PATRICIA PENDER is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has published widely on feminism and the early modern period in essay collections and international journals including SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Women Writers: Elizabethan to Victorian and Huntingdon Library Quarterly.

Introduction: Authorial Alibis: Early Modern and Late Modern Self-Effacement and Sprezzatura: Modesty and Manipulation Sola Scriptura: Reading, Speech, and Silence in The Examinations of Anne Askew 'A worme most abjecte': Sermo Humilisas Reformation Strategy in Katherine Parr's Prayers or Medytacions Mea Mediocritas: Mary Sidney, Modesty, and the History of the Book 'This triall of my slender skill': Inexpressibility and Interpretive Community in Aemilia Lanyer's Encomia 'To be a foole in print': Anne Bradstreet and the Romance of 'Pirated' Publication Bibliography Index

An in-depth study of early modern women's modesty rhetoric from the English Reformation to the Restoration. This book provides new readings of modesty's gendered deployment in the works of Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet.