Parergon

Kate Allan recently completed her doctorate on ‘Alchemical Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing’ at the University of Oxford. Prior to this, she completed an MA in English at the University of St Andrews followed by an MSt in English (1550–1700) at Oxford. Her research considers the engagement of seventeenth-century women poets with contemporary scientific culture, alchemical practice, and poetics. She co-convened the 2021 symposium ‘Women and Agency: Transnational Perspectives c. 1450–1790’, from which this special issue arose. Her work is forthcoming in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, and she is a research assistant for the Australian Research Council–funded Future Fellowship project, ‘Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer (1530–1660)’.

Bernadette Andrea is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliate faculty in the Center for Middle East Studies, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Department of Feminist Studies at UCSB. She is the author of The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She edited and introduced English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707 (University of Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012) for the series ‘The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe’. Her co-edited collections include Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, with Patricia Akhimie (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, with Linda McJannet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Liza Blake is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, with research interests in literature, philosophy, and science; women writers; textual editing; and asexuality studies. She has published articles in ELR, SEL, PBSA, JEMCS, Criticism, and postmedieval. She has co-edited Arthur Golding’s ‘A Moral Fabletalk’ and Other Renaissance Fable Translations, as well as Lucretius and Modernity. She maintains the online edition ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition’ (<http://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/poemsandfancies/>), as well as the resource ‘The Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography’ (<https://acearobiblio.com/>). She is one of three general editors of The Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish, a twenty-volume series under contract with Punctum Books.

Cassandra (Cassie) Gorman is Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature and Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Her research explores ways in which English imaginative literature of the seventeenth century was not only responsive to but a part of scientific progress, with particular interests in early modern women’s writing and the reciprocal influence between corpuscular philosophy and theological thought. Cassie’s monograph The Atom in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (D. S. Brewer, 2021) investigates a remarkable ‘poetics of the atom’ in the early modern period, through which poets and philosophers sought positive, spiritual motivation in the concept of material indivisibility. She has also published papers on cupids in sixteenth-century love lyric, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, Lucy Hutchinson’s interpretation of matter and spirit, and Thomas Traherne’s physics and metaphysics. She co-edited a volume of essays on the latter with the theologian Elizabeth Dodd, Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth Century Thought (D. S. Brewer, 2016).

Mallory N. Haselberger is a letterpress printer, bibliographer, and Master of Library and Information Science candidate in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is passionate about learning from the past by doing, whether reimagining the handpress period by working with a Gutenberg-style printing press and binding her own artists’ books, or by introducing students to the wonders of working with archival documents that have passed through innumerable hands for hundreds of years. Mallory previously earned Master of Arts degrees in Art History and English Literature, with research projects focusing on women artists, authors, and letterpress printers, early modern artistic manuals, and artists’ books. Her most recent work is included in the edited volume Teaching the History of the Book (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023).

Chris Higgins is Head of History at Folkestone School for Girls. He holds a Masters from the Courtauld Institute, University of...