This chapter addresses the limitations posed by contemporary scholarly ideology for interpreting texts written by early modern women and the ways in which the work of editing may both correct and illuminate dominant critical paradigms. Using the two extant editions of Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers (1574 and 1582) as a case study, along with theoretical insights from M. M. Bakhtin, it reverses the criticism that Tyrwhit’s sixteenth-century male editor, Thomas Bentley, altered her work by demonstrating Bentley’s careful preservation of the text. The Tyrwhit prayerbook also raises questions of biography and genre, particularly the need to contextualize antecedent rather than subsequent works, to ask “to what was Tyrwhit and other women writers responding” rather than “to what did their work give rise?” In addressing these questions, the chapter offers a taxonomy of prayerbooks, reflects on the larger question of what status women held in the religious discourse of the sixteenth century, and speaks to issues of revision, collaboration, and the production of an “ideal text” that are addressed in other essays in this volume.