Genre

The history of the field of early modern women’s writing is primarily a story of the expansion and diversification of knowledge of the genres in which women wrote. Literary genres like poetry, drama, and prose fiction have always been at the center of the field, but there has also been a strong critical engagement with nonliterary genres like diaries, letters, and recipe books, supported by the expansion of archival studies. As recovery work has revealed the wide range of genres in which early modern women wrote, scholars have engaged with central questions about literary value and canon formation as they have assessed the impact of early modern women’s writing on early modern literary studies as a whole.