Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature, and: Religion, Reform and Women's Writing in Early Modern England (review)

These two new monographs are a welcome sign of the maturity of scholarship on earlier women's writing in English. They build on the efforts of an earlier generation of scholars whose painstaking archival work brought these previously ignored texts back into our journals and classrooms and who established a critical vocabulary that enabled the discussion to flourish. Andrea and Coles are conscious of that heritage and employ it to make bold claims that connect women's writing and women's history to wider cultural trends.

Bernadette Andrea's Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature is a significant addition to the field of early modern women's writing and an important correction to an even newer field, the study of early modern European engagements with Islam and the near east in this period. Andrea argues that studies of English encounters with the Islamic world have paid too little attention to the role of gender and specifically of women writers in this period. Bringing these two approaches together requires fluency in multiple theoretical perspectives, and the introduction succinctly and cogently outlines the issues at stake. Andrea points out the anachronism of applying postcolonial theory to England's precolonial past, and in the early chapters, she establishes that the English were by no means the dominant power in earlier exchanges with the east. In the later chapters, however, Andrea implicitly applies aspects of postcolonial theory to texts that postdate English colonial activity, and some discussion of the theoretical nuances would have been helpful. She also tends to rely on an outdated perception of women's writing that oversimplifies the oppression of women; it is a pity she could not have read Coles's analysis of the agency of Protestant gentlewomen, for example, before depicting Lady Mary Wroth as oppressed and silenced.

Andrea's introduction implies that the earlier texts discussed in the first three chapters constitute a sustained engagement by English women with the Islamic world, but on further reading the material turns out to be rather thin: only a few letters between Queen Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Queen Mother Safiye, none of which are reproduced in full here; the brief appearance of the fictional Sophy of Persia in the second part of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, which Andrea tries, not entirely convincingly, to identify with the historical Lady Teresa Sampsonia Sherley; and three Quaker women, only one of whom wrote about an Islamic engagement. The title Women and Islam begins to seem something of a misnomer, although that may be the responsibility of Cambridge University Press's preference for titles that use search-engine friendly key words. All of these texts are worth studying, and Andrea sets them deftly alongside one another and a wealth of contextual material, but the whole might have been better served by an approach that acknowledged that these textual encounters between Englishwomen and the Islamic world were rare and isolated. The fourth and fifth chapters on Delarivier Manley's plays and prose fiction build on a much stronger textual foundation and could usefully have been expanded.

Kimberly Anne Coles's Religion, Reform and Women's Writing in Early Modern England covers much more familiar territory but makes equally bold and significant claims. Coles considers how "the idea of the religious female became an authorising figure and a literary tool—one that could be manipulated by men and women alike" in the second half of the sixteenth century (p. 2). She offers persuasively argued analyses of several well-studied texts, including Anne Askew's trial narrative, Katherine Parr's prayers, Anne Lok's sonnet sequence and translation of Calvin, the Sidney Psalms, and Aemilia Lanyer's passion poem Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. She also employs a wide range of contextual material, from...