Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture, 1550–1700 ed. by Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher (review)

How did the women of the Bible figure in early modern texts? In Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture, 1550–1700, eleven literary scholars attempt to answer this question. The editors have adopted a broad definition of “literary culture” that includes not only poetry and drama but also political theory, petitions, sermons, and conduct manuals. The volume’s geographical and confessional focus, however, is narrower than its title suggests: the fourteen essays focus entirely on interpretations of biblical women in early modern English literary culture and the bulk of the essays address exclusively texts produced by English Protestants (though several of the New Testament essays examine Catholic writings). Biblical Women follows a biblical structure itself, divided into two parts on Old and New Testament women, with overview essays by the editors at the beginning of each part and an afterword by Dympna Callaghan. Each essay focuses on particular biblical women, and while readers should not expect a comprehensive survey of biblical women in early modern English literature, the volume contains discussions of a wide range of figures—including but not limited to Eve, Jezebel, Deborah, Jael, Judith, women in Proverbs, Esther, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and the Whore of Babylon.

Among the essays on Old Testament women, two stand out. Both consider the problems that biblical heroines could pose in early modern England. Michele Osherow’s “Wives, Fears and Foreskins: Early Modern Reproach of Zipporah and Michal” examines a puzzling contrast. While some biblical women were praised by early modern commentators for challenging male authorities, such as the women who saved the life of the baby Moses from Pharaoh, other Old Testament heroines came in for far more critical treatment. Moses’s wife Zipporah saves her husband from imminent death at the hands of an angry God in Exodus 4:24–27 by circumcising their son, yet she “is consistently reprimanded for her actions, her attitude and her speech” in early modern texts (77). Likewise, David’s wife Michal ingeniously orchestrates her husband’s escape from her father King Saul in 1 Samuel 19, but was subject to extensive criticism by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators. Drawing on a wide range of early modern texts, Osherow’s extensively researched essay outlines the ways in which the behavior of these biblical heroines was attacked and shows how “the reputations of these biblical women suffer for their exposure to male weakness: their bold responses are understood as cause and their aid is warped into affliction” (88). Alison Thorne’s “The Politics of Female Supplication in the Book of Esther” shows how different genres “generated markedly different interpretations” of Queen Esther and her importance for contemporary readers (101). Thorne shows how Protestant authors of exegetical texts tended to offer typological readings of Esther, using the biblical Queen to speak more broadly to God’s providential care for his people. In these texts, Esther could be defined as an assertively godly protectress and equated with Queen Elizabeth. But while exegetical texts were “fixated on the broader scheme of God’s interventions on behalf of the righteous,” (103), conduct literature provided a very different picture of Esther. Because this genre presented readers with models of behavior to be emulated or avoided, Thorne argues that this “generic template produced a more ambiguous appraisal of Esther than the salvific heroine of the Old Testament,” offering depictions of the Queen that “diminish Esther’s heroic feats by a process of domestication aimed at accommodating her high-profile role to the docile, self-deprecatory conduct laid down for early modern women” (103–4). Esther took on yet another significance in petitions during the English Civil War, when female petitioners to Parliament deployed Esther “as a precedent in order to license their own forays into the political arena” (105).

Two essays on New Testament women highlight ways in which Protestants did...