My Name Was Martha : A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem

Buried away in a commonplace book held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the manuscript of this work was serendipitously discovered last year and is here brought into print for the first time. Entitled "The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth / Widdowe," its features include these:
The poem is one of the first autobiographical works (per se) by anyone in English, and it is certainly one of the first autobiographical poems. The fact that it is by a woman, of course, adds to its importance.
The poem makes one of the most sweeping and radical claims for the right to equal education ever issued in the Renaissance. That this claim is made by a woman, and that it is made so early, serves to heighten the significance of the statement.
This work stands on its own merits as a poem. Unlike a good deal of other "women's verse" from this period, Martha Moulsworth's "Memorandum" needs no apologies as a complex work of art.
In covering the years 1577 to 1632, the poem encompasses some of the most important decades of English history and expresses opinions that would seem to make Moulsworth one of the earliest English advocates of truly equal education. At the same time, however, her poem also suggests a highly complex attitude toward her status in a rigidly patriarchal society, including her relations with her God, her father, and her three successive husbands. The poem offers a complicated mixture of self-assertion and deference, of shrewdness and wisdom, of self-respect and selfless love.
Essays placing the "Memorandum" in its historical, literary, and theoretical contexts follow the text of the poem itself.

Robert C. Evans is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery.