SOURCE: Beilin, Elaine V. “Piety and Poetry: Isabella Whitney, Anne Dowriche, Elizabeth Colville, Rachel Speght.” In Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance, pp. 87-117. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Beilin focuses on the allegorical dream in Speght's Mortalities Memorandum, which, she argues, is radical in its assumption that women have the right to acquire knowledge and the ability to teach all humanity.

… Rachel Speght's self-consciousness as a literary woman manifests itself both in the subject of her first work, A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), a defense of women written in direct response to Joseph Swetnam's Araignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant Women and in the persona of her second, a poem, Mortalities Memorandum, with a Dreame Prefixed (1621). In the dream portion of this second work, Speght presents an allegorized version of the struggles of an avowedly pious woman to gain access...