Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (review)

Using an unusual introductory technique, the reader is drawn into this work through the analysis of the symbolic information incorporated in the portrait of Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset. The portrait establishes the identity, family heritage, cultural legacy and pursuits, and, most importantly considering the remit of the book, the reading and literary habits of Lady Anne.

Edith Snook has produced a work which studies the representations of reading in the writings produced by women from 1540 to 1640. Each chapter concentrates on a specific literary work, contextualising it within the framework of the gendering of the English Reformation, seventeenth-century works of literacy, Catholic women readers and writers, passion, and the reading and writing of secrets in women's written works. Anne Askew and Katherine Parr represent themselves as pious women whilst exposing the gender operations of religious reform in Reformation England. Dorothy Leigh's work is viewed in relation to the maternal voice and its engagement with religious-political issues from outside the public and political conflict. Elizabeth Grymeston offers a different maternal perspective, the debate from a Catholic point of view. Aemelia Lanyer and Mary Wroth explore reading practices through forms of writing which encouraged various types of social relationships, using religious poetry as their main textual form.

Throughout, each printed work is explored as a means of establishing how women represented themselves as readers, how women readers regarded their social status, as well as examining the diversity of women's reading practices. For all these women, reading becomes a technique for authoritative self-invention, enabling them to use the reading material to provide an alternative, almost subliminal, discourse about women's minds. In doing so, their voices and readings move them into spheres from which they are normally excluded: intellectual, political, and literary culture. Documenting women's reading in the Early Modern period shows that the readings were not following social expectations or traditionally accepted readings intended for women.

Spanning the subjective private and the public dynamic, the book encompasses the diverse nature of discourses on reading in the Early Modern world. Writing about reading, women engaged in a process of proposing change, situating their subjective experience of reading within the way reading was practised in Early Modern English society. Many of the texts written by women were published by others and underwent several printings as interest in the debates about faith and reading encouraged a wider readership. Works in which women were involved in the publication process represented reading in a more forceful way, attempting to encourage reader sympathy towards women's writing.

The authors covered in this book often represent themselves as 'unlearned', a term used to disassociate them from the humanist education which was a male realm but only for those who were expected to participate in public life. Education itself was divided into social hierarchies and women were amongst those who were partially literate, those who did not read Latin or Greek but read in English. Women, it was anticipated, needed a less perfect education as they were confined to non-public spheres of life. Social and political power required a different form of education.

The book provides ample evidence of the contribution women writers made to the history of reading. Their presence shaped ideas, developed practical reading literacy, and enabled them to move into the world outside the household. Women writers of the Early Modern period should not be made invisible by lack of reference to their contribution to the history of reading.