Foreword

I am always excited to learn about Leverhulme Trust projects: these multi-year grants, often involving teams of scholars from various disciplines with a range of specialist expertise, typically address large, ambitious projects with the potential to change signifcantly perceptions of the past.Women's Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1400-1800: An Anthology is an outstanding example of the ground-breaking work that a network of interdisciplinary, international scholars can bring to students and researchers.Not only does this anthology introduce us to an astonishing variety of women's voices from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but its archipelagic lens also invites scrutiny of the categories used in past scholarship, while the linguistic expertise of the team of editors and translators provides tools for the further study of the authors and their texts.While Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson's Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology (2001) initially drew attention to British and Irish women writing in languages other than English, this anthology fully illustrates the richness and complexity of their literary environments, with non-anglophone women writers from three countries working in multiple vernacular languages presented alongside those writing in English.Prioritising texts that have not previously been published or translated, the contents serve both as documentation of the lively literary cultures outside England (and London in particular) and as an introduction to vernacular and bardic genres.Here we have an answer poem in Irish from Brighid Fitzgerald (c.1589-1682) to a young man whom she doubted was really dying of love for her, an early sonnet by Mary Beaton (c.1543-c.1597), one of the ladies-in-waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as verse from Mary McMorine 'a servant maid' (f.1799).Gwerful Mechain (c.1462-c.1502) adopted a bardic name and wrote both erotic and religious poems in Welsh, and ofers a counterpoint to the better-known Elizabeth Melville's Scots religious allegory, Ane Godlie Dream.Te entries of anglophone poems by women living in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland working in English include familiar names such as Katherine Philips,