Provost explores Renaissance women's poetry in new book
January 11, 2000
Wheaton College Provost and Professor of English Susanne Woods continues to uncover and explore the little-known world of female Renaissance writers with Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), a study of Jacobean poet Aemilia Lanyer.
Woods places the work of Lanyer in relation to the times in which she wrote and three of the major canonical writers with whom she was a contemporary: Spenser, Shakespeare and Jonson. Lanyer is considered the first woman writing in English who clearly sought professional standing as a poet, and the portrait that emerges is that of a fiercely independent artist addressing issue of gender, authority, poetry and patronage in sixteenth-century England.
Woods holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is widely respected for her contributions to the study of Renaissance poetry and prose. She is a founder of Brown University’s Women Writers Project, an online database of early women’s writing that sets the benchmark for electronic text encoding. Woods’ prolific scholarly work includes a number of books and essays, and articles in journals such as the Iowa Review, Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies and The Nation.