Offering a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing, the essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures across Italy, France, England, and the Low Countries. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers. The collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and in exploring familial, political, and religious communities.

Contents: Foreword, Diana Robin; Introduction, Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen; Part I Continental Epistolary Communities: Letters make the family: Nassau family correspondence at the turn of the 17th century, Susan Broomhall; Letters and lace: Arcangela Tarabotti and convent culture in Seicento Venice, Meredith K. Ray; Women, letters, and heresy in 16th-century Italy: Guilia Gonzaga's heterodox epistolary network, Camilla Russell. Part II Cross-Channel Textual Communities and Uses of Print: The gender of the book: Jeanne de Marnef edits Pernette du Guillet, Leah Chang; ' Some improvement to their spiritual and eternal state': women's prayers in the 17th-century Church of England, Sharon Arnoult; The public life of Anne Vaughan Lock: her reception in England and Scotland, Susan M. Felch; Esther Inglis, linguist, calligrapher, miniaturist, and Christian humanist, Sarah Gwyneth Ross; Courtliness, piety, and politics: emblem books by Georgette de Montenay, Anna Roemers Visscher and Esther Inglis, Martine van Elk. Part III Constructions of Transnational Literary Circles: Crossing international borders: tutors and the transmission of young women's writing, Julie D. Campbell; Journeying across borders: Catherine des Roches's catalog of modern women intellectuals, Anne R. Larsen; Forming familles d'alliance: intellectual kinship in the republic of letters, Carol Pal; Afterword: critical distance, Margaret J.M. Ezell; Bibliography; Index.