1. Continuing to build the scholarship on English female poets from the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, this essay collection is a helpful, if sometimes uneven, resource. The volume includes coverage of well-known authors, such as Mary Wroth, Mary Sidney, Æmilia Lanyer, Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, and Anne Askew, and less familiar ones, notably Katherine Austen, Damaris Masham, and Ann Lock (discussed alongside Mary Sidney in Margaret Hannay's essay 'Early Modern Englishwomen's Psalm Discourse'. The book explores ways in which these early modern women construct themselves and their gender in their writings, adapt literary conventions, and respond to their cultural settings, as well as ways in which, at times, they were depicted by others. The latter topic is particularly dealt with in Jeslyn Medoff's well-done study ' "Very Like a Fiction": Some Early Biographies of Aphra Behn'. A four-part thematic structure provides the organization for the anthology: Strategies and Contexts, Poetic Conventions and Traditions, Negotiating Power and Politics, and Writing the Female Poet, although these categories do tend to overlap at times.

2. Write or Be Written supplements other resources in the growing field of early modern women's studies, differing from some, such as Lay by Your Needles Ladies: Writing Women in England 1500-1700, edited by Suzanne Trill and Kate Chedgzoy (reviewed in Renaissance Forum 5.1) by concentrating wholly on analysis, rather than including primary sources. The strict focus of this particular book, moreover, is poetical works. Probing what it meant for a woman to write, circulate, and even publish poetry in the roughly 150 years of coverage, the volume recognizes the complexity of cultural power relations, rather than considering these females all victims of a patriarchal system. The layers of the poets' economic, religious, political, educational, marital and social status are examined along with their gendered identities. An emphasis on deep contextualization, by now a commonplace of most pre-contemporary studies, forms the theoretical subtext of the essays.

3. There are scant weaknesses in this collection. Some of the essays are brief forays into their subjects, teasing the reader by introducing a provocative topic, then letting her down by failing to fully explore the issue. For example, Helen Wilcox's ' "First Fruits of a Woman's Wit": Authorial Self-Construction of English Renaissance Women Poets' begins with visual representations of women writing in the early modern period, including two paintings as examples, but then veers off into written metaphorical constructions in dedicatory poems. While the discussion of verbal iconography is interesting, more coverage of the visual would have been appreciated. The scope of writers covered is also somewhat unbalanced. Early eighteenth-century poet Anne Finch is dealt with only briefly, considered alongside of Æmilia Lanyer in Jacqueline Pearson's ' "An Emblem of Themselves, in Plum or Pear": Poetry, the Female Body and the Country House', whereas discussions of Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips each fill two complete essays. Margaret Cavendish receives only the briefest of mentions, as part of Wilcox's work.

4. That said, the essays are well researched and presented, ushering in more sophisticated theoretical explorations of the subjects and their poetry than has sometimes been attempted in earlier works on women from the era. Appelt's cogently written introduction clearly presents an apology for the collection as a whole, as well as highlighting key issues of the individual essays. Many of the contributors make unique observations on the women's writing, drawing together texts and contexts in original ways. For example, Andrew Shifflett connects Katherine Philips's writings on friendship to Thomas Hobbes's description of power relations in Leviathan. Joan Pong Linton demonstrates Anne Askew's anticlerical ballad as fitting within the ploughman tradition, as seen in William Langland's and other early reformers' works. Pamela Hammons's essay on Katherine Austen's 'Book M', a manuscript collection of her works, presents an illuminating view of how her gender, Anglicanism, and Royalist politics shape Austen's later seventeenth-century writings, although Hammons's numerous footnotes are necessary for the reader less familiar with Austen's works to make complete sense of the findings.

5. The essays are often in apt dialogue with each other as well. Shannon Miller's work on the importance of Mary Sidney's original poetry counterpoints Hannay's coverage of Sidney's Psalm translations. Anne Russell's study of Aphra Behn's published miscellanies rounds off the discussion of manuscript circulations of Katherine Austen's works. Other essays re-evaluate previous scholarship, such as Margaret Ezell's examination of the complex material realities that shaped Damaris Masham and her work, contrary to those who would group Masham's ideology wholly with the more abstract philosophy of the Cambridge Platonists. Bronwen Price's essay on Katherine Philips probes the ways the poet constructs and uses 'the rhetoric of innocence' in ways that are not so innocent – knowingly challenging political ideas and notions of femininity.

6. Write or Be Written is a useful addition to Renaissance and seventeenth-century literary and women's studies collections. By continuing the critical conversation, it illustrates that there is still much to be investigated and written on early modern women and their works.

CAROL BLESSING
POINT LOMA NAZARENE UNIVERSITY, SAN DIEGO