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HUMANITIES 221 not by her: that Baldhoven had done the same is really no excuse! Apart from these minor irritations, the volume is a monument that will take its place among the major works of neo-Latin. (A.G. RIGG) Elizabeth Joscelin. The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Childe. Edited by Jean LeDrew Metcalfe University of Toronto Press. x, 136. $45.00 Jean LeDrew Metcalfe=s edition of Elizabeth Joscelin=s The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Childe makes a significant contribution to the study of early modern women=s writing. Elizabeth Joscelin was one of several seventeenth-century English women who wrote advice for their offspring, although Joscelin is unique among them in composing spiritual guidance for an unborn child. Joscelin wrote from a concern that she would die in childbirth, and she did perish in 1622, nine days after the birth of her daughter, Theodora. In 1624, Thomas Goad edited and published the manuscript Joscelin had compiled. His edition would be reprinted a number of times thereafter: seven times between 1624 and 1635, with editions appearing later in the seventeenth century, as well as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in England, Scotland, America, and, in translation, in Holland. This popularity makes The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Childe crucial to the history of seventeenth-century women=s writing, but Elizabeth Joscelin is also an important figure in women=s history; her text provides evidence of one woman=s interest in education and religion and of the terms through which early modern motherhood and female authorship were constructed. The strength of this new edition is its juxtaposition of Joscelin=s manuscript with Goad=s printed and edited version of the work. The lefthand page of Metcalfe=s volume offers a transcription of Joscelin=s holographic manuscript, now preserved in the British Library, and will enable access to the text Joscelin actually wrote. The transcription is eminently readable, while also preserving the spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, authorial deletions, and marginal notations of the manuscript. The footnotes also cross-reference a second British Library manuscript, a copy by Thomas Goad, and draw attention to the alterations, many of which would be reproduced in print, which Goad introduced into Joscelin=s text. The righthand page of Metcalfe=s edition offers the corresponding passages from the printed text. The choice as copy text of the second impression B which not only incorporates Goad=s emendations, as the first impression did, but also sometimes reverts to Joscelin=s original B allows Metcalfe to illustrate how the text became a >social text,= the result of the >combined influences of editor, publisher, and printer upon the authorial manuscript.= The juxtaposition of the manuscript and print versions distinguishes Metcalfe=s 222 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 book from the other recent edition of Joscelin=s work, that by Sylvia Brown in Women=s Writing in Stuart England (1999). Brown=s edition is based on Joscelin=s manuscript, and her transcription is more visually correlated to Joscelin=s manuscript; the editor marks the line breaks and paragraph spacing of the original and does not introduce contemporary punctuation, editorial choices which may be preferred by readers interested primarily in manuscript production. Metcalfe=s edition, however, is probably the more readable for not having these features, and she does achieve a balance between accessibility for today=s readers and historical accuracy by enclosing the interpolated contemporary punctuation in square brackets. In addition to making the manuscript text more readily available to scholars interested in Joscelin=s views, Metcalfe=s edition also facilitates the study of the text=s reception and editorial history. The appendix usefully reprints three nineteenth-century introductions to The Mother=s Legacy by Robert Lee (1851), Sarah Hale (1871), and Randall T. Davidson (1894). The parallel texts, along with this appendix, will allow study to proceed on two fronts. Attending to the more authoritative manuscript version, scholars will be able to consider Elizabeth Joscelin=s commitments to religion, maternity, education, and authorship, along with her prose style. The more widely read printed version will also make it possible to analyse Goad=s editorial influence and to consider the social conditions that could make a woman=s writing popular...

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