The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips: A Poetics of Culture, Politics, and Friendship ed. by David L. Orvis and Ryan Singh Paul (review)

The poet, translator, playwright, and letter-writer Katherine Philips has come to occupy an increasingly prominent position in the canon of early modern Anglophone writing over recent decades. Alongside Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, she is arguably the best-known British woman writer of the seventeenth century and her verse has been mainstreamed through its inclusion in all the major undergraduate anthologies. The three-volume scholarly edition edited by Patrick Thomas, Germaine Greer, and Roger Little, published 1990–93, will soon be supplanted by the forthcoming Oxford University Press volumes edited by Elizabeth H. Hageman and Andrea Sununu. This is, then, an excellent time for the publication of the first collection of essays focused on Philips’s poetry.

The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips brings together five influential and five new essays with an afterword by the preeminent scholar of Philips, Elizabeth Hageman, and an introduction that should be the first port of call for any reader interested in getting up to speed with the author. Orvis and Paul perform an excellent service in synthesizing authoritatively the biographical, social, and publication contexts for understanding Philips. Their introduction then outlines expertly the key trends in Philips scholarship from the 1980s. This succinct, nuanced history of Philips criticism is enormously valuable; it identifies the main trajectories and critics, and explains how they have evolved and diverged. The introduction also groups together loosely the ten essays that follow under three topics: cultural poetics, form and influence, friendship and homoeroticism.

The first of these is Catharine Gray’s oft-cited essay on Philips’s Interregnum formation: “Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie.” As with the essays by Paula Loscocco, Valerie Traub, and Lorna Hutson that are reprinted here, Gray’s is prefaced with a new foreword that situates its critical context, draws attention to its impact and how the discussion has evolved since. Gray’s essay was crucial in reorienting Philips criticism away from the Restoration and back to the 1650s. It identified the publication of William Cartwright’s posthumous Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems (1651), where Philips was first published in print, as the moment when she came into her own as a royalist poet, and demonstrated how her forging of coterie relationships shaped a more public engagement with monarchist politics. It remains an exciting and important piece of work, and is flanked here by three new essays. Christopher Orchard places Philips’s “On the 3. of September 1651”—written on the occasion of Charles II’s defeat at the Battle of Worcester—in dialogue with two exactly contemporary works: William Davenant’s preface to Gondibert and Roger Boyle’s romance Parthenissa. Inventively drawing on the later close friendship between Philips and Boyle in Restoration Dublin, Orchard argues that Boyle’s romance offered Philips a model of royalist virtue that was rooted in a vision of clemency as a route toward friendship across political lines. Although lacking in empirical evidence as to how Philips would have read these texts in time to influence her poem, this is insightful and stimulating work. David L. Orvis rightly identifies the failure of critics to interrogate seriously the religious perspectives articulated in Philips’s poetry. Directing attention to her “prophetic self-fashioning” (109), his innovative study sets Philips against the contemporary flowering of female millenarian prophecy, arguing that she uses the biblical Elijah and Moses in order to develop an anti-eschatological voice that advocates monarchism, looking toward a restoration of the actual monarch rather than the Fifth Monarchy. Amy Scott-Douglass sustains this interest in Philips’s religious positioning. She asks the question: which London churches would Philips (raised in a Puritan household) have attended as a child? The answer enables the author to imagine Philips’s childhood exposure to iconoclasm and...