Margaret Ferguson (Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California--Davis. She is author of Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (2003) and Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (1984). She is coeditor of Feminism in Time, Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law, Literacies in Early Modern England and a critical edition of Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam.