When writers in the first half of the seventeenth century wanted to describe what possessed them while composing their prose or poems, they would typically name a melancholy muse or temperament. The best-known illustration of this creative impulse was the female figure of Melancholia portrayed in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia 1 (1514), described in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) as “a sad woman leaning on her arme with fixed lookes, … halfe mad, … and yet of a deepe reach, excellent apprehension, judicious, wise and witty.” The poets and scholars who professed that they could identify with her somber, preoccupied bearing would immediately be recognized by their audiences if not as geniuses, then as pretending toward such a status. Although the familiar figure of Melancholia was female, neither Burton nor any of the other theorists on the subject imagined there could be any women writers identifying with the forms of introspective intellectualism and inventiveness that she represented.