Early Modern Women's Writing / Early Modern Literature in History (PDF)

Martine van Elk is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, USA. She has published extensively on Shakespeare, early modern vagrants, and early modern English and Dutch women writers.

“Van Elk’s well-written and well-documented monograph is an inspiring incentive for more of this kind of research and is highly recommended for anyone interested in transnational relations and early modern female authorship.” (Sophie Reinders, Women's Writing, July, 2018)

“This stimulating study offers the first book-length analysis of selected seventeenth-century English and Dutch women writers paired together or in groups; it thus exemplifies current interest in transnationalism, translation, and cross-cultural comparison. … Well organized, skillfully written, and amply documented, Martine van Elk’s study is an important contribution to the burgeoning field of transnational scholarship.” (Anne R. Larsen, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 57 (2), April, 2018)

“The originality of this work lies in its wide scope. … Those scholars of gender studies and early modern women writers who share this evaluation, and those ready to let themselves be persuaded, should read Early Modern Women’s Writing. At the very least, this study brings Dutch sources under the attention of an international audience by presenting them side by side with their English ‘counterparts’.” (Lotte Fikkers, Journal of the Nothern Renaissance, northernrenaissance.org, February, 2018)
“Martine van Elk’s rich and eclectic study compares Dutch and English women writers working at a time when an ideology of domesticity emerged, with the public and private spheres gradually but irreversibly separating. … Van Elk’s monograph offers an important assessment of how women on both sides of the narrow seas sought public recognition of their artistic skill.” (Nadine Akkerman, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 71 (2), 2018)

“Early Modern Women’s Writing … is an important accomplishment because it incorporates the understudied works of Dutch female authors in an argument aimed to intervene in English-language debates. It invites further reading and analysis of all the texts that have been (re-)discovered over the