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218 formance history. Thirty-four productions of The Rover are recorded between 1979 and 2001, including one of both parts of the play in 1996, and French and German translations, and there are two new adaptations, including Biyi Bandele’s 1999 RSC production. There are productions of other Behn plays, and five different plays about her. Ms. O’Donnell’s work has contributed to her revival: this second edition provides an indispensable guide, and sets a standard for the bibliographers of other writers. Jane Spencer University of Exeter SUSAN WISEMAN. Conspiracy and Virtue : Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford, 2006. xii ⫹ 384. $99. In the opening chapters that provide an overview of Conspiracy and Virtue, Ms. Wiseman makes it clear that hers is a book not about the improvement of woman’s lot from 1620 to 1688, but about particular women engaged in religion and politics, two spheres then closely intertwined. She starts by examining the use of exemplary women like Lucretia and Arria in seventeenthcentury political discourse, and then, until the middle of her book, she gives almost exclusive attention to anti-Stuart women’s writings before 1660— Brilliana Harley’s letters, the ‘‘prophecies ’’ of Sarah Wight and Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Bradstreet’s fifthmonarchist Tenth Muse. The exception is Lady Anne Clifford, who spends forty-four years in litigation and finally manages to inherit her father’s lands, bringing ‘‘into focus the politicized nature of familial claims.’’ Turning to the Restoration period, Ms. Wiseman examines the works of Lucy Hutchinson, a classical scholar and Independent in religion who wrote the Memoirs of her regicidal husband and constructed him as an embodiment of ‘‘republican virtue.’’ In her elegies informed by a ‘‘poetics of desolation,’’ Hutchinson also cast her husband as a ‘‘martyr,’’ even though he had been pardoned in 1660 and was only sent to prison in 1663 on ‘‘suspicion of conspiracy ,’’ dying there of illness the next year. At this point in the book, Ms. Wiseman turns to Queen Christina of Sweden, but not to any of her writings: she says she will look only at the ‘‘representation’’ of the Queen. Whereas the anti-royalist women all speak for themselves, Christina is reduced to silence. Nor does Ms. Wiseman cite any primary source from the Catholic side, but instead depicts the Swedish Queen’s conversion through the accounts of two Protestant Englishmen , Bulstrode Whitelocke and John Bargrave. The result is that Christina’s change of religion is made to appear as the culmination of her philosophical, religious, and sexual ‘‘libertinism.’’ Yet since Bargrave regarded the city of Rome with ‘‘abhorrence,’’ one cannot help but wonder why his account should be treated as objective. The Swedish Queen also plays a silent part in the section on Margaret Cavendish, whose works Ms. Wiseman describes as increasingly and ‘‘explicitly hostile to Catholicism .’’ One of these is The Blazing World (1666), where a libertine Empress is said to be modeled on Queen Christina because of her ‘‘very overt transgressions of decorum (not least in abandoning her Lutheran kingdom for Rome).’’ It is astonishing to see libertinism , the violation of ‘‘decorum,’’ and the renouncing of a crown for religion’s sake placed here on the same plane. After this, Ms. Wiseman discusses the 219 works of Elizabeth Jekyll and Mary Love, who fused politics and religion in their writings of the 1660s to turn the Presbyterian minister Christopher Love into a martyr for the royal cause. Love’s trial and execution for treason in 1651 was significant because his death ended the ‘‘clerical resistance’’ to Cromwell. In a section on the ‘‘Martyrs’’ of the ‘‘Restoration Period,’’ Ms. Wiseman also discusses the sufferings of antiroyalist Alice Lisle, who was condemned at the Bloody Assizes of 1685 for harboring a traitor after the battle of Sedgmoor. Strangely, though, she passes over in silence the sufferings of the royalist women Elizabeth Cellier and Queen Catherine of Braganza, who were both falsely accused in the pretended Popish Plot—with Cellier ending up three times in the pillory and also spending four years in prison. The final chapter deals with Anne Halkett, Rachel Russell, and Aphra Behn. Ms. Wiseman remarks that Halkett , in her...

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