Women’s Works: 900-1550

WOMEN’S WORKS … manages to make immensely difficult labor look like the most natural outgrowth of intellectual engagement with a problem - not easy but the product of worthwhile effort. In addition to providing the basic documents of a virtually unknown canon, the typescript of this anthology incorporates some of the most useful innovations I’ve ever seen in the publication of medieval and Renaissance literary texts….Foster has a fine ear, and his edition repeatedly encourages its readers to hear the poems. He builds into his edition many devices to heighten a reader’s awareness of the poem as a performed and experienced event. All editions should do these things, but very few manage even the most basic. Because he has mastered all the traditional editorial and literary skills and fused them with a craftsman’s management of desktop publishing technology, Foster has engineered a graceful escalation of the values and esthetics of literature courses. I expect that future editors will adopt them as models. -anonymous press reader, Columbia University (Scholar’s Review) Illustrated. 8x10