Renaissance Forum: Volume 3, Number 1, 1998: Elaine Hobby

Helen Wilcox, ed. 1996. Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. xxii + 307 pp. ISBN 0-521-46219-3. Ł35/$54.95 hb. ISBN 0-521-46777-2. Ł12.95/$18.95 pb.

In Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, Helen Wilcox has gathered essays by twelve critics, amongst them some of the most important pioneers of the study of early-modern women's writing. The book is divided into two sections of equal length; the first part, 'Constructing Women', gives more emphasis to historical contexts of women's writing than to the writings themselves, and the second, 'Writing Women', reverses that emphasis. In the main, the readers addressed are undergraduate students of English literature, and academics wishing to incorporate works by women into their curricula. Clear explanations are therefore given, for instance, of the importance of religious doctrine, and religious conflict, in the two centuries at issue, of the role of manuscript circulation and the impact of print culture, and of the formation of the Royal Society. Referencing is thorough, and the contributors are usually meticulous in the guidance they give over the availability (or otherwise) of primary materials in modern editions, and in their accounts of key secondary materials. Each essay also indicates where its issues or texts are discussed from another angle elsewhere in this book. A useful six-page chronology, listing works discussed here alongside 'historical events of particular relevance to women, such as the execution of female martyrs, the women's petition to parliament, and the decree allowing women to act in public theatres', prefaces the book. Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700 therefore deserves the place it will no doubt swiftly acquire on reading-lists and on library shelves.
Chapter 1, by Hilda Smith, examines 'Humanist education and the Renaissance concept of woman', providing an overview of research undertaken both before and since Joan Kelly Gadol famously asked, 'Did women have a Renaissance?'. This is followed by Suzanne Trill's 'Religion and the construction of femininity', which argues that 'the concept "woman" was not particularly affected by religious and political upheavals, and that cultural assumptions about proper feminine behaviour traversed doctrinal boundaries'. Trill deploys material by 'Puritan', Anglican and Roman Catholic authors, citing eulogies of female martyrs, Mary Sidney's translation of the psalms, and Aemilia Lanyer's great poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), as well as the religio-political pamphleteering of female radical sectaries, to produce a sound basis from which a student might begin to explore such works. Valerie Wayne's chapter, 'Advice for women from mothers and patriarchs' is particularly dextrous, combining its summary of medical and theological definitions of women with a good deal of original thinking about the sudden appearance of advice books by women in the 1620s. She deftly demonstrates that 'the mother's advice books are not innocent productions: they were fully embedded in the social and economic relations from which they arose and on which they had some effect'. Chapter 4, by Jacqueline Pearson, has a comparably dialectical approach, examining the gendered metaphors through which reading and writing were discussed, and showing how women's entry into literate culture was aided in part by the economic interests of the emerging book market. Ann Thompson's good survey of women's roles as patrons and in the audience, and their involvement in public entertainments before the arrival of women on the public stage, completes the contextual information provided in the first half of the book. This is followed by a chapter which makes the transition from contexts to women's texts, as Bronwen Price shows the various ways in which Margaret Cavendish's philosophical poems of 1653 refuse or escape the conceptual bounds that excluded women from learning in general, and from scientific endeavour in particular.
The six chapters of the book's second half are mostly divided generically: Ros Ballaster discusses plays ranging from Jane Lumley's translation of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis (c. 1550) to Mary Pix's The Beau Defeated (1700); Elizabeth H. Hageman introduces women's religious and secular poetry; Elspeth Graham addresses 'Women writings and the self'; Betty S. Travitsky surveys the huge range of prose works by women, including fiction, cookery books, religio-political pamphlets, and prose prefaces to verse works in her broad sweep. Travitsky's sweep is in fact so far-reaching that it is difficult for her to talk in detail about any of these texts, and indeed I am not sure that anything is gained by placing such widely differing kinds of work together in a single chapter. Although Hageman's and Graham's tasks might have been less daunting, since the range of material they take responsibility for, though considerable, is less vast, the method adopted by them, of discussing a small number of representative works in some detail, and just mentioning others of similar type, is more likely to stimulate the student reader into independent study. Both Hageman and Graham also offer insights from their own current research, making their chapters the most exciting and pleasurable to read in the volume. Another way of organising a daunting range of material into a manageable argument is demonstrated in Margaret W. Ferguson's 'Renaissance concepts of the "woman writer"'. Ferguson structures her discussion by addressing theoretical questions, such as how gender or authorship might be defined, or the importance of Britain's colonialist activities to an analysis of these works, only deploying textual examples when they can be made to serve the point she seeks to make. The remaining chapter in this section, Helen Hackett's essay 'Courtly writing by women', considers poetry by Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I, amongst others, offering convincing readings of the relationships between these works and their social context; Hackett is, though, rather hazy in some of her footnotes, not always making it clear when she is summarising the work of another critic, and when she is using that as a basis from which to present her own analyses.
There is much to welcome in this book: it is clearly written by critics who are thorough and knowledgeable, and who freely make use of feminist theoretical approaches that include psychoanalytical, literary historical, and Foucauldian, to name just the most popular. There are, though, two startling omissions: Aphra Behn's most famous work, The Rover, is not discussed; the important work of Janet Todd, which has not only stimulated many readings of Behn, but has also made those readings possible by bringing Behn's works back into print, is entirely ignored. Those omissions are baffling; other gaps here offer, instead, a reason to celebrate: so much good feminist research has been undertaken into women's writing from the early-modern period in the last twenty years that it is simply not possible to account for the results of all of it in a book of this length. Thanks to the energy of the authors of this volume, and to that of those they refer to, Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700 can be no more than an introduction to the vibrant field it surveys. Realising this, many of the contributors have gone out of their way to entice their readers into joining the army of scholars. I can hardly wait to see what happens next.

ELAINE HOBBY
LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY