The Anthologist is a project in progress at the CRC Humanities Computing Studio. The goal of The Anthologist is to create digital anthologies, which allow images of the texts themselves to be displayed. The Early Modern Women Anthologist highlights and displays some of the resources of the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. Selections from two volumes (1664 and 1669) of the Poems of Katherine Philips launch this feature.

Katherine (Oxenbridge) Philips, the Matchless Orinda (1632-1664), was born in London to a prosperous, mercantile, middle-class family and educated at Mrs. Salmon's school in Hackney, where she formed the basis of her society of female friends.Philips early adopted the code name of "Orinda." Admirers soon extended this pseudonym to "the matchless Orinda." In 1648 Katherine Oxenbridge married the fifty-four-year-old widower Colonel James Philips, who was serving as High Sheriff of Cardiganshire, Wales. Orinda balanced her time between London and the Philips estate in Wales, securing influential literary champions in both locations. Poet, translator, and letter writer, Philips died at thirty-two from smallpox, contracted during a visit to London to protest a pirated edition of her poems.

Her translation of Pierre Corneille's La mort de Pompée (1644), which she completed in 1663, provoked enough interest to lead to stage productions that year at the Theatre Royal in Smock Alley in Dublin and, in London, at theatres in Lincoln's Inn Fields and St. James's. The following selections from her poetry, often addressed to identified or coded contemporaries, illustrate some of the ways she opened up interior, autonomous space.

Philips composed 130 poems - dialogues, odes, epitaphs, eulogies, songs - on topics of immediate and interrelated concern: friendship, contentment, happiness, retirement, the soul, and death. Her poetry supplies a kind of cultural barometer. Though married to a Welsh Cromwellian, she does not disguise her sympathies or the breadth of her understanding of Royalist and Parliamentary causes. She boldly makes a religion of female friendship. She also grieves feelingly the death of her only son, born after seven years of childlessness.

Following are photographs of five poems by Katherine Philips taken from the 1664 edition of her Poems in the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library.

After his defeat by Cromwell's forces at Worcester on September 3, 1651, Charles II fled to the Continent. Philips invokes the defeats of Pompey, who fled to Egypt after Pharsalus, and Samson, who grinds at the Philistine prison house in Gaza (Judges 16. 21-30).

"Lucasia," Mrs. Anne Owen of Orielton, West Wales, is the subject of over twenty poems. Henry Lawes, composer and musician, was praised in verse by both Philips and Milton; Lawes wrote the music for Milton's mask, Comus.

Henry Vaughan, Welsh poet and doctor, shared Philips's Royalist sympathies. He added the title "Silurist" to his name in honour of the Celts (Silures) who once lived near his birthplace in Wales. His poetry expresses religious attitudes through Baroque symbolism.

Orinda claims she has been inspired and guided by Lucasia's soul.

When one of the earliest members of Orinda's society of friendship, "Rosania" (Mary Aubrey), married William Montagu, Philips was not informed or invited to the wedding; hence, "friendship's injury."

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