Introduction; D.Clarke Female Authority and Authorisation Strategies in Early Modern Europe; J.Stevenson 'In a Mirrour Clere': Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's Miserere mei Deus; R.Smith Old Wives' Tales Retold: The Mutations of the Fairy Queen; D.Purkiss Giving Time to Women: The Eternizing Project in Early Modern England; A.Boesky The 'Double Voice' of Renaissance Equity and the Literary Voices of Women; L.Hutson The Voices of Anne Cooke, Lady Anne, and Lady Bacon; A.Stewart 'Formed into Words by Your Divided Lips': Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian Tradition; D.Clarke 'For Worth , Not Weakness, Makes in Use but One': Literary Dialogues in an English Renaissance Family; M.Wynne-Davies 'Whom the Lord with Love Affecteth': Gender and the Religious Poet, 1590-1633; H.Wilcox Ejaculation or Virgin Birth? The Gendering of the Religious Lyric in the Interregnum; E.Clarke Unfettered Organs: The Polemic Voices of Katherine Philips; J.Loxley A Voice for Hermaphroditical Education; F.Teague Index

"The Double Voice" reassesses the notions of gender which have been used to analyze Renaissance literature. Rather than assuming that men and women write differently because of background, education and culture, it tries to unsettle the connections between the sex of the author and the constructions of gender in texts, and to reconsider the prevalent determinist model of reading which tends to consign women writers to the private, domestic sphere, and to render male negotiations of gender and sexuality invisible and transparent.

DANIELLE CLARKE is Lecturer in English at University College Dublin. She has published articles on gender and writing in the early modern period, and is the editor of Three Renaissance Women Poets.

ELIZABETH CLARKE is Research Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. She is the author of Theory and Theology in George Herbert's Poetry, and of several articles on women's manuscript writing.