Early modern Welsh women writers

In spite of the gradual anglicization of both high and low culture in Tudor Wales and the proliferation of Welsh-language religious prose in print from the 1660s onward, Wales’s early modern literary landscape remained predominantly Welsh-language and poetic. Early modern women’s writing in Wales mirrors this linguistic and generic profile. Poetry’s pre-eminence, and Welsh bardic poetry in particular, reflects poetry’s enduring position within Welsh culture as well as its emblematic significance for Welsh cultural identity. No prose works by Welsh women were produced until the English-language novels of Anna Maria Bennett, Mary Robinson, Catherine Parry, Elizabeth Griffith, and Anne Hughes in the 1780s and 1790s. This entry discusses the Welsh and anglophone poetry produced by women in Wales during the early modern period and charts the metric, generic, and thematic patterns that are visible in their works.