This essay reviews the ways in which recent studies of early modern women’s writing have both extended the geographical scope of that canon, and have increasingly sought to situate it in relation to expansive, detailed and complex cultural geographies of the period. This broadening of the canon requires scholars to confront unfamiliar genres, new scholarly challenges and novel critical concerns, and thus demands that we think about fresh ways of reading these texts. How can paying new attention to the metaphorical and literal places and journeys of early modern women’s writing help the field to respond to this demand for growth, in terms of both content and methodology? To address this question, I review the body of work that is already taking up these challenges, and suggest some directions for further exploration that would enable us to develop a properly internationalist, Atlantic and comparative approach to early modern British women’s writing.

This Special Issue emerges from an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded network, Memory and Community in Early Modern Britain, which investigated two related topics: the memory cultures of early modern Britain and the question of how that period is remembered today. The network ran for two years, from 2013 to 2015. In a series of events hosted by each of the four institutions involved (

This essay pursues the study of early modern memory across a chronologically, conceptually and thematically broad canvas in order to address key questions about the historicity of memory and the methodologies of memory studies. First, what is the value for our understanding of early modern memory practices of transporting the methodologies of contemporary memory studies backwards, using them to study the memorial culture of a time before living memory? Second, what happens to the cross-disciplinary project of memory studies when it is taken to a distant period, one that had its own highly self-conscious and much debated cultures of remembering? Drawing on evidence and debates from a range of disciplinary locations, but primarily focusing on literary and historical studies, the essay interrogates crucial differences and commonalities between memory studies and early modern studies.

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This 2007 collection offered the first definitive study of a surprisingly underdeveloped area of scholarly investigation, namely the relationship between Shakespeare, children and childhood from Shakespeare's time to the present. It offers a thorough mapping of the domain in which Shakespearean childhoods need to be studied, in order to show how studying Shakespearean childhoods makes significant contributions both to Shakespearean scholarship, and to the history of childhood and its representations. The book is divided into two sections, each with a substantial introduction outlining relevant critical debates and contextualizing the rich combination of fresh research and readings of familiar Shakespearean texts that characterize the individual essays. The first part of the book examines the significance of the figure of the child in the Shakespearean canon. The second part traces the rich histories of negotiation, exchange and appropriation that have characterised Shakespeare's subsequent relations to the cultures of childhood in literary realms.