Women's writing to 1700

Women's creativity in both early modern Ghàidhealtachd and Lowland cultures means that a range of national and local, individual and collective, identities intersect throughout their work. Early modern women's written expressiveness can be found in other modes of textuality, such as recipe books; letter-writing; and songbooks, each of which gestures towards the household and the private domestic realm as spaces of creativity. This chapter discusses it as a distinctive body of ‘cultural work’ which roots the articulation of women's literary voices within particular social and communicative contexts. It explores its imaginative fabric – those threads of formal, aesthetic, and figurative qualities which bind and differentiate these women's texts from one another and create work which is striking in its expression of affect and emotional power. Women speak from the positions of lover, mother, daughter, friend, and in the roles of elegist, panegyrist, prophet, preacher, translator, compiler.