Editing Early Modern Women eds. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Paul Salzman (review)

"Certainly much has changed in the editing of early modern women since the late twentieth century," Sarah C. E. Ross and Paul Salzman write, introducing this remarkable and thought-provoking collection. Yet they go on to register the lingering influence of the last century's criticism on current scholarship: "there continue to be deep and productive tensions between the decentred treatment of authorship in much mainstream early modern editorial work, and the recovery of authors along with authorship that continues to be one prevailing motivation in much editorial work on early modern women writers" (2). If these tensions are deep, they are at least productive, and the chapters in this volume fearlessly explore these conflicts and boldly offer insights, solutions, and ways forward through the many impasses attending the task of editing early modern's women's writings—works that often defy mainstream canons, taxonomies, genres, and forms. Bringing together the experience, self-awareness, and incisive commentary of editors whose volumes have exemplified the practice and defined the field with the theoretical sophistication of studies of editorial practice—from Danielle Clarke's fascinating survey of Mary Sidney Herbert's early editors to Suzanne Trill's "archaeology" of Anne, Lady Halkett's archive—Editing Early Modern Women offers a refreshingly current and theoretically urgent intervention into studies of early modern women's writing.

Addressing the central concerns of this volume from different critical and theoretical viewpoints, contributors to this collection rehearse and gloss recent debates surrounding editorial practice in terms that illuminate scholarship in cognate disciplines. The binaries at play in editing early modern women's writing—textual stability and contingency, single-authorship and fragmented scripts, authorial intention and new textualism's "social" text—are fundamental to any scholarship that relies upon or interrogates early modern women's writing in any form other direct archival scrutiny. At the heart of the debate is the question of how we convey early modern women's writing to a current readership in ways that will make these works accessible without obscuring the unique features of their production: how, in other words, should editions of women's writings be situated in relation to the mainstream? Thus Mary Ellen Lamb—in a chapter that pushes back against new textualism's "Death of the Author" by stressing the topicality of Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania—addresses the central dilemma of canonicity: "One the one hand, it is important not to ghettoize women writers. To take their rightful place in the mainstream of the literary canon, their works must be understood in terms of their male contemporaries. On the other hand, to discount the formative role of gender is to ignore the conditions under which women worked and lived" (204). Other chapters engage this dilemma by questioning the "formative role of gender" and its implications for readers and editors. Susan M. Felch, for example, sees Elizabeth Tyrwhit's prayers as "gender-inflected" but not "gender-exclusive" (24), thus allowing her to read intersectionally across religious as well as gendered discourses. Marie-Louise Coolahan destabilizes the single-author paradigm governing readings of Katherine Philips's Poems, shifting the focus toward the social contexts in which Philips wrote to argue that authorship, in this view, "represents refracted versions of authorship that concatenate around the historical figure" (193). Ramona Wray challenges the "life and works" approach to Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, redirecting readings of the work "as only 'women's writing' or 'biographical adjunct'" toward contextualization of the play in relation to other early modern plays in a variety of genres (62).

Students and scholars of individual writers will find chapters that speak to their interests and open new avenues of inquiry. Leah S. Marcus's account of the production of her co-edited Collected Works of Elizabeth Tudor offers insight into the complex issues attending the queen's writing and its appearance in...