Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry in the Beinecke Library

By Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, current Beinecke Visiting Fellow Monday, April 19, 2010 at 11:00 am Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall Street, Room 39 Free and open to the public

The last four decades of scholarship by feminist critics, literary historians, archivists, and book historians have seen the discovery of many early modern women poets and a major reevaluation of the importance of manuscript writing. The Beinecke Library’s Osborn Collection includes rich holdings in early modern women’s manuscripts, and this talk will provide a brief introduction to some of these, including the sole full copy of Lucy Hutchinson’s biblical epic Order and Disorder, commonplace books including poems by Katherine Philips, and women’s collections of both original and borrowed poetry. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann will suggest some of the research questions these materials might help us ask and answer, and the importance of this collection to our understanding of early modern women poets.