Ramie Targoff

Literary scholar Professor Ramie Targoff tells the story of four women writers of Shakespeare’s day whose important work has been either forgotten or overlooked.

Nearly all Renaissance women writers were unpublished, out of print or in books that obscured their authorship until the 1990s. Targoff says the works help us to see the Renaissance in a fresh light and offer a female perspective on life in Shakespeare’s day. The writers are Mary Sidney, poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sydney, Aemilia Lanyer, the first 17th-century woman to publish a book of original poetry, Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, and Anne Clifford, a diarist who fought against patriarchy.

Targoff is professor of English, co-chair of Italian Studies, and the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Centre for the Humanities at Brandeis University in the United States. She is author of books on Renaissance poetry and religion.