Elizabethan

Very little is known of Isabella Whitney's life, other than what she says in her poems. She was a sister of Geoffrey Whitney, who came of a Cheshire family. Having published two volumes of non-religious verse, she is the first secular woman poet in England.

• Craik, Katharine A. "Warner, William (1558/9–1609)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

A standard edition is The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, et al. (9 vols.; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1932-49). A good single-volume edition, without notes, is The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1912).

• Brown, Nancy Pollard. "Southwell, Robert [St Robert Southwell] (1561–1595)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008.

• Nicholls, Mark and Penry Williams. "Ralegh, Sir Walter (1554–1618)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

Edmund Bolton attributed The Arte of English Poesie, published anonymously, to George Puttenham in Hypercritica (composed by Bolton in 1621, published in 1722). Puttenham was the nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot, the maker of the first Latin-English dictionary. Little else is known of Puttenham's life or works.