Elizabeth Joscelin. 2000. The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Childe. Ed. Jean LeDrew Metcalfe. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. x+135 pp. ISBN 0-8020-4694-0. £28.

1. Each of these well-presented and carefully compiled volumes of prose by and about early modern women constitutes a valuable contribution to the rapidly expanding field of the study of early modern women. Both will form very useful additions to personal and institutional libraries, as each makes available new texts or expanded extracts from important material not previously widely accessible. Both volumes are designed to serve students and scholars well, in different ways. While increasing numbers of primary texts by and about early modern women are becoming available in electronic form on the Internet, thoughtfully conceived comparative published editions such as these remain an important resource for teaching, study and the general reader.

2. Lay by Your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England 1500-1700 is a generous anthology of prose extracts, crammed full of good things. It comprises an interesting and varied selection of very substantial extracts from published and manuscript prose texts by early modern women, and by early modern men on the subject of women. It distinguishes itself as a very useful teaching anthology, offering a range of excellent opportunities for comparative work. The fifty extracts are organised chronologically, with a span of nearer 160 years than the somewhat misleading title dates given. The anthology does not in fact include any late medieval writing, but effectively observes 1550 as the usual earliest parameter of early modern women's writing; only Richard Hyrde's translation of Vives' Instruction of a Christen Woman (1530) is earlier. The last and latest piece is Aphra Behn's translation of Brilhac's Agnes de Castro (1688).

3. The selection is deliberately wide-ranging in terms of genre; in an effort to challenge readers' expectations, the editors have included 'witchcraft pamphlets, letters and other manuscript material, prophetic texts, practical books and petitions, as well as the more widely recognised genres of prose fiction and autobiography' (13). Some of the women writers included are familiar: Mary Wroth, Anna Trapnel, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn. Others are much less so: Anne Wheathill, Frances Cooke, Susanna Bell, Elizabeth Gaunt, and the mix is invigorating. It is a strength of the anthology that even where well-studied authors are included, they are often represented by less familiar texts such as Mary Sidney's translation of Philippe de Mornay's A Discourse of Life and Death. The inclusion of Mary Rowlandson's A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson (1682) is particularly pleasing as a step towards breaking down an artificial historical divide in this early period between 'American' and 'English' literature. Like her contemporary Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson was almost certainly born in England, emigrating in her youth. Mary Rowlandson's dramatic and sensational narrative is a text familiar to American students, but insufficiently studied on courses on early modern women's writing in Britain. One somewhat surprising omission from the rich selection here, however, is the prolific mystical writer Jane Lead (c.1624-1704).

4. A brief introduction (1-17) summarises the critical and methodological principles employed, briefly addressing contextual issues such as education, law, theology, translation, self-censorship, religious controversy, early modern 'feminism' and authorship. Thereafter, the bulk of the volume is taken up with the texts themselves. The textual editing rationale (21-2) is commendably clear and detailed; texts are reproduced in 'old spelling' with minimal editorial intervention. The critical apparatus to the volume is spare, with few footnotes. Whilst this is undoubtedly a very useful collection for those who already have an overview, and want to expand their reading in the field, the limited introductory framework and relative lack of contextual information may not necessarily be ideal for beginners. The select bibliography is reasonably comprehensive, although so much new material is currently being published that printed bibliographies can rapidly become outdated; this is an area where electronic publications undoubtedly lead. Although space was clearly limited, more attention to the publication history of early modern women's writing would have been helpful and interesting. For example, relatively little attention is given to distinguishing between manuscript texts and published texts which went into multiple editions. Thus, the anthology does not draw attention to the inclusion of works by the two best-selling woman writers of the seventeenth-century: The Gentlewomans Companion by Hannah Woolley (1675) and The Midwives Book by Jane Sharp (1671).

5. The editors' open-minded attitude to literary status has led to the welcome and illuminating inclusion of an extensive range of examples of contemporary genres: mothers' advice books, diaries, letters, meditations, pamphlets of the 'woman controversy'. The manuscript documents in particular offer some wonderfully vivid and immediate insights into early modern women's minds and lives. Maria Thynne ends one of her letters (1604-7) to her husband Thomas: 'being as mellencolly as a red herring and as made as a pilchard and as prowde as a peece of argon ling, I salute thy best beloved selfe with the returne of thyne owne wyshe in thy last letter, and so once more fare ever well, my best and sweetest Thomken, and many thousand tymes more than these many thankes 100000000000000000000000000 for thy kind wanton letters' (79). This anthology also pays ample attention to the important early modern genre of translation, often in danger of being overlooked due to modern readers' cultural bias towards original writing. Eight out of the fifty texts are translations, including the first: Hyrde's 'englisshing' of Vives Latin text (1530). Twelve out of the fifty texts are by men; the list includes the key male commentators upon women's lives and behaviour: John Knox, Thomas Salter, Philip Stubbes, Joseph Swetnam.

6. As post-graduate students, the editors of this volume organised the inspiring landmark conference on early modern women Voicing Women: Gender, Sexuality, Writing at the University of Liverpool in 1992. This anthology is further evidence of their continuing instrumental role in allowing early modern women's voices to be heard. It also stands as affirmative evidence of a female critical tradition, since they themselves were supported and encouraged by a previous generation of feminist scholars of early modern writing, as their acknowledgement of Her Own Life: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen as a model indicates.

7. A concern with early modern women's strategies of authorship, and an exploration of the ways in which women might circumvent the social and cultural constraints of the age in order to 'take the Pen' are common to both volumes reviewed here. The rapid development of scholarship on early modern women's writing is signalled by moves over the last two decades through the (re)discovery of texts, to anthologies introducing numerous short extracts, to collections of more substantial extracts such as Lay by Your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen, to the publishing of complete texts in an accessible form. Jean LeDrew Metcalfe devotes her entire volume to a single text-Elizabeth Joscelin (also Jocelin/Joceline/Jocelyn)'s advice book The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Childe (1624).

8. Metcalfe's meticulous and scholarly comparative edition of The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Childe makes an important prose text in the recently critically consolidated genre of mothers' advice books available in a unique format.

9. Metcalfe usefully summarises the publication and critical history of The Mothers Legacy. Importantly, she draws attention to the continuing popularity of the text, in both the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, reminding readers that late-twentieth-century interest in texts by early modern women does not constitute the sole or ultimate recovery. She also highlights different readings of the text, and defines further fruitful areas for critical investigation, such as its importance as 'a devotional work, a piece of social criticism, and an eloquent example of seventeenth-century prose' (14). Metcalfe's valuable, but all too brief remarks here, leave the reader wanting a much fuller and more developed discussion of these issues.

10. Metcalfe's real editorial and scholarly achievement is skilfully to use the bibliographical evidence available to show us how far perceptions of Joscelin's text has been shaped by its paratexts, particularly Goad's biographical 'Approbation' and his subtle, almost imperceptible editing strategies. She uses bibliographical evidence to construct a thought-provoking case study in the transmission and mediation of women's writing from the early modern period by male editors or authorities. This would seem to provide an exemplary model for future scholars and editors working on similarly mediated or authorised published texts.

11. She sets out to demonstrate how 'the survival of both Joscelin's holograph and Goad's copy of The Mothers Legacy offers a rare opportunity to observe the effect of a male editor on a text authored by a woman' (25). Metcalfe's distinctive, ingenious and scholarly editorial approach is designed to give the reader simultaneous comparative access to 3 distinct versions of the text. The parallel text (46-109) consists of a diplomatic transcription of Joscelin's holograph manuscript on the right-hand page, with editor Goad's amendments to his later manuscript copy in footnotes. The text of the published version (taken from the corrected second edition for accuracy) is reproduced on the left hand page. When shorn of Goad's emotive and insistent linking of Joscelin with death: 'The course of her life was a perpetuall meditation of death' (44), her text proper appears significantly more theological in both structure and content. Similarly, the removal of his influential 'Approbation' also serves to highlight the marked stylistic contrast between the tender and intimate tone of Joscelin's dedicatory letter to her husband and the severe tone of her instructions for her child's education: 'dear loue, as thou must be the ouerseer for god sake when <he or she> shall fayle in duty to god or to the world do not let thy fondenes winke at such folly but seuearly correct it' (48). Joscelin characterises herself as a devoted wife and a stern mother here. Notably, this edition also gives the reader access to the text in the only version in which it existed for its author, since she did indeed die in childbirth from this pregnancy as she feared, in 1622.

12. Metcalfe also summarises and intervenes in the critical controversy begun by Goad over the end of the text. By annotating Joscelin's ending Sine fine finis he began the critical tradition that the piece was incomplete, a theory that Metcalfe carefully refutes. She argues that the text fulfils its aim and the logic of its structure, an argument supported in part by Joscelin's use of 'lastly' (108) to introduce her concluding comments. Metcalfe's aim of covering all aspects of The Mothers Legacy is indicated by her inclusion of the extremely interesting illustration from the Dutch edition of 1699 (18). Yet some discussion of the astonishing change of setting and social class would seem to be called for here, since the writing female figure in the Dutch illustration appears to be in a stone prison and is certainly shackled by the ankle.

13. Metcalfe's outstanding achievement in this volume is to supplement the very useful provision of a complete text with new ways of reading and new questions to ask about Elizabeth Joscelin's Legacy.

List of Works Cited

Graham, Elspeth, Hinds, Hilary, Hobby, Elaine and Wilcox, Helen. 1989. Her Own Life: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen. London: Routledge.

GWENO WILLIAMS
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF RIPON AND YORK ST JOHN