The initial phrase in my title is adapted from Julia Kristeva, whose complex insights and uncannily Baroque-like speculations have danced across most of my thinking and writing ever since, fascinated but at that point largely uncomprehending, I first heard her speak at a conference in the late 1970s. Thirty years later, comprehending a little more and with increased admiration, I encountered, first in French and then translated into English, the book she describes – again not a little Baroquely – as a ‘novel’ based on the life of Saint Teresa, in which she remarks that the saint of Avila reveals that ‘the secrets of Baroque civilization are female’. Throughout this study I approach, move away from, and variously return to Kristeva's terminology. I have chosen ‘Female’ rather than ‘Feminine’ Baroque for my title because all my subjects were (by the admittedly unscientific and culturally problematic criteria of the time) perceived as women, and their struggles against the gender ideologies of their time were forced upon them by both phallocentric discourse and authority figures who were all (also problematically) assumed to be ‘male’. I have especially wanted to avoid the problematically reified concept of ‘Woman’, since I am concerned with real historical subjects who were – some very consciously, others implicitly – rebelling against what today we see as the ideological constructs of gender. Their varied frustrations and rebellions constitute an important dimension of their Baroque-ness, illustrating in multiple although often contradictory ways how marginal or dispossessed members of a society struggle to locate spaces of resistance within dominant or oppressive ideological structures.

The primary, though not exclusive ‘textual’ focus of this study is not art or music or architecture – cultural activities to which the label ‘Baroque’ is conventionally attached – but writing. The more prosaic descriptive phrase in my title points to an area of research to which I have been grateful to contribute for many years: the revival (or in some cases the discovery) of early modern women's writings in English. My interests in what then were still termed ‘Renaissance women’ go far back, to the late 1960s, when as a student I met John Rathmell, the first modern editor of Mary (and Philip) Sidney's Psalms, who was the internal examiner of my Cambridge PhD.