Description: Anthologies play an essential role in shaping literary history. This anthology reveals women's poetic activity and production across the three nations of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1400 to 1800, overturning the long-standing and widespread bias in favour of English writers that has historically shaped both scholarly and popular understanding of this period's female poetic canon. Prioritising texts that have never before been published or translated, readers are introduced to an extraordinary array of women's voices. From countesses to servant maids, from erotic verse to religious poetry, women's immense poetic output across four centuries, multiple vernaculars, and national traditions is richly demonstrated. Featuring translations and glosses of texts in Irish, Ulster Scots, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, alongside informative headnotes on each poet, this collection makes the work of women poets available like never before. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Brief description: Sarah Prescott is Professor of English Literature, Vice-Principal, and Head of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. She specialises in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century anglophone literature from Britain and Ireland, and has published many articles and chapters in her subject field. She is the author of Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 1690-1740 (2003) and Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (2008); coeditor of Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 (2003) and Writing Wales from the Renaissance to Romanticism (2012); and coauthor, with Professor Jane Aaron, of vol. iii of The Oxford Literary History of Wales, entitled Welsh Writing in English, 1536-1914: The First Four Hundred Years (2020). Professor Prescott was the Principal Investigator for the Leverhulme-funded project 'Women's Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales: 1400-1800'.