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In a letter to Charles Cotterell on 18 March 1662, Katherine Philips reported her reception of an elegy in French by Henriette de Coligny, relating that it was: "One of the finest Poems of that nature I ever read'. She identifies for particular praise the ideas and style of the French original: "the Thoughts are great and noble, and represent to the Life the vastness of her excellent Soul; the Language is pure, and hardly to be parallell'd'.¹ Philips's letter unfurls two layers of international reception: Cotterell's receipt and endorsement of the poem as well as her own. This is a single case of the cross-channel circulation and critique of a woman poet. But we know that Coligny was widely read in other countries. Her Poésies (Paris, 1666) is listed in 10 per cent of the eighteenth-century Dutch library catalogues analysed by Alicia Montoya.² The WomenWriters database (described below) yields further references: her authorial reputation is alluded to in one eighteenth-century Russian, one Dutch and five French sources; her Poésies in one eighteenth-century and one early twentieth-century source.³ This chapter proposes some preliminary methodologies for researching the reception of early modern women's writing on a large scale, in order to open up a transnational perspective on its circulation and influence.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137342430_10

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