Poems by a Sixteenth-Century Gentlewoman, Maid, and Servant

A collection of poems by the first English woman to publish secular poetry under her own name.

Isabella Whitney (c. 1547–after 1624) was the first English woman to publish original secular poetry under her own name. She published two poetic miscellanies of poems: The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573), which include her own work as well as a total of six poems by five different male authors. This edition of her writings prints modernized texts of the complete miscellanies and adds to them six poems attributed to Whitney by largely twentieth-century critics. These poems provide a rich portrait of sixteenth-century female courtship and its dangers, a unique view of class and gender in Whitney’s lifetime, and a portrait of London as a burgeoning market of practical goods and luxury items from foodstuffs to imported silk.