News from the Midell Regions and Calthorpe’s Chapel

An introduction to a new early modern woman writer that makes her manuscripts available in print for the first time.

This first print edition of two extant manuscripts by Dorothy Calthorpe (1648-1693) introduces a new seventeenth-century woman writer to the growing canon of early modern female authors. The edition provides transcriptions of the manuscripts and Calthorpe’s will, as well as a hefty apparatus that features a comprehensive introduction to Calthorpe, her family, and her work; a glossary of persons who figured in her writing and her life; and two genealogical charts. Calthorpe’s writings (including both prose and verse and ranging from Petrarchan love poems to roman a clef and devotional verse), and the thoughtfully constructed and illustrated volumes in which her texts appear, demonstrate the rich intellectual life of a previously unknown female writer and provide a compelling example of Restoration manuscript production.