1. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf invented the now famous figure of Judith Shakespeare in an attempt to explain the absence from early modern literary history of a female equivalent of the Bard. The desperately unhappy life Woolf imagines for Shakespeare's talented but deprived and abused sister conveys her conviction 'that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at'.

2. Woolf's story of feminine creativity smothered by a brutal patriarchal society has cast a long shadow over the academic project of recovering the history of women's writing in Britain. It contributed to the development, in the 1980s, of an early modern women's literary history that focused overwhelmingly on oppression - on the restrictions and exclusions imposed on women by a society that required them to be 'chaste, silent and obedient' and enforced submission to its dictates through the threat of public censure. While it is undeniable that early modern ideologies of gender possessed real coercive power, more recent studies by feminist historians and literary scholars have illuminated the different ways in which women resisted, challenged and manipulated them. Moreover, as Margaret Ezell pointed out in her ground-breaking book Writing Women's Literary History (1993), the portrayal of early modern Englishwomen simply as victims of an unassailable patriarchy colluded, however unwittingly, in their silencing. It certainly helped to produce a picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers as 'rare and eccentric creatures' that obscured women's extensive involvement in coterie literature and manuscript circulation during a period when 'to publish was the exception for both men and women' (Ezell, 42,34). Ezell's pioneering work on women's manuscript culture belongs to a cross-disciplinary revisionist project (which includes studies like Elaine Hobby's Virtue of Necessity and Amy Erickson's Women and Property in Early Modern England) that over the past 10 years or so has fostered a more nuanced understanding of early modern women's lives and works - one that takes on board the fact of their subordination without ignoring their significant contributions to the cultural, political and economic life of their society.

3. Attending to Early Modern Women brings together work by feminist literary critics, historians and art historians that amply demonstrates the advances made in recent years in the field of early modern women's studies. Like its precursor volume, Attending to Women in Early Modern England (1994), the book records the proceedings of a conference on early modern women sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Held in April, 1994, the Attending to Early Modern Women conference enlarged its scope to include continental European women but retained its predecessor's commitment to multi- and interdisciplinary approaches. The book, like the conference from which it emerges, is divided into four parts: Our Subjects, Our Selves; Women's Places; Placing Women; and Teaching a Gendered Renaissance. (It is, incidentally, a rare pleasure to encounter an academic book that takes teaching seriously enough to devote an entire section to it.) Each of the four parts combines a number of plenary papers with summary reports on the workshops that followed the plenary sessions.

4. The research presented in both formal papers and workshops charts a collective move away from the models and assumptions of earlier work in the field. As Natalie Zemon Davis comments in her keynote address, recent research on early modern women by scholars from diverse disciplines shares a determination to look not only at 'hierarchies, exclusions, and dominations', but also at women's 'resourcefulness and resistance' (35). In their workshop on 'Gendered Spaces in Early Modern England', the historians Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson exemplify this approach; they challenge 'modern scholars who describe seventeenth-century gender relations solely in terms of the dominant discourse', arguing instead that early modern Englishwomen should be seen as agents who effectively resisted and revised the gendered script imposed upon them (182). The title of another workshop - 'The Traffic In/By Women' - points to a comparable revisionist impulse; in this case, the target is Gayle Rubin's seminal essay 'The Traffic in Women', which is here modified to allow consideration of early modern women's roles as producers and dispensers of goods as well as objects of exchange between men. In a workshop devoted to 'Reading Early Modern Women's Letters', women's conformity to contemporary ideals of femininity is interpreted as evidence not simply of subjection but also of the ways in which women of the period exploited accepted models of conduct in order to gain a measure of power and influence in their communities. Catharine Randall comes to similar conclusions in her paper 'Positioning Herself: A Renaissance-Reformation Diptych', in which she shows that even the most unpromising material - in this case Charlotte de Mornay's memoir of her Calvinist statesman husband Philippe - can reveal traces of female agency: a text that looks on one level like a classic instance of feminine self-effacement can be read on another in terms of the authority de Mornay claims as recorder and editor of her husband's life. The editors' comment on the material presented in the section Women's Places aptly summarises the complexity of the view of early modern women which emerges from the book as a whole: 'No women's places were unambiguously liberating or unambiguously oppressive' (15).

5. Attending to Early Modern Women provides the academic reader with a valuable account of its contributors' interrogations and revisions of interpretive models and strategies. David Underdown's essay uses the court scandals of the early seventeenth century to present a case for moving gender from the margins to the centre of the study of early Stuart politics. In Underdown's view, the scandals of the reigns of James I and Charles I suggest that contemporary conceptions of gender, in particular widespread fears of witchcraft and sorcery, contributed significantly to the political tensions of the pre-Civil War years - an aspect of early seventeenth-century history ignored by Whig, revisionist and post-revisionist historians alike. The development of effective methods for the recovery of early modern women's voices is, not surprisingly, a central preoccupation of the book. In an essay dedicated to rectifying the 'invisible invisibility' of minority women, Mary Elizabeth Perry presents a fascinating study of three moriscas in early modern Spain (women from Muslim families forced to convert to Christianity) who had the misfortune to come before the Inquisition. The Inquisition documents record the women's words, but Perry reminds us that these records need to be read carefully, with an awareness 'that they derive their meaning from a context of power that may or may not be apparent' (65). The art historian Corine Schleif examines the problems involved in challenging a male-dominated canon, and argues that foregrounding the collaborative nature of artistic production in the workshops of late medieval cities will help to retrieve the contributions of workshop wives, widows and daughters erased by the great-master narrative of art history.

6. The volume editors clearly attach considerable importance to the summaries of the conference workshops. They include 31 of them in the book in an attempt to convey to the reader 'the dynamic multivocal nature of the conference' (10). This attempt is only partly successful. For the reader, the workshop reports make clear the full scope of the research currently being undertaken in early modern women's studies. They also help to stimulate further research by identifying the kinds of questions that might profitably be asked of a particular topic or text. However, the summaries are often too brief to capture either the content of the organisers' presentations or the liveliness of the discussions they presumably provoked. We are told, for example, that in the workshop on 'Prostitution and Class' 'Margo Hendricks analyzed the importance of misrecognition in Aphra Behn's representation of prostitutes' (186). This manages to tell us very little about the presentation of an important critic of early modern women's drama. Perhaps the editors of subsequent volumes in the series should consider presenting fewer and longer workshop reports that might better translate the informal pleasures of the workshop into print.

ANITA PACHECO
UNIVERSITY OF HULL