This introductory chapter outlines the tensions between mainstream early modern editorial theory and practice, and the demands of early modern women's texts, in particular tensions between prioritization of authorial identity, and the new textualism. The unique temporalities of editing early modern women--its burgeoning at a point synchronous with historicist and textualist literary-critical movements; its (arguable) maturation in the age of digital editing--have generated unique challenges as well as unique solutions and methodologies that have the potential to speak back to the editorial mainstream. This introduction outlines the theoretical interventions offered by the chapters in this volume, directed at a number of key questions. How do we edit texts that have no editorial history, or whose editorial histories are concerned with oddity and exemplarity rather than canonicity? How do we edit texts that do not fit easily into conventional taxonomies of ‘literature’, and what contexts should we present for them? How can textual editing upset conventional hierarchies of literary value, while still finding a readership? And how can digital methods of editing, archiving, and amassing early modern texts facilitate multiple editorial and literary-critical aims?