In Tudor and Stuart Britain, women writers took active roles in negotiating cultural ideas and systems to gain power, in participating in politics through writing, in shaping the aesthetics of genre, and in fashioning feminine gender, despite constraints on women. Through the lens of cultural studies, the authors explore the ways in which women of this era worked to actually create culture. Articles cover five areas: women, writing and material culture; women as objects and agents in reproducing culture; women's role in producing gender; popular culture and women's pamphlets; and women's bodies as inscriptions of culture. Papers include women's poetry and the Tudor-Stuart system of gift exchange, class perspective in Pembroke's ""Psalmes"", and questions of balance in the sonnets of Mary Stuart.