Women Writing History in Early Modern England

Megan Matchinske is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

• 1. Strategies for survival: gender, ethics and history; 2. Truth in the telling: moral, method and history in Anne Dowriche's The French Historie; 3. Gendering Catholic conformity: equivocal history and cultural context in Elizabeth Grymeston's Miscelanea; 4. From here to 'henceforth': history, gender and identity in the diary writing of Lady Anne Clifford; 5. Receptive readers: dissimulation and historical truth in Mary Carleton's bigamy trials; 6. The 'dying-tale': history and the ethics of action; Bibliography.

Review of the hardback: 'Not only is Women Writing History in Early Modern England an impressive contribution to the scholarship on women's historical writing in the early modern period; it constitutes an important theoretical intervention on the relationship between ethics and historiography, and on our own relationship to the past that is the subject of our scholarship. This is a book that scholars of both literature and history will read with great profit.' Literature and History