A Mother’s Spiritual Dialogue, Meditations, and Elegies

Client: Iter Press (2023)

Project: A Mother’s Spiritual Dialogue, Meditations, and Elegies by Mary Carey; edited by Pamela S. Hammons

Lady Mary Carey examined her life and expressed her views in a handwritten manuscript created for self-reflection and restricted audiences of family and friends rather than for print publication. Her poetry and prose, composed and revised between 1650 and 1658, were important enough to her inner circle that her autograph manuscript was copied in a fair hand in 1681. In addition to providing us with key insights into women’s multidimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century in England, Carey teaches us a great deal about a woman’s deepest emotional and spiritual states while confronting the hardships of life—from the fears of childbearing to the sorrows over child loss to the terrors of war.

As part of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, Carey’s work has been carefully edited and annotated by Pamela S. Hammons, Professor of English and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami, who specializes in early modern English and medieval literature, manuscript culture, poetry, women’s writing, and theories of gender and sexuality.

Service: TEC copy edited the introduction, notes, and bibliography for Iter Press style in usage, punctuation, and spelling; corrected grammar errors; and edited for consistency and clarity. The transcribed text and appendices were carefully read to ensure the editor’s modernizations and regularized spellings, punctuation, and other treatments of the seventeenth-century text were correctly and consistently applied. Following the editor’s review of the edited text, TEC finalized all changes in the manuscript in preparation for production.

“Many thanks, too, to Samantha Rohrig [of The Editing Company] for her precise, detailed copyediting.” — Pamela S. Hammons, Acknowledgments