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Katherine Philips was a poet writing during the Comraonwealth and early Restoration Periods. During her brief lifetime (1632-1664), Philips became one of the first woraen in England to publish poetry on secular topics and one of England's first women of letters. However, there is still no reliable edition of her poetry that presents. This edition consists of three introductory chapters followed by the text. The first introductory chapter presents a brief biography of Philips. The second chapter is a critical introduction to the poetry that briefly explores Philips' use of various genres, themes, motifs, and influences. This chapter also discusses Philips' society of friendship. The third chapter is a general textual introduction that outlines editorial procedure and describes the artifacts collated in the edition. This chapter also analyzes Philips' raethod of circulating her poems and the complex relationships among the artifacts. The section following the three introductory chapters is the text of the edition which contains 138 poems by Katherine Philips, including the translations fron French and Italian, the act songs fron Pompey, and Philips' juvenalia and dubia. Each poem contains a three-part textual apparatus: a brief textual introduction, the text of the poem with emendations noted, and a historical collation of the substantive variants her complete canon and that presents her texts as near as possible to the author's originals. The first edition, published in 1664 shortly before her death, was a pirated one, and the 1667 edition, prepared by her literary executor, shows significant editorial intrusion. Other seventeenth-century editions were raerely reprints of the 1667 edition. The purpose of this edition, then, is to provide the coraplete canon of Katherine Philips' poetry in a reliable text that is as near as possible to what the author originally wrote.