What's Political in Seventeenth‐Century Women's Political Writing?

Recent scholarship on women's writing in seventeenth‐century England has emphasized the political aspect of these texts. While scholars of Anne Bradstreet have generally praised her late lyrics at the expense of her narrative history ‘The Four Monarchies’, this essay seeks to place the ‘Four Monarchies’ in the context of political writings by seventeenth‐century English women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Anne Clifford, Brilliana Harley, and especially her contemporaries writing in Old England concerning the English Civil Wars, such as Elizabeth Poole, Anna Trapnel, Eleanor Davies, and Mary Cary.