These essays form part of a recent scholarly trend that challenges the assumption that religious writing was a safe and uncontroversial activity for an early modern woman. The volume introduces the work of a number of women, some well-known and others less frequently studied, some writers and others patrons or commissioners of texts, some Protestant and some Catholic. Tackling such a wide range risks diluting the collection, but it also enables the contributors to draw parallels across confessional divides. Some unity is found by grouping the essays into two topics: “Women and Religious Communities” and “Reading Intertextual Prose Genres.”

One considerable strength of the first topic is its emphasis on textual production as part of a wide range of cultural activity. It has been many years since Margaret Ezell first pointed out that privileging print and a narrow range of literary genres would never give a full picture of early modern women's literary agency, but it is only in recent years that we have begun to see other forms of textual production as the legitimate focus of scholarship. Essays by Patricia Phillippy, Susannah Brietz Monta, and Julie Crawford introduce us to the ways that women's religious writing worked alongside their design, commissioning, and production of textual objects as diverse as recusant texts, funeral monuments, and portraits. The essays in the second section together offer a serious account of the complexities of authorial agency in hybrid genres such as translation and scripture paraphrase.