Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain by Sarah C. E. Ross (review)

Sarah C. E. Ross's Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain is a rich, exciting, and erudite study that significantly advances our understanding of the multitudinous ways in which seventeenth-century English women used writing to convey political perspectives. Earlier studies inform us that women utilized prophecies, petitions, letters, and other modes to participate in the fierce political debates that comprised the English Civil Wars, the short but impactful years of republican experiment that followed, and the Restoration. Ross's study demonstrates that women also used manuscript poetry to "think on the state" (1). While it's difficult to ascertain whether female manuscript poets were "writing in conscious response to one another," the shared "tropes, genres, and material forms" they used to "articulate their politics" simultaneously links them to their more prominent male counterparts and constructs an intersecting but nonetheless distinct "'female tradition' of politicized poetry in manuscript" (6).

Chapter one, "Elizabeth Melville's Religious Verse and Scottish Presbyterian Politics," denominates its subject "the most extensive and politicized female circulators of poetry in manuscript before Katherine Philips" (30). Melville's impressive oeuvre emerges from her affiliation with "radical Scottish Presbyterians who, in the late 1590s and early 1600s, resisted the episcopalian form of church governance that was being steadily reintroduced to Scotland by James VI" (28). These men espoused, and in some cases were jailed, for promulgating the "doctrine of the two kingdoms," that is, the biblically-derived assertion that "godly and earthly kingdoms were separate, that anarchical power secondary and incomparable to Christ's heavenly crown" (28). Elizabeth Melville's poetry plays an important part in constructing this Presbyterian milieu of "anti-episcopalian militancy" (29). Her persistent use of the "metaphors of the spiritual shield and spiritual weapons," like her "sonnets of sustenance and exhortation," advanced the "two kingdoms" doctrine and sustained the resolve of her Presbyterian fellows during their imprisonment (62).

Ross's second chapter, "Thou art the nursing father of all pietye," explores the subject of "Sociality, Religion, and Politics in Anne Southwell's Verse." Southwell wrote the bulk of her poems to and about members of the literary circle of Sir Thomas Overbury, but her "compendious Folger manuscript" also "extends our sense of her comfortable familiarity with a wide social network among the English and Anglo-Irish elite" (70). The "plasticity" (74) of her "social authorship" enables her to "write on state political figures," but it is her devotional and religious poetry that comprises her most extensive "mode of engaging explicitly in oral, social, and state-political commentary" (80). Specifically, in her lengthy poems on the Decalogue, Melville makes extensive use of biblical verse paraphrase to offer a "relatively moderate Calvinism" and support for James's vision of himself as "'the nursing father of all pietye'" at a time in the 1620s when the "landscape" of "'mainstream' religious politics" was "rapidly shifting" (95).

Chapter three, "'When shee heard the drumms and cannon play': Jane Cavendish and Occasional Verse," sheds light on a poet who inherited this "rapidly shifting" Jacobean landscape and whose involvement in a "coterie poetic environment intimately connected with the embattled culture of royalism in the 1640s" catapulted her into the English Civil Wars (100). Jane Cavendish's occasional verse invokes the "conditions of political extremity under which she wrote" as she and her sisters were garrisoned in their home. Like other garrisoned women writers, Cavendish engages an "authorizing" male figure who was absent due to the wars and who exemplifies the greatness of the political cause he serves (102). For her part, Cavendish directs a number of her occasional verses to the "great Example" of her father as he commanded Charles I's forces in the north of England (104). In a gesture of even greater indebtedness, she models her overall poetic practice on his diverse array of "generic precedents" as well as his conflation of familial with political...