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  • Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England
  • Katherine R. Larson (bio)
Edith Snook. Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England Ashgate. x, 188. US $89.95

Edith Snook's Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England offers a compelling reassessment of women's participation within the history of reading. Grounding her analysis on the assertion that the writing and reading practices of early modern women represent crucial models for gendered intervention within religious, political, racial, and class discourses, Snook examines the 'cultural negotiations' enacted by women's representations of reading. She concludes that writing about reading functioned as an important vehicle for 'authoritative self-invention' for women that influenced power struggles and social relationships in the English nation, church, and household.

The excellence of Snook's carefully constructed study owes much to her methodology. Each chapter develops an intertextual dialogue between selected female-authored texts and contemporaneous writings to illustrate the impact of women's representations of reading on wider cultural discourses. The first three chapters highlight the role of a feminine 'rhetorical stance' – primarily as unlearned readers and mothers – in cultivating Protestant and Catholic scriptural reading practices. Aware that her argument could risk defending an essentialist female 'voice,' Snook rather points to the strategic potential of feminine self-construction. In chapter 1, she argues that Anne Askew's self-representation as a skilled biblical interpreter in her Examinations and Katherine Parr's self-portrayal [End Page 390] as an authoritative 'grace-filled reader' in Lamentacion of a Synner help to negotiate the conflict over vernacular Scripture reading in sixteenth-century England. John Foxe, John Bale, and Thomas Bentley incorporate both stances into their influential defenses of Protestantism. Focusing on Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing, Snook contends in chapter 2 that Leigh elucidates the relationship between domestic reading practices, literacy, and good governance within church and state through the gendered trope of domestic labour. Situated outside the public sphere, the maternal voice offers Leigh a position from which to question government and to advocate religious reform. Ventriloquizing the maternal voice, Nicholas Breton's The Mother's Blessing similarly 'perform[s] femininity' in order to challenge institutional authority. In chapter 3, Snook explores the function of the maternal voice within the commonplace tradition, reading Elizabeth Grymeston's Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives alongside a manuscript compiled by Thomas Chaffyn, one of Grymeston's own readers, and a miscellany owned by Anne Campbell. Snook argues that Grymeston relies on citation and a maternal voice to build 'a stance of public loyalty to England and private faith in Catholicism.' In each case, Snook's readings are persuasive and insightful, while the intertextual relationships she develops between her chosen texts reinforce the politico-religious impact of gendered depictions of reading.

The final two chapters of the work shift to address the relationships Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth create with their chosen audiences through representations of reading. In chapter 4, Snook argues that Lanyer 'recuperates women's eyes as instruments of knowledge' in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Lauding her aristocratic dedicatees as skilled readers, Lanyer grants them the authority to desire and to understand Christ. Snook reads Lanyer's poems alongside Elizabeth Middleton's The Death and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a text displaying a similar defence of 'affective knowledge' that pushes women beyond the private sphere to public action. Finally, Snook provides a judicious analysis of the secret and ciphered writing and reading practices pervading Wroth's Urania and her epistolary exchanges with her readers. For Wroth, texts represent 'a site of social, as well as linguistic struggle.' Her ciphers underscore her fear of readers' misinterpretation or violation of exclusive coterie texts even as they validate aristocratic women as the 'true interpreters' of coded writings. While Wroth is more hesitant to grant authority to her readers than the other writers featured in Snook's study, she, like Lanyer, strives 'to engender better readers of women's texts.'

By calling attention to the varied ways in which early modern women writers engaged with and affected 'cultural politics' through their written representations of reading, Snook's study stands as a valuable contribution to...

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