Early Modern Women and Latin Literary Culture: Assessing the Evidence of Manuscript Verse

Abstract

The study of early modern Latinity has increased rapidly in methodological and analytical sophistication in recent years, including welcome attention to Latin writing by women. Nevertheless, the assumption has tended to be that Latin texts of the period were written almost exclusively by and for men and boys. The evidence for women as readers and writers is often partial and complex to interpret, and early modern Latin remains an understudied field with relatively few scholarly guides even to basic questions about style, form, and genre. This essay sets out some guiding principles for this kind of work by considering how best to assess manuscript material as additional evidence for the circulation, readership, and reception of an already known woman Latin poet (Katherine Killigrew, née Cooke), and discussing evidence for female Latinity more widely, among women who are not known as Latinists. Texts under consideration include apparently uncirculated Latin verse by otherwise unknown women and Latin verse addressed to women, a category which has not, to my knowledge, been discussed before as a unified phenomenon. [V.M.]