Motivated to write a historical poem by intense religious conviction and a mission to reform poetry, Anne Dowriche was one of a small number of women who published poetry in the sixteenth century. In her preface she states that she wrote The French History (1589) to edify, comfort, and stir up her Protestant readers to "care, watchfulness, zeal, and ferventness in the cause of God's truth," choosing poetry in order to restore its "credit" and to move her audience. Her twenty-four-hundred-line poem, an ardently Protestant account of the French civil wars, is framed as a narrative history, a providential justification of the Reformed church, and a political diatribe against tyranny. Through her poem Dowriche participated vigorously in contemporary religious and political controversies, and although some of her verses lumber along, she created vivid and memorable scenes and characters.

Anne Edgcumbe Dowriche was the daughter of Sir Richard Edgcumbe and...