Mary Ellen Lamb is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA. She is the author of Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (1990) as well as numerous essays on women writers in such journals as English Literary Renaissance and Criticism. Her book The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (2006) explores old wives' tales as a formative component of early modern popular culture. Karen Bamford is Associate Professor of English at Mount Allison University, Canada. She is the author of Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (2000) and co-editor of Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama (2002).

• Contents: Introduction, Mary Ellen Lamb; Part I 'Our Mothers' Maids': Nurture and Narrative: Telling tales: locating female nurture and narrative in The Faerie Queene, Jacqueline T. Miller; Female orality and the healing arts in Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale, Kate Giglio; Urania's example: the female storyteller in early modern English romance, Julie A. Eckerle; 'Before woomen were readers': how John Aubrey wrote female oral history, Henk Dragstra. Part II Spinsters, Knitters and the Uses of Oral Traditions: Fractious: teenage girls' tales in and out of Shakespeare, Diane Purkiss; Robber bridegrooms and devoured brides: the influence of folktales on Spenser's Burisane and Isis church episodes, Marianne Micros; 'I'll watch him tame and talk him out of patience': the curtain lecture and Shakespeare's Othello, LaRue Love Sloan; Free and bound maids: women's work songs and industrial change in the age of Shakespeare, Fiona McNeill; Gender at work in the cries of London, Natasha Korda. Part III Oral Traditions and Masculinity: Pocky queans and horn knaves: gender stereotypes in libelous poems, C.E. McGee; 'When an old ballad is plainly sung': Musical lyrics in the plays of Margaret and William Cavendish James Fitzmaurice; ' My manly shape hath yet a woman's minde': the fairy escape from gender-roles in The Maid's Metamorphosis, Regina Buccola; 'Her very phrases': exploiting the metaphysics of presence in Twelfth Night, Eric Mason; Clamorous voices, incontinent fictions: orality, oratory and gender in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, Clare R. Kinney; Afterword, Pamela Allen Brown; Bibliography; Index.