Revisionist in scope, by focusing on national comparison and contrast rather than primarily gender-inflected women’s literary history, this project seeks to overturn critical commonplaces current in the field of early modern women’s writing.
- Are common poetic genres visible across the geographical reach of the project?
- Are any poetic forms and/or genres unique to the any of the nations involved in this study, such as the waulking-song (òran luaidh) in the Scottish Gaelic song tradition?
- Are there connections between 'Celtic' and 'Anglophone' traditions?
- Did women poets writing from various geographical locations have an awareness of other women poets, either within their own culture or further afield?
- How does a study of women’s poetry in these comparative linguistic and comparative contexts change how scholars have written about the concept of ‘authorship’ for women?
- In what ways did linguistic difference affect modes of dissemination and/or forms of publication (including manuscript/scribal transmission and publication)?
- What prominence should we attribute to linguistic difference as opposed to metrics (strict/free-metre) in evaluating women’s poetry?
- How was bardic culture different in Ireland Scotland and Wales, and how did this impact on women’s poetry in these different locations?
- To what extent is Anglophone material independent of respective native ‘bardic’ literary cultures’?
- Do women poets of a specific class write poetry which cuts across geographical and linguistic boundaries?
- Did women poets of the past subscribe to a national sense of identity or was their experience of space and place more, or equally, informed by local, familial, and/or religious attachment?
- Is it possible to speak of pan-Gaelic or pan-Celtic allegiance between women poets in this period or do national, political, social and religious differences divide them?
- How does a study of women poets in Ireland, Scotland and Wales challenge the accepted canon of women poets from the period 1400 to 1800?