This Handbook is a research-based book that attempts to define the field, and to gesture towards future configurations in the light of developments over the past thirty years. The Handbook will build on and complement existing overviews of early modern women’s writing but will have a more conceptual and theoretical focus in addition to extending historical and critical work. It will also integrate the disciplinary challenges raised by early modern women’s writing more fully into critical work on the Renaissance—again, this differentiates this work from other wide-ranging volumes on the topic. It seeks, through a range of approaches, to ask larger questions about women’s writing and its relationship(s) to writing and culture more generally. Implicitly it questions the category of ‘women’s’ writing, by examining how far gender and constructions of gender inflect authorship, reception, and style, and how we can integrate provisional and partial identifications into our understanding of early modern women’s discourse. We are keen to integrate intersectionality into the analysis of early modern women’s writing, focusing on a range of key issues—region, class, race, ethnic identity, marital status, profession, language. In particular, the chapters will interrogate the degree to which women’s writings and their innovations in fact spearhead a number of key developments in thought and writing over the course of the seventeenth century. The emphasis throughout is on innovation as a response to specific cultural, ideological and sometimes very local conditions.