Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (review)

198 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) that concentrate on social themes. Titled ‘Prints and Patterns’ and ‘Display and Collecting’, these framing chapters consider the ways in which imagery was circulated and reinvented, the shift from manuscript illustrations to printmaking, the use of prints in artists’ workshops, and the changing nature of geographical borders in visual culture during this period. Given the broad scope of this study, it is perhaps inevitable that some topics are considered very briefly and can seem unconvincingly integrated into the book’s overarching themes. A section on images of witchcraft, given a scant two pages at the end of chapter six, on ‘Wild People and Those Outside the Norm’, is perhaps the chief example of this and might have been better left out. However, despite minor failings, the strength of the book undoubtedly lies in its breadth as a survey of a variety of complex material. Grössinger provides a taste of the great richness of printmaking during this period as an artistic and social phenomenon, and helps modern viewers come closer to an understanding of how Early Modern people might have found humour, folly and meaning in these images. Jennifer Spinks Department of History University of Melbourne Hammons, Pamela S., Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. 198; RRP £40.00; ISBN 0754607801. In this study, Pamela Hammons discusses the lyrics of three little-read seventeenth-century women writers, addressing the ways in which each forged a viable poetic voice with which to reappraise and revise her role as a woman within Early Modern society. Tackling the role of women within the religious and social structures of Early Modern England, this study deals with texts previously receiving little or no critical attention. Lyrics by Mary Carey, Katherine Austen and radical sectarian Anna Trapnel are examined alongside works by Milton, Jonson, Shakespeare and others. After a lucid introduction to the scope of the study and the issues at stake, Hammons moves into three chapters dealing with Carey’s poetry on child loss, Trapnel’s religious lyrics and her role as a female prophet, and Katherine Austen’s negotiation of widowhood in her commonplace book known as ‘Book M’, respectively. Each chapter raises important questions about female Reviews 199 Parergon 20.2 (2003) authorship within a society where women were largely restricted to a private and domestic sphere. In considering poetry on child loss, for example, Hammons confronts the paradox of the mother creating verse upon the occasion of the loss of her ‘creation’, her child. Female creativity being culturally defined in physical terms, female-authored child-loss poetry becomes a kind of miscreation which proves difficult for Carey as mother-writer to negotiate, but also a powerful means of defending herself against blame for the death of her child. Chapter Two explores similar contradictions inherent in the role of the female prophet, examining Trapnel’s complicated claim of a public voice via the rhetorical denial of agency and of the ownership of her own words. Poetic Resistance thus asserts that poetry was a means through which women could legitimate their public voices by aligning themselves with powerful and accepted male traditions. Reworking the canticles in A Voice of the King of Saints and Nations, Trapnel represents herself as a psalmist in order to legitimate her public voice. Reading Trapnel’s religious lyrics as strategically self-effacing, Hammons perhaps neglects comparison with early women writers such as Mary Sidney, but does highlight weaknesses of feminist criticism which presumes a direct and intentional relationship between the female writer/self and the femaleauthored text. Instead, Poetic Resistance reveals important connections between the denial of subjectivity, the forging of a female poetic voice, and the production and circulation of female-authored texts. Challenging previous dismissals of Trapnel’s poetry as religious ‘raving’, Hammons argues that the apparent possession by the Holy Spirit was a deliberate part of Trapnel’s self-figuration; a means by which Trapnel could preach without appearing to preach, speak publicly while protecting herself from accusations of subversive behaviour. In the final chapter of this study, Hammons moves from the religious...