Selection criteria

Selecting a group of 100 texts to represent the wide expanse of Renaissance women's writing was a difficult task, because this number is such a small fraction of the total material extant. RWO is the largest anthology or collection of 16th- and 17th-century English women's writing ever to be assembled, but it is only a sample of a much larger potential archive (currently estimated at over 500, with more discovered every year). In addition, because of current limitations in the available text encoding methods, we were unable to include any manuscript materials, thereby eliminating a significant sector of early women's writing from consideration.

Within these constraints, the selection committee attempted to achieve a balanced collection on a number of counts. They chose a mix of now well-known writers such as Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish, together with lesser-known women such as Elizabeth Poole. They also included both "original" work and translations, and included as well writing under probable female pseudonyms like "Jane Anger" and written representations of an otherwise lost female voice (as in the accounts of the Flower witchcraft). They selected a range of genres, including drama, poetry, religious tracts, philosophical writings, cookbooks, trial narratives, works in translation, and introductions to translated works. They also tried to include as many women from "lower" socio-economic classes as possible, and provided a range of religious stances (Anglican, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Roman Catholic, etc.) from this religiously fraught period. Although the materials are chronologically balanced across the period covered, since there is a smaller amount of extant writing by 16th-century women, the committee selected a larger percentage of it than of the 17th century, where more choices were necessary.

As a general rule the committee chose first editions of works, using as source texts exemplars with no known defects. On occasion (for instance, Elizabeth Cary's life of Edward II) when there are large and interesting variations between editions, they included more than one. With a few exceptions, the texts were transcribed in full, including all frontmatter and backmatter, and including textual segments by writers thought or known to be men (for instance, a preface by a male publisher or compiler). The exceptions to the full transcription rule were texts mostly by a male author containing a small portion by a female author (for instance, Mary Sidney's "The Doleful Lay of the Fair Clorinda", excerpted from Edmund Spenser's "Astrophel" in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 1595). Similarly, in cases of long works in translation, the translator's preface was included but the translation itself omitted for the time being. The Women Writers Project may in the future transcribe these texts in full.

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