Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England by Julie Crawford (review)

Taken from a letter by John Donne considering whether the Countess of Bedford would be a “proper Mediatrix” to “present his case to the necessary people” (1), the term “mediatrix” signifies more than an intermediary; its honorific application to the Virgin Mary invests this function with special agency. This term is used to represent four women — Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Margaret Dakins Hoby; Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford; and Mary Sidney Wroth — as “politically and culturally powerful, but with an edge of oppositionalism; at once a patron to be honored and a force to be reckoned with; a maker of texts and a maker of careers” (2). Crawford foregrounds the importance of their literary and cultural contributions primarily within the political domain dominated by the militant Protestantism of the Sidney–Herbert faction. Each exerted influence through her estate — Wilton, Hackness, Twickenham, and Loughton respectively. Rather than “idealized retreats” (22), these properties served as centers of political activism promoting the rights of the nobility in opposition to absolute monarchal rule. This perspective is important; just as important, however, is the high value Crawford places on collaboration. These women actively engaged in the production of texts not only through their own writing, but also in their roles as patrons, dedicatees, and readers. They exerted formative influence over the literary works that were written or circulated on their estates.

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, presents the best case for agency in collaboration. As demonstrated by the presence of her name in the title of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and further revealed in her 1593 edition, Mary Sidney Herbert played an active role in the composition and circulation of her brother’s romance. In her translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, she enacted a different form of agency in the presentation of Cleopatra as a constant woman. As suggested in its title, “Female Constancy and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia,” this is in fact the focus of the chapter, and the political meaning associated with female constancy represents one of the most interesting arguments of the book. Exposing a political analogy between women and political subjects, the constancy of Philoclea and Pamela in the revised Arcadia represents coded advice for persons of either gender living under an absolute monarchy. Rather than the quietism or (worse) masochism attributed to female constancy, Crawford draws on the Christianized neostoicism of Justus Lipsius to represent constancy as “an active achievement of will, and thus as a statement of power” (45). The rape of the princesses advised by Cecropia to Amphialus figures as monarchal tyranny, and the princesses’ equilibrium in the face of death creates female constancy as “the supreme representation of aristocratic virtue” (77). Moreover, the “deciphering imperative” (37) points to a contemporary political domain. Asserting the structural importance to the Arcadia of topical connections between its characters and historical figures, Crawford uses contemporary identifications between Philoclea and Pamela to Penelope Rich and Dorothy Percy, respectively — the sisters of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex — to contextualize Sidney’s romance within the militant Protestantism of the Essex faction.

Defending the reading of printed texts as “an active form of literary production,” the chapter “How Margaret Hoby Read her De Mornay” takes a new tack. After the deaths of her husbands Walter Devereux and Thomas Sidney, Margaret Dakins married Thomas Posthumous Hoby and relocated to recusant Yorkshire, settling on her estate of Hackness, gained through her marriage to Walter Devereux. Serving as a regional headquarters, Hackness was, according to Crawford, “more than a godly household in the recusant north — it was an outpost of one of the most powerful political alliances in England” (88). While her husband employed violent measures against Catholics, Margaret Hoby engaged in persistent gentle persuasion, introducing “Presbyterian-minded puritanism” (101) to the area through social interactions — visits, long conversations, and especially through the communal reading of...