My goal in designing this syllabus has been to expose students to early modern women writers within the canonical "major authors" course model. I have chosen John Donne as the major figure and focus for this upper-level course; accompanying his poems and prose are a mix of contemporaneous male- and female-authored texts (not strictly male-female pairs) which speak to both formal and thematic frameworks of his work. His epithalamion on the occasion of the marriage of Elizabeth and Palatine, for example, is assigned with selections from Spenser's Epithalamion and with Katherine Phillips' "To my Dear Sister C.P. on her nuptials." Donne's tribute to the Countess of Pembroke's translation of the Psalms is assigned with those particular translations as well as with the 1611 King James Version. For suggesting this approach to reading, I am indebted to my colleagues at the Institute; the arrangement allows for inclusion of women's texts in a traditional literature course and encourages a regard for the historical conditions of literary production. In addition to the text-specific comparisons these assignments are designed to elicit, I hope to pursue a more general question connecting Donne and women writers on the syllabus: how does historical biography both inform and plague critical readings of early modern writers?