This book provides a welcome English translation of a marvelous anthology of women's religious and secular writing, stretching from the visions of the late medieval mystics through the prison testaments of sixteenth-century Anabaptist martyrs to the pamphleteers and novelists of the growing urban bourgeoisie. The translations and introductions demonstrate the ways that women in the Low Countries shaped the intellectual and cultural developments of their eras.

This landmark bilingual Dutch-English anthology introduces women's writing in the Low Countries, the low-lying delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers, from 1200 to 1875. The Dutch and Flemish writers featured here produced work of ardent religious passion, ranging from medieval mysticism to scathing anti-Reformation polemic to pious Anabaptist reflections. Others addressed current social and political debates or demonstrated fierce feminist engagement. This survey includes a range of genres, from sonnets to social and epistolary novels, and will serve as a unique resource for the study of women's writing throughout the ages as well as an unparalleled portrait of the emotional, social, and political worlds of female writers in the Low Countries.

This first-of-its-kind anthology offers the English-speaking readers a unique chance to become acquainted with the leading Dutch and Flemish women writers since the 1880s. Covering a representative range of public and private genres from poetry, criticalessays, travel literature and political commentary to diaries and journals, the fifty-six texts are arranged chronologically and are accompagnied by brief introductions, chronologies, and brief guides to the authors and works. An important contribution to our understanding of modern European literary canon and the long march of feminist history and literature. (Dutch ed.: "Schrijvende vrouwen", 978-90-8964-216-5).

Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1750 brings together research on women and gender across the Low Countries, a culturally contiguous region that was split by the Eighty Years' War into the Protestant Dutch Republic in the North and the Spanish-controlled, Catholic Hapsburg Netherlands in the South. The authors of this interdisciplinary volume highlight women’s experiences of social class, as family members, before the law, and as authors, artists, and patrons, as well as the workings of gender in art and literature. In studies ranging from microhistories to surveys, the book reveals the Low Countries as a remarkable historical laboratory for its topic and points to the opportunities the region holds for future scholarly investigations. Contributors: Martine van Elk, Martha Howell, Martha Moffitt Peacock, Sarah Joan Moran, Amanda Pipkin, Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Margit Thøfner, and Diane Wolfthal.

This book is the first comparative study of early modern English and Dutch women writers. It explores women’s rich and complex responses to the birth of the public sphere, new concepts of privacy, and the ideology of domesticity in the seventeenth century. Women in both countries were briefly allowed a public voice during times of political upheaval, but were increasingly imagined as properly confined to the household by the end of the century. This book compares how English and Dutch women responded to these changes. It discusses praise of women, marriage manuals, and attitudes to female literacy, along with female artistic and literary expressions in the form of painting, engraving, embroidery, print, drama, poetry, and prose, to offer a rich account of women’s contributions to debates on issues that mattered most to them.