Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England considers the roles women played as literary patrons, dedicatees, readers, and writers in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, and the intimate relationship between these literary activities and what has often been called "politically active" humanism. Focusing on the interrelated communities centered on Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Margaret Hoby; Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford; and Lady Mary Wroth, Mediatrix argues that women played integral roles not only in the production of some of the most renowned literary texts in the period, including Philip Sidney's Arcadia, John Donne's poetry, and Mary Wroth's Urania, but also in wider networks of intellectual, religious, and political activism. Each of the communities discussed was concerned with the cause loosely identified as international or militant Protestantism and frequently mediated through the circulation of texts of all kinds.

Illuminating women's constitutive involvement in everything from the genres of the texts produced - romances, verse letters, texts of religious controversy - to the places in which those texts were produced and circulated - the estates of Wilton, Penshurst, Hackness, Twickenham, and Loughton - and the conditions in and hermeneutics by which they were read, Mediatrix offers an account of early modern English literary production with women at the center and political activism as one of its primary, rather than merely topical, concerns.

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Julie Crawford is Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities and Chair of Literature Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has published on a wide range of early modern authors, from Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Sidney, to Cavendish, Wroth, and Clifford, and on topics ranging from the history of reading to the history of sexuality. She is the author of a book on cheap print and the English reformation, called Marvelous Protestantism (2005). She is currently completing a book entitled Margaret Cavendish's Political Career.