The Ashgate Research Companion to the Sidneys, 1500–1700 ed. by Margaret P. Hannay, Michael G. Brennan, and Mary Ellen Lamb (review)

These volumes offer tribute to the cultural importance of the early modern Sidneys and to the remarkable cultural shift regarding the women members of the family and early modern women generally. The many invented traditions involving Philip date from his death in 1586, but the emergence of the Sidney women is a triumph of our own time: it coincides with—even if, at least in these volumes, it does not always respond closely to—the impact of feminism and the centrality of gender and sexuality in early modern studies.

In addition to biographies on more than twenty Sidneys, there are essays in volume one on the Sidneys and Ireland, Wales, the continent, public entertainments, literary patronage, Penshurst Place and Leicester House, visual arts and music; a category that might have been included is religion which, as Robert Stillman shrewdly indicates, is not a straightforward matter, at least with Philip. In volume two, there are essays on circulation in print and manuscript, prose romance, prose, drama, poetry (including William Herbert, smuggled in because of his connection with his cousin), and psalms.

In what follows I concentrate largely on the Sidney women. However, the many invented traditions associated with Philip hang over the whole collection. Mildly obsequious phrases are scattered throughout: the family’s “prestige,” their “Sidney-ness,” their “striking and idyllic” residence and “idealized family home,” and even what was later seen as Philip’s “martyrdom.” “Just to be a Sidney” clearly still has a prime value for many modern devotees (1:xviii, 2:xviii–ix, 1:153). Most contributors stress the family’s “governance” and “political duty” (1:219), without acknowledging that the “enduring legacy” (1:184) of generations of Sidneys included the long-lasting exploitation of early (and more recent) imperialism in Ireland and elsewhere. Raymond Williams once observed that Arcadia was written in a “lovely” park, which “had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants” (The Country and the City [New York: Oxford University Press, 1975], 22). Something of the ideological bias behind some of the Companion’s ultra-Sidneyphilia (in fairness, not attributable to all contributors) may be sensed in Stillman’s essay on the Defence where he takes a swipe at the “critical trampoline” of criticism with a “political” intent, praising literary histories “freed from” all “ideological agendas,” with British cultural materialists and Alan Sinfield especially singled out (2:153, 164–65).

The Sidney family women get ample coverage in the predominantly biographical volume: in addition to essays on Pembroke and Wroth, Grace Ioppolo—with a welcome but regrettably temporary indecorous note—tells of “those Essex girls” (1:77), Lettys Knollys, Penelope Rich, Dorothy Percy and Francis Walsingham. We hear of a “triptych” of countesses (1:133), though intriguingly there is no mention of the black sheep or poor relations, like the Sidney cousins who played a major Reformation role taking over the Walsingham Priory estate before dying out (perhaps cursed by the Virgin Mary whose shrine the Sidneys appropriated), or of Mistress Anne Bradstreet—a surprising omission, even by mention, since she was a poet, both admiring Philip and asserting distinctive women’s concerns. But, after all, she was a mere colonial and certainly not a countess.

The two receiving most attention are appropriately the Countess of Pembroke and Lady Mary Wroth. Hannay contributes a brief biography of Pembroke. Recent scholarship, as Garth Bond indicates, has modified the picture of a “large-scale poetic revolution promulgated by Mary Sidney” to a more informal though “still quite active” group of associates and contacts (2:57, 65). Lisa Celovsky’s fine essay on patronage similarly notes that an organized coterie, a “dramatic circle” centered on Mary, has been long dismissed (1:268, 270). Her Psalms have increasingly emerged as her major work...