Women's Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1400–1800: An Anthology

Anthologies play an essential role in shaping literary history. This anthology uncovers 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 ladies-in-waiting 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.

List of contents

List of contributors; Foreword; Acknowledgements; Note of sources and copy texts; List of abbreviations of sources and archives; Introduction; Part I. 1400-1660: 1. Ireland 1400-1660; 2. Scotland 1400-1660; 3. Wales 1400-1660; Part II. 1660-1800: 4. Ireland 1660-1800; 5. Scotland 1660-1800; 6. Wales 1660-1800; Bibliography; Index.

About the author

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'.Marie-Louise Coolahan is Professor in the School of English, Media, and Creative Arts at the University of Galway. She is the author of Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (2010); editor of 'The Cultural Dynamics of Reception', a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2020); and coeditor, with Gillian Wright, of Katherine Philips: Form, Reception, and Literary Contexts (2018). She is Principal Investigator of the ERC -funded RECIRC project (2014–20) on the reception and circulation of women's writing.Sarah Dunnigan is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (2002), and Women and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing (2004), which she coedited with C. Marie Harker and Evelyn S. Newlyn. Most recently she coedited, with Shu-Fang Lai, The Land of StoryBooks: Scottish Children's Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019).Wes Hamrick is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Connecticut. He specialises in eighteenth-century British and Irish literature and has particular expertise in the Irish language manuscript tradition and its relationship to print culture. He is a cofounder of Leamh.org and has published on the public sphere in Gaelic Ireland, as well as contributing to the anthology Bone and Marrow / Cnámh agus Smior (2022).Kate Louise Mathis is Lecturer in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on medieval Gaelic prose literature and Gaelic women's poetry and elegy, contributing most recently to The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (2021) and The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing (2024).Cathryn A. Charnell-white is Reader in the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University, and Chair of Literature Wales (2021–25). She edited the first anthology of late medieval early modern Welsh language women's poetry, Beirdd Ceridwen: Blodeugerdd Barddas o Ganu Menywod hyd tua 1800 (Ceridwen's Poets: The Barddas Anthology of Women's Poetry until about 1800; 2005).

Summary

A multilinguistic resource uncovering women's poetic activity across Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1400 to 1800, this anthology overturns the bias towards English writers that has historically shaped scholarly and popular perceptions of the canon of this period. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Foreword

A geographically and linguistically diverse account of women's poetic activity across Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1400 to 1800.

Product details

• Assisted by: Charnell-White Cathryn A. (Editor), Coolahan Marie-Louise (Editor), Sarah Dunnigan (Editor), Wes Hamrick (Editor), Kate Louise Mathis (Editor)
• Publisher: Cambridge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 31.08.2025
• EAN: 9781009489911
• ISBN: 978-1-009-48991-1
• Illustrations: Worked examples or Exercises
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Wales, Scotland, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / General, Ireland, Gender studies: women, Literary reference works, Gender studies: women and girls, Poetry anthologies (various poets)