1. Writing an encomium to the neo-Latin poet Elizabeth Jane Weston at the time of her death in 1612, Johann Matthias von Wackenfels praises her above the rest of her sex: 'Other girls handle yarn and distaff and spindles, / and tease out the combed threads on their shuttles; / not so you, Weston, sprung from noble blood; instead, / you emulate great men in the deeds you undertake.' Women neo-Latinists of the early modern period tended to attract a hyperbole classifying them as unique, fitter to be worshipped as a tenth muse than compared with other women. But if so, there were more muses than ten. Girls were not educated at grammar schools or (on the whole) at universities, but some managed to gain access to the learned tongues because they were royal, or through the ambitious educational programmes of their relations – often their fathers. Jane Stevenson's forthcoming Women and the Language of Power will chart the large extent of women's participation in neo-Latin scholarly culture, surprising to those scholars who persist in seeing learned discourse as exclusively male. Perhaps, though, there is a good case for seeing Elizabeth Jane Weston as primus inter pares. Many contemporaries placed her among the best Latin authors, ancient and modern: in Thomas Farnaby's Index Poeticus (1634), she appears as one of only seven English authors, as well as being the only woman on the entire list.

2. Weston's time has come again, since this is the second edition of her work within two years. Donald Cheney, one of the editors of this volume, was also responsible for the facsimile reprint of Poëmata and Parthenica issued by Ashgate Press in their series The Early Modern Englishwoman. The prime aim of this series was to improve the availability of women's writing in response to a rapidly swelling scholarly demand; it included only those writings of Weston's which appeared in contemporary printed books authored by her, and its editorial apparatus was minimal. Facsimile reprints are always going to be useful to scholars, but the current volume – the first collected edition of Weston's works, translating the Latin throughout and including a full bibliography – has now superseded it for most purposes.

3. Discussing Weston in his monumental Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, J.W. Binns has remarked on how strange it is that 'the writings of the Anglo-Latin poet best known on the Continent in the early seventeenth century were never printed in England'. Born in Chipping Norton, carried off to Bohemia with her stepfather when young, and turning to Latin verse to win courtly patronage when her family became destitute, Weston can certainly be regarded as deracinated. But in a more positive vein, both her life-story and her writing how a facility in the Latin tongue could enable one to move around Europe, and tell a hard-luck story with assurance. The tropes of any hungry writer, seeking patronage from an early modern aristocrat, take on a new poignancy when voiced by a woman; and Weston's writing is heavily performative, deriving much of its subject matter from her insecure state. Addresing Rudolf II of Prague's advisor Johann Barvitius, for instance, she writes: 'Do not be surprised . . . that an impoverished daughter / (alas!) of an impoverished mother frequents your door. We are obliged to say little, by piety, by sacred Themis, / by Apollo, and by the very Graces and Muses. / But you, have regard for women in distress as is your wont, / and take up our cause, which Themis herself finds just'.

4. How good a poet is she, however? Aesthetic judgements are hard for present-day critics to arrive at when reading neo-Latin poetry of this kind; very few Renaissance scholars – even those who can understand Latin – are willing or able to appreciate the nuances of neo-Latin panegyric, and literal translations, such as the editors of this volume supply, can never give any idea of metrical expertise. But the great merit of these translations is that they enable one to see the epigrammatic neatness of Weston's poetic structures. Her sharp consciousness of a poem's shape enables her to play very successfully with the notion of reversing usual expectations: a topic which is, for obvious reasons, often addressed by women writers in this era. The editors tactfully illuminate Weston's wide range of allusion, and do a very thorough job of identifying her addressees and admirers; to study Weston, even more than with most writers of this date, is to find oneself engaged not just with an individual but with a milieu.

5. Even given the extraordinary fascinations of Weston's life, and the user-friendliness of this painstaking and excellent edition, one wonders if Weston's work will ever become central in the emergent canon of early modern English women's writing – it is simply so much easier to write about Aemilia Lanier or Katherine Philips. But it would be a pity if she continued to be the preserve of neo-Latin specialists – both because of her own talents, and because her career resonates interestingly with current research on how early modern women negotiated their entrance into the public sphere. From early days Weston was cannily aware of how to pre-empt objections to her literary activity, stressing her virginity and playing on her – undoubtedly genuine – motives of destitution and family piety; and it was her combination of linguistic facility with chastity and filial virtue which, more than anything, acted as a spur to other courtly wits. The editors sensibly include a collection of contemporary tributes to Weston, illustrating how successful a bid she made for iconicity – a success which is surely to be seen as part of her considerable poetic talents. Would she, though, have written a trans-European neo-Latin epic if she had been a man?

ALISON SHELL
UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM