Iter Press

An early Tudor translation of the Cité des dames, a crucial argument written by Christine de Pizan on the importance of women. Christine de Pizan's defense of women against centuries of misogyny, Cité des dames, was the only work of literature translated into English by Brian Anslay, an administrator in the household of King Henry VII. While numerous manuscripts were held in royal and aristocratic libraries, Anslay’s printed translation enabled a broader range of readers to appreciate the arguments for female rule crucial to the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I. Anslay’s translation also played a key role in the late-nineteenth-century revival of interest in Christine. This modernization of Anslay’s Tudor English makes his translation accessible to contemporary readers while preserving the rhythms of early Tudor prose. It includes an extensive introduction and notes highlighting both the history of the language and the cultural references embodied in the text.

The first published defense of women by a Netherlandish author. Jehan Baptista Houwaert’s Excellence and Nobility of Women constitutes the eighth book of his Plain of the Nine Muses, or The Pleasure Garden of Virtuous Women (1582–1583), an immense conduct book for women in rhymed verse based on the many querelle texts of the French and Burgundian tradition but especially, in its French translation, on the pathbreaking Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex (1529) by Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim.  Like its model, Houwaert’s work asserts not merely the equality but the superiority of women. It is unique in that it is addressed not to a wealthy noblewoman or princess, as were most such defenses, but more democratically to the “girls, unmarried women, wives, and widows of Belgica”—all of them!

Published for the first time in full, a common woman’s writings reveal the startling role she played in England’s revolt against the monarchy.   In 1649, a seamstress named Elizabeth Poole appeared at the Whitehall debates in London to prophesy in front of Parliament’s army shortly after it had defeated the crown in the English civil wars. Invited to help deliberate the fate of Charles I, Poole advised the army to spare the king’s life but to put him on trial for tyranny and to enter into a new compact with the people. After her visions proved controversial, she was defamed as a prostitute and a witch. She retaliated by printing her prophecies, along with two new defenses of her original revelations. This collection publishes Poole’s pamphlets in full for the first time.