzel’s
prayer into a Latin prayer for Henry, but Parr may have been involved
for she translated and adapted another one of Witzel’s prayers.44 Henry
and Parr’s decision to import and adapt a Catholic prayer for the Holy
Roman Emperor is a curious one that can be read in several ways.
Witzel became a Lutheran in 1525, but he returned to the Catholic
church in 1533 and spent many years working on bi-confessional pro-
jects that attempted to heal the schism within Christianity.45 Witzel’s
rejection of Lutheranism along with his openness to liturgical reform
would have appealed to Henry in 1544. Witzel was apparently at the
Diet of Speyer (February–June, 1544) when Charles V secured the sup-
port of the German Princes for his military alliance with Henry, and it
may have been there that one of Henry’s emissaries became acquainted
with Witzel’s prayer.46 Katherine and Henry certainly had the Emperor
on their minds at this time of heavy diplomatic and military negotia-
tions, and it is also possible that Witzel’s book was brought to them in
London: the Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys reported to the
Another random document with
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correspondent’s; nor that without help from children who, though not
mine, have been cared for as if they were.
Secondly; my correspondent tells me that my duty is to stay at home,

instead of dating from places which are a dream of delight to her,
and which, therefore, she concludes, must be a reality of delight to
me.
She will know better after reading this extract from [15]my last year’s
diary; (worth copying, at any rate, for other persons interested in
republican Italy). “Florence, 20th September, 1874.—Tour virtually
ended for this year. I leave Florence to-day, thankfully, it being now a
place of torment day and night for all loving, decent, or industrious
people; for every face one meets is full of hatred and cruelty; and the
corner of every house is foul; and no thoughts can be thought in it,
peacefully, in street, or cloister, or house, any more. And the last
verses I read, of my morning’s readings, are Esdras II., xv. 16, 17 ↗️:
‘For there shall be sedition among men, and invading one another;
they shall not regard their kings nor princes, and the course of their
actions shall stand in their power. A man shall desire to go into the
city, and shall not be able.’ ”
What is said here of Florence is now equally true of every great city
of France or Italy; and my correspondent will be perhaps contented
with me when she knows that only last Sunday I was debating with a
very dear friend whether I might now be justified in indulging my
indolence and cowardice by staying at home among my plants and
minerals, and forsaking the study of Italian art for ever. My friend
would fain have it so; and my correspondent shall tell me her
opinion, after she knows—and I will see that she has an opportunity
of knowing—what work I have done in Florence, and propose to do,
if I can be brave enough.
Thirdly; my correspondent doubts the sincerity of my [16]abuse of
railroads because she suspects I use them. I do so constantly, my
dear lady; few men more. I use everything that comes within reach of
me. If the devil were standing at my side at this moment, I should
endeavour to make some use of him as a local black. The wisdom of
life is in preventing all the evil we can; and using what is inevitable,
to the best purpose. I use my sicknesses, for the work I despise in
health; my enemies, for study of the philosophy of benediction and
malediction; and railroads, for whatever I find of help in them—
looking always hopefully forward to the day when their embankments
will be ploughed down again, like the camps of Rome, into our
English fields. But I am perfectly ready even to construct a railroad,
when I think one necessary; and in the opening chapter of ‘Munera
Pulveris’ my correspondent will find many proper uses for steam
machinery specified. What is required of the members of St.
George’s Company is, not that they should never travel by railroads,
nor that they should abjure machinery; but that they should never
travel unnecessarily, or in wanton haste; and that they should never
do with a machine what can be done with hands and arms, while
hands and arms are idle.
Lastly, my correspondent feels it unjust to be required to make

clothes, while she is occupied in the rearing of those who will require
them.
Admitting (though the admission is one for which I do not say that I
am prepared) that it is the patriotic [17]duty of every married couple to
have as large a family as possible, it is not from the happy
Penelopes of such households that I ask—or should think of asking
—the labour of the loom. I simply require that when women belong to
the St. George’s Company they should do a certain portion of useful
work with their hands, if otherwise their said fair hands would be idle;
and if on those terms I find sufficient clothing cannot be produced, I
will use factories for them,—only moved by water, not steam.
My answer, as thus given, is, it seems to me, sufficient; and I can

farther add to its force by assuring my correspondent that I shall
never ask any member of St. George’s Company to do more, in
relation to his fortune and condition, than I have already done
myself. Nevertheless, it will be found by any reader who will take the
trouble of reference, that in recent letters I have again and again
intimated the probable necessity, before the movement could be
fairly set on foot, of more energetic action and example, towards
which both my thoughts and circumstances seem gradually leading
me; and, in that case, I shall trustfully look to the friends who accuse
me of cowardice in doing too little, for defence against the, I believe,
too probable imputations impending from others, of folly in doing too
much. [19]
[Contents]
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
I. I hope my kind correspondent will pardon my publication of the

following letter, which gives account of an exemplary life, and puts
questions which many desire to have answered.
“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I do not know if you have forgotten me, for it
is a long time since I wrote to you; but you wrote so kindly to me
before, that I venture to bring myself before you again, more
especially as you write to me (among others) every month, and I
want to answer something in these letters.
“I do answer your letters (somewhat combatively) every month in my
mind, but all these months I have been waiting for an hour of
sufficient strength and leisure, and have found it now for the first
time. A family of eleven children, through a year of much illness, and
the birth of another child in May, have not left me much strength for
pleasure, such as this is.
“Now a little while ago, you asked reproachfully of Englishwomen in

general, why none of them had joined St. George’s Company. I can
only answer for myself, and I have these reasons.
“First. Being situated as I am, and as doubtless many others are

more or less, I cannot join it. In my actions I am subject first to my
husband, and then to my family. Any one who is entirely free cannot
judge how impossible it is to make inelastic and remote rules apply
to all the ever-varying and incalculable changes and accidents and
personalities of life. They are a [20]disturbing element to us
visionaries, which I have been forced to acknowledge and submit to,
but which you have not. Having so many to consider and consult, it
is all I can do to get through the day’s work; I am obliged to take
things as I find them, and do the best I can, in haste; and I might
constantly be breaking rules, and not able to help it, and indeed I
should not have time to think about it. I do not want to be hampered
more than I am. I am not straitened for money; but most people with
families are so more or less, and this is another element of difficulty.
“Secondly. Although I do not want to be further bound by rules, I

believe that as regards principles I am a member of St. George’s
Company already; and I do not like to make any further profession
which would seem to imply a renunciation of the former errors of my
way, and the beginning of a new life. I have never been conscious of
any other motives or course of life than those which you advocate;
and my children and all around me do not know me in any other
light; and I find a gradual and unconscious conformation to them
growing up round me, though I have no sort of teaching faculty. I
cannot tell how much of them I owe to you, for some of your writings
which fell in my way when I was very young made a deep impression
on me, and I grew up embued with their spirit; but certainly I cannot
now profess it for the first time.
“Thirdly (and this is wherein I fear to offend you), I will join St.
George’s Company whenever you join it yourself. Please pardon me
for saying that I appear to be more a member of it than you are. My
life is strictly bound and ruled, and within those lines I live. Above all
things, you urge our duties to the land, the common earth of our
country. It seems to me that the first duty any one owes to his
country is to live in it. I go further, and maintain that every one is
bound to have a home, and live in that. You speak of the duty of
acquiring, if possible, [21]and cultivating, the smallest piece of
ground. But, (forgive the question,) where is your house and your
garden? I know you have got places, but you do not stay there.
Almost every month you date from some new place, a dream of
delight to me; and all the time I am stopping at home, labouring to
improve the place I live at, to keep the lives entrusted to me, and to
bring forth other lives in the agony and peril of my own. And when I
read your reproaches, and see where they date from, I feel as a
soldier freezing in the trenches before Sebastopol might feel at
receiving orders from a General who was dining at his club in
London. If you would come and see me in May, I could show you as
pretty a little garden of the spade as any you ever saw, made on the
site of an old rubbish heap, where seven tiny pairs of hands and feet
have worked like fairies. Have you got a better one to show me? For
the rest of my garden I cannot boast; because out-of-door work or
pleasure is entirely forbidden me by the state of my health.
“Again, I agree with you in your dislike of railroads, but I suspect you
use them, and sometimes go on them. I never do. I obey these laws
and others, with whatever inconvenience or privation they may
involve; but you do not; and that makes me revolt when you scold
us.
“Again, I cannot, as you suggest, grow, spin, and weave the linen for
myself and family. I have enough to do to get the clothes made. If
you would establish factories where we could get pure woven cotton,
linen, and woollen, I would gladly buy them there; and that would be
a fair division of labour. It is not fair that the more one does, the more
should be required of one.
“You see you are like a clergyman in the pulpit in your books: you
can scold the congregation, and they cannot answer; behold the
congregation begins to reply; and I only hope you will forgive me.
“Believe me,
“Yours very truly.”
[22]
II. It chances, I see, while I print my challenge to the Bishop of my

University, that its neighbouring clergymen are busy in expressing to
him their thanks and compliments. The following address is worth
preserving. I take it from the ‘Morning Post’ of December 16, and
beneath it have placed an article from the ‘Telegraph’ of the following
day, describing the results of clerical and episcopal teaching of an
orthodox nature in Liverpool, as distinguished from ‘Doctor’
Colenso’s teaching in Africa.
“The Inhibition of Bishop Colenso.—The clergy of the rural
deanery of Witney, Oxford, numbering thirty-four, together with the
rural dean (the Rev. F. M. Cunningham), have subscribed their
names to the following circular, which has been forwarded to the
Bishop of Oxford:—‘To the Right Rev. Father in God, John Fielder,
by Divine permission Lord Bishop of Oxford.—We, the undersigned
clergy of the rural deanery of Witney, in your Lordship’s diocese, beg
respectfully to offer to your Lordship our cordial sympathy under the
painful circumstances in which you have been placed by the
invitation to the Right Rev. Dr. Colenso to preach in one of the
churches in your diocese. Your firm and spontaneous refusal to
permit Dr. Colenso to preach will be thankfully accepted by all
consistent members of our Church as a protest much needed in
these times against the teaching of one who has grievously offended
many consciences, and has attempted as far as in him lay to injure
the “faith which was delivered to the saints.” 4 That your Lordship
may long be spared to defend the truth, is the prayer of your
Lordship’s obedient and attached clergy.’ ”
III. “Something startling in the way of wickedness is needed to

astonish men who, like our Judges, see and hear the periodical
[23]crop of crime gathered in at Assizes; yet in two great cities of
England, on Tuesday, expressions of amazement, shame, and
disgust fell from the seat of Justice. At York, Mr. Justice Denman was
driven to utter a burst of just indignation at the conduct of certain
people in his court, who grinned and tittered while a witness in a
disgraceful case was reluctantly repeating some indelicate language.
‘Good God!’ exclaimed his Lordship, ‘is this a Christian country? Let
us at least have decency in courts of justice. One does not come to
be amused by filth which one is obliged to extract in cases that
defame the land.’ At Liverpool a sterner declaration of judicial anger
was made, with even stronger cause. Two cases of revolting
barbarism were tried by Mr. Justice Mellor—one of savage violence
towards a man, ending in murder; the other of outrage upon a
woman, so unspeakably shameful and horrible that the difficulty is
how to convey the facts without offending public decency. In the first,
a gang of men at Liverpool set upon a porter named Richard
Morgan, who was in the company of his wife and brother, and
because he did not instantly give them sixpence to buy beer they
kicked him completely across the street, a distance of thirty feet, with
such ferocity, in spite of all the efforts made to save him by the wife
and brother, that the poor man was dead when he was taken up.
And during this cruel and cowardly scene the crowd of bystanders
not only did not attempt to rescue the victim, but hounded on his
murderers, and actually held back the agonized wife and the brave
brother from pursuing the homicidal wretches. Three of them were
placed at the bar on trial for their lives, and convicted; nor would we
intervene with one word in their favour, though that word might save
their vile necks. This case might appear bad enough to call forth the
utmost wrath of Justice; but the second, heard at the same time and
place, was yet more hideous. A tramp-woman, drunk, and wet to the
skin with rain, was going along a road near Burnley, in company with
a navvy, [24]who by-and-by left her helpless at a gate. Two out of a
party of young colliers coming from work found her lying there, and
they led her into a field. They then sent a boy named Slater to fetch
the remaining eight of their band, and, having thus gathered many
spectators, two of them certainly, and others of the number in all
probability, outraged the hapless creature, leaving her after this
infernal treatment in such plight that next day she was found lying
dead in the field. The two in question—Durham, aged twenty, and
Shepherd, aged sixteen—were arraigned for murder; but that charge
was found difficult to make good, and the minor indictment for rape
was alone pressed against them. Of the facts there was little or no
doubt; and it may well be thought that in stating them we have
accomplished the saddest portion of our duty to the public.
“But no! to those who have learned how to measure human nature,
we think what followed will appear the more horrible portion of the
trial—if more horrible could be. With a strange want of insight, the
advocate for these young men called up the companions of their
atrocity to swear—what does the public expect?—to swear that they
did not think the tramp woman was ill-used, nor that what was done
was wrong. Witness after witness, present at the time, calmly
deposed to his personal view of the transaction in words like those of
William Bracewell, a collier, aged nineteen. Between this precious
specimen of our young British working man and the Bench, the
following interchange of questions and answers passed. ‘You did not
think there was anything wrong in it?’—‘No.’ ‘Do you mean to tell me
that you did not think there was anything wrong in outraging a
drunken woman?’—‘She never said nothing.’ ‘You repeat you think
there was nothing wrong—that there was no harm in a lot of fellows
outraging a drunken woman: is that your view of the thing?’—‘Yes.’
And, in reply to further questions by Mr. Cottingham, this fellow
Bracewell said he [25]only ‘thought the matter a bit of fun. None of
them interfered to protect the woman.’ Then the boy Slater, who was
sent to bring up the laggards, was asked what he thought of his
errand. Like the others, ‘he hadn’t seen anything very wrong in it.’ At
this point the Judge broke forth, in accents which may well ring
through England. His Lordship indignantly exclaimed: ‘I want to know
how it is possible in a Christian country like this that there should be
such a state of feeling, even among boys of thirteen, sixteen, and
eighteen years of age. It is outrageous. If there are missionaries
wanted to the heathen, there are heathens in England who require
teaching a great deal more than those abroad.’ (Murmurs of ‘Hear
hear,’ from the jury-box, and applause in court.) His Lordship
continued: ‘Silence! It is quite shocking to hear boys of this age
come up and say these things.’ How, indeed, is it possible? that is
the question which staggers one. Murder there will be—
manslaughter, rape, burglary, theft, are all unfortunately recurring
and common crimes in every community. Nothing in the supposed
nature of ‘Englishmen’ can be expected to make our assizes maiden,
and our gaol deliveries blank. But there was thought to be something
in the blood of the race which would somehow serve to keep us from
seeing a Liverpool crowd side with a horde of murderers against
their victim, or a gang of Lancashire lads making a ring to see a
woman outraged to death. A hundred cases nowadays tell us to
discard that idle belief; if it ever was true, it is true no longer. The
most brutal, the most cowardly, the most pitiless, the most barbarous
deeds done in the world, are being perpetrated by the lower classes
of the English people—once held to be by their birth, however lowly,
generous, brave, merciful, and civilized. In all the pages of Dr.
Livingstone’s experience among the negroes of Africa, there is no
single instance approaching this Liverpool story, in savagery of mind
and [26]body, in bestiality of heart and act. Nay, we wrong the lower
animals by using that last word: the foulest among the beasts which
perish is clean, the most ferocious gentle, matched with these
Lancashire pitmen, who make sport of the shame and slaying of a
woman, and blaspheme nature in their deeds, without even any plea
whatever to excuse their cruelty.”
The clergy may vainly exclaim against being made responsible for
this state of things. They, and chiefly their Bishops, are wholly
responsible for it; nay, are efficiently the causes of it, preaching a
false gospel for hire. But, putting all questions of false or true
gospels aside, suppose that they only obeyed St. Paul’s plain order
in 1st Corinthians v. 11 ↗️. Let them determine as distinctly what
covetousness and extortion are in the rich, as what drunkenness is,
in the poor. Let them refuse, themselves, and order their clergy to
refuse, to go out to dine with such persons; and still more positively
to allow such persons to sup at God’s table. And they would soon
know what fighting wolves meant; and something more of their own
pastoral duty than they learned in that Consecration Service, where
they proceeded to follow the example of the Apostles in Prayer, but
carefully left out the Fasting. [27]
[Contents]
Accounts.
The following Subscriptions have come in since I made out the list in
the December number; but that list is still incomplete, as I cannot be
sure of some of the numbers till I have seen my Brantwood note-
book:—
£ s. d.
31. “In Memoriam” 5 0 0
32. (The tenth of a tenth) 1 1 0
33. Gift 20 0 0
34. An Old Member of the Working Men’s College-Gift 5 0 0
35. H. T. S 9 0 0
36. 5 0 0
7. Second Donation 5 0 0
15. 5 0 0
,, ,,
£ 55 1 0
[29]
Seven thousand to St. George’s Company; five, for establishment of Mastership

1
in Drawing in the Oxford Schools; two, and more, in the series of drawings
placed in those schools to secure their efficiency. ↑
Lamentations v. 13 ↗️. ↑
2
As distinguished, that is to say, from other members of the Church. All are
3
priests, as all are kings; but the kingly function exists apart: the priestly, not
so. The subject is examined at some length, and with a clearness [9]which I cannot
mend, in my old pamphlet on the ‘Construction of Sheepfolds,’ which I will
presently reprint. See also Letter XIII., in ‘Time and Tide.’ ↑
I append a specimen of the conduct of the Saints to whom our English
4
clergymen have delivered the Faith. ↑
[Contents]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER L.
A friend, in whose judgment I greatly trust, remonstrated sorrowfully

with me, the other day, on the desultory character of Fors; and
pleaded with me for the writing of an arranged book instead.
But he might as well plead with a birch-tree growing out of a crag, to

arrange its boughs beforehand. The winds and floods will arrange
them according to their wild liking; all that the tree has to do, or can
do, is to grow gaily, if it may be; sadly, if gaiety be impossible; and let
the black jags and scars rend the rose-white of its trunk where Fors
shall choose.
But I can well conceive how irritating it must be to any one chancing
to take special interest in any one part of my subject—the life of
Scott for instance,—to find me, or lose me, wandering away from it
for a year or two; and sending roots into new ground in every
direction: or (for my friend taxed me with this graver error also)
needlessly re-rooting myself in the old.
And, all the while, some kindly expectant people are [30]waiting for
‘details of my plan.’ In the presentment of which, this main difficulty
still lets me; that, if I told them, or tried to help them definitely to
conceive, the ultimate things I aim at, they would at once throw the
book down as hopelessly Utopian; but if I tell them the immediate
things I aim at, they will refuse to do those instantly possible things,
because inconsistent with the present vile general system. For
instance—I take (see Letter V ↗️.) Wordsworth’s single line,
“We live by admiration, hope, and love,”

for my literal guide, in all education. My final object, with every child
born on St. George’s estates, will be to teach it what to admire, what
to hope for, and what to love: but how far do you suppose the steps
necessary to such an ultimate aim are immediately consistent with
what Messrs. Huxley and Co. call ‘Secular education’? Or with what
either the Bishop of Oxford, or Mr. Spurgeon, would call ‘Religious
education’?
What to admire, or wonder at! Do you expect a child to wonder at—

being taught that two and two make four—(though if only its masters
had the sense to teach that, honestly, it would be something)—or at
the number of copies of nasty novels and false news a steam-engine
can print for its reading?
What to hope? Yes, my secular friends—What? That it shall be the

richest shopman in the street; and be buried with black feathers
enough over its coffin? [31]
What to love—Yes, my ecclesiastical friends, and who is its

neighbour, think you? Will you meet these three demands of mine
with your three Rs, or your catechism?
And how would I meet them myself? Simply by never, so far as I

could help it, letting a child read what is not worth reading, or see
what is not worth seeing; and by making it live a life which, whether it
will or no, shall enforce honourable hope of continuing long in the
land—whether of men or God.
And who is to say what is worth reading, or worth seeing? sneer the
Republican mob. Yes, gentlemen, you who never knew a good thing
from a bad, in all your lives, may well ask that!
Let us try, however, in such a simple thing as a child’s book.

Yesterday, in the course of my walk, I went into a shepherd-farmer’s
cottage, to wish whoever might be in the house a happy new year.
His wife was at home, of course; and his little daughter, Agnes, nine
years old; both as good as gold, in their way.
The cottage is nearly a model of those which I shall expect the

tenants of St. George’s Company, and its active members, to live in;
—the entire building, parlour, and kitchen, (in this case one, but not
necessarily so,) bedrooms and all, about the size of an average
dining-room in Grosvenor Place or Park Lane. The conversation
naturally turning to Christmas doings and havings,—and I, as an
author, of course inquiring whether Agnes had [32]any new books,
Agnes brought me her library—consisting chiefly in a good pound’s
weight of the literature which cheap printing enables the pious to
make Christmas presents of for a penny. A full pound, or it might be,
a pound and a half, of this instruction, full of beautiful sentiments,
woodcuts, and music. More woodcuts in the first two ounces of it I
took up, than I ever had. to study in the first twelve years of my life.
Splendid woodcuts, too, in the best Kensington style, and rigidly on
the principles of high, and commercially remunerative, art, taught by
Messrs. Redgrave, Cole, and Company.
Somehow, none of these seem to have interested little Agnes, or

been of the least good to her. Her pound and a half of the best of the
modern pious and picturesque is (being of course originally
boardless) now a crumpled and variously doubled-up heap, brought
down in a handful, or lapful, rather; most of the former insides of the
pamphlets being now the outsides; and every form of dog’s ear,
puppy’s ear, cat’s ear, kitten’s ear, rat’s ear, and mouse’s ear,
developed by the contortions of weary fingers at the corners of their
didactic and evangelically sibylline leaves. I ask if I may borrow one
to take home and read. Agnes is delighted; but undergoes no such
pang of care as a like request would have inflicted on my boyish
mind, and needed generous stifling of;—nay, had I asked to borrow
the whole heap, I am not sure whether Agnes’s first tacit sensation
would not have been one of deliverance.
Being very fond of pretty little girls, (not, by any [33]means, excluding
pretty—tall ones,) I choose, for my own reading, a pamphlet 1 which
has a picture of a beautiful little girl with long hair, lying very ill in bed,
with her mother putting up her forefinger at her brother, who is
crying, with a large tear on the side of his nose; and a legend
beneath: ‘Harry told his mother the whole story.’ The pamphlet has
been doubled up by Agnes right through the middle of the beautiful
little girl’s face, and no less remorselessly through the very middle of
the body of the ‘Duckling Astray,’ charmingly drawn by Mr. Harrison
Weir on the opposite leaf. But my little Agnes knows so much more
about real ducklings than the artist does, that her severity in this
case is not to be wondered at.
I carry my Children’s Prize penny’s-worth home to Brantwood, full of

curiosity to know “the whole story.” I find that this religious work is
edited by a Master of Arts—no less—and that two more woodcuts of
the most finished order are given to Harry’s story,—representing
Harry and the pretty little girl, (I suppose so, at least; but, alas, now
with her back turned to me,—the cuts came cheaper so,) dressed in
the extreme of fashion, down to her boots,—first running with Harry,
in snow, after a carriage, and then reclining against Harry’s shoulder
in a snowstorm.
I arrange my candles for small print, and proceed to read this richly
illustrated story.
Harry and his sister were at school together, it appears, [34]at

Salisbury; and their father’s carriage was sent, in a snowy day, to
bring them home for the holidays. They are to be at home by five;
and their mother has invited a children’s party at seven. Harry is
enjoined by his father, in the letter which conveys this information, to
remain inside the carriage, and not to go on the box.
Harry is a good boy, and does as he is bid; but nothing whatever is

said in the letter about not getting out of the carriage to walk up hills.
And at ‘two-mile hill’ Harry thinks it will be clever to get out and walk
up it, without calling to, or stopping, John on the box. Once out
himself, he gets Mary out;—the children begin snowballing each
other; the carriage leaves them so far behind that they can’t catch it;
a snowstorm comes on, etc., etc.; they are pathetically frozen within
a breath of their lives; found by a benevolent carter, just in time;
warmed by a benevolent farmer, the carter’s friend; restored to their
alarmed father and mother; and Mary has a rheumatic fever, “and for
a whole week it was not known whether she would live or die,” which
is the Providential punishment of Harry’s sin in getting out of the
carriage.
Admitting the perfect appositeness and justice of this Providential

punishment; I am, parenthetically, desirous to know of my
Evangelical friends, first, whether from the corruption of Harry’s
nature they could have expected anything better than his stealthily
getting out of the carriage to walk up the hill?—and, secondly,
whether [35]the merits of Christ, which are enough to save any
murderer or swindler from all the disagreeable consequences of
murder and swindling, in the next world, are not enough in this world,
if properly relied upon, to save a wicked little boy’s sister from
rheumatic fever? This, I say, I only ask parenthetically, for my own
information; my immediate business being to ask what effect this
story is intended to produce on my shepherd’s little daughter Agnes?
Intended to produce, I say: what effect it does produce, I can easily

ascertain; but what do the writer and the learned editor expect of it?
Or rather, to touch the very beginning of the inquiry, for what class of
child do they intend it? ‘For all classes,’ the enlightened editor and
liberal publisher doubtless reply. ‘Classes, indeed! In the glorious
liberty of the Future, there shall be none!’
Well, be it so; but in the inglorious slavery of the Past, it has

happened that my little Agnes’s father has not kept a carriage; that
Agnes herself has not often seen one, is not likely often to be in one,
and has seen a great deal too much snow, and had a great deal too
much walking in it, to be tempted out,—if she ever has the chance of
being driven in a carriage to a children’s party at seven,—to walk up
a hill on the road. Such is our benighted life in Westmoreland. In the
future, do my pious and liberal friends suppose that all little Agneses
are to drive in carriages? That is their [36]Utopia. Mine, so much
abused for its impossibility, is only that a good many little Agneses
who at present drive in carriages, shall have none.
Nay, but perhaps, the learned editor did not intend the story for
children ‘quite in Agnes’s position.’ For what sort did he intend it,
then? For the class of children whose fathers keep carriages, and
whose mothers dress their girls by the Paris modes, at three years
old? Very good; then, in families which keep carriages and footmen,
the children are supposed to think a book is a prize, which costs a
penny? Be that also so, in the Republican cheap world; but might not
the cheapeners print, when they are about it, prize poetry for their
penny? Here is the ‘Christmas Carol,’ set to music, accompanying
this moral story of the Snow.
“Hark, hark, the merry pealing,

List to the Christmas chime,
Every breath and every feeling
Hails the good old time;
Brothers, sisters, homeward speed,
All is mirth and play;

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Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern

Women’s Collaboration (Early Modern

Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800 (Early

Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern

Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and

Dissident Authorship in Mozambique: the Case of António

Medicine, Magic and Art in Early Modern Norway 1st ed.

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe

Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern

Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature 1st

EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY

Editorial Board Members

More information about this series at

Early Modern Literature in History

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944552

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern

Part I Literary and Intertextual Co-labor

2 Katherine Parr, Henry VIII, and Royal

3 Collaboration in the Parliamentary Speeches of Queen

4 Conflicted Collaboration in The Mothers Legacy 71

5 Collaboration, Authorship, and Gender in the Paratexts

Part II Collective Contexts and Material Co-production

6 Literary Gifts: Performance and Collaboration in the

7 The Clerics and the Learned Lady: Intertextuality in the

8 Paratextual Marginalia, Early Modern Women,

9 “All Fell Not in Pharsalias Field”: Lucy Harington

10 “A Veray Patronesse”: Margaret Beaufort and the Early

11 Afterword: “Her Book” and Early Modern Modes

Julie Crawford is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at

kinship and patronage network. She has previously published an essay on

Australian Research Council-funded project on early modern women and

Fig. 8.1 Poem in the hand of Elizabeth I, in a presentation copy

Fig. 9.2 Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. Arthur Gorges (London, 1614),

Table 7.1 Grey first lines comparison with Becon 157

Introduction: Gender, Authorship,

Patricia Pender and Alexandra Day

Interested as it has been in recovering the work of neglected writers, early

P. Pender (*) · A. Day

© The Author(s) 2017 1

of the women writers we have already recovered, at least in terms of

on scholars who wish to reclaim lost or forgotten female voices,” she

Canonical Early Modern Literary Collaboration

specificity of particular writing partnerships. As noted above, Masten

As these debates indicate, the concept of collaboration remains sub-

Taxonomies of Early Modern Women’s Collaboration

individuality—means that it is predisposed to finding ways to describe the

directly on issues of authorship and collaboration. Helen Smith’s metic-

integral to her project. “Larger than the ‘little commonwealth’ of mar-

she resists any vacuous conflation of the individual agencies involved.

If Horton’s chapter poses one kind of challenge to traditional under-

30. Patrick Cheney, “Introduction,” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 19–25,

40. Susan M. Felch, “‘Noble Gentlewomen Famous for Their Learning’: The

Cheney, Patrick. “Introduction.” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 19–25.

Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Margaret Roper, the Humanist Political Project.” In

Alexandra Day is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

1 Introduction: Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern

2 Katherine Parr, Henry VIII, and Royal

3 Collaboration in the Parliamentary Speeches of Queen

4 Conflicted Collaboration in The Mothers Legacy 71

5 Collaboration, Authorship, and Gender in the Paratexts

6 Literary Gifts: Performance and Collaboration in the

7 The Clerics and the Learned Lady: Intertextuality in the

8 Paratextual Marginalia, Early Modern Women,

9 “All Fell Not in Pharsalias Field”: Lucy Harington

10 “A Veray Patronesse”: Margaret Beaufort and the Early

11 Afterword: “Her Book” and Early Modern Modes

Fig. 8.1 Poem in the hand of Elizabeth I, in a presentation copy

Fig. 9.2 Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. Arthur Gorges (London, 1614),

Taxonomies of Early Modern Women’s Collaboration

30. Patrick Cheney, “Introduction,” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 19–25,

40. Susan M. Felch, “‘Noble Gentlewomen Famous for Their Learning’: The

Writing for and with Henry: Parr’s Translations