This encyclopedia on early modern women’s writing from the English Reformation to the Restoration  focuses on writing by or attributed to women, written in or translated into English, in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Europe, and the Americas.  It is designed to provide coverage of six established chronological periods: - Early Tudor (1526-1557), Elizabethan (1558-1603), Jacobean (1603-1625), Caroline (1625-1649), English Civil War & Interregnum (1642-1660), and Restoration (1660-1688). With almost 400 entries, the encyclopedia is organised through broad theoretical, material, generic, and thematic categories, as well as by period.

Patricia Pender is an Associate Professor, English and Writing, at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she coordinates the Gender Research Network and the Writing for Social Change Program. She is the author of Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (2012); “I’m Buffy and You’re History”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism (2016); and Bibliophilic, a chapbook of poetry (2018). She has edited Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration (2017); and co-edited, with Rosalind Smith, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2014) and the Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2026). She has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Antiquarian Association, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London, as well as multi-year funding from the Australian Research Council. She is currently working on: a memoir-in-essays, “Turn It Up to Eleven,” and a play, “The Real Housewives of Henry VIII,” which have been generously supported by residencies at Relais de Camont and Centre Pompadour in France and the Ann Moyal and Eric Dark Fellowships at Varuna Writers Centre in Australia.

Professor Rosalind Smith is Chair of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the Australian National University. She has published widely on politics, gender and form in early modern women’s writing, and her books include Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Gender, the co-authored Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint, and the co-edited collections Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing, Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics and Early Modern Women’s English Marginalia. She has led several collaborative digital projects, including the award-winning Early Modern Women’s Complaint Poetry Index and the Beyond the Book digital exhibition, developed in partnership with State Library Victoria. Her fellowships include a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, the Alice Ball Bodley fellowship in Women’s History from the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, the Alice Griffin fellowship from the University of Auckland, and the Lloyd Davis fellowship from the University of Queensland, and she has been awarded over $4 million in external research funding across her career. She is general editor, with Professor Sarah Ross, of the journal Parergon, and, with Associate Professor Trisha Pender, of the Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing.