Recovering Women's Canonical Voices: Sixteenth-Century Women Psalmists' Shaping of English Literature (thesis)

Abstract

Through an analysis of the Biblical Psalter, the poetry of Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Vaughan Locke, and Elizabeth Melville as well as sixteenth-century perception of these poets and the Psalms, this thesis explores the Psalms as exceptional literary entities and calls into question assumptions of sixteenth-century women writers. This exploration reveals the significant impact women had on sixteenth-century England, on the Psalms as a literary genre, and on the literary canon as a whole. Finally, this thesis demonstrates how early assumptions about sixteenth-century women writers have been over turned, identifies the limits of scholarship of women's writing in early modern England, and illustrates the need and shift towards unbiased analysis of early modern women writers. [From Introduction]