The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture by Bernadette Andrea (review)

Bernadette Andrea's previous works, including Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2007), had already established her as an authority in the fields of early modern feminism and orientalism. Her most recent book here confirms that position. Using the methodologies of micro-history, feminist studies, and postcolonialism, the book is organized around a number of case studies of gendered subalterns from Islamic lands who, with various degrees of volition, were displaced to England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The categories studied by Andrea include wives of diplomats and company agents, servants, slaves, ladies of pleasure, and even human pets, whose displaced conditions nevertheless allow for strategies of resistance and survival (or survivance, to take up Gerald Vizenor's term). This paradoxical agency manifests itself through Andrea's investigation of the women's refracted representations in an impressive array of historical records and contemporary works of fiction.

The five case studies sketched out in the introduction and opening chapter, and analyzed throughout the book, are those of Elen More, the "black queen of beauty" of Scottish court pageants in the early sixteenth century; Lucy Negro, nicknamed "the Abbess of Clerkenwell", who ran a brothel in London in the late sixteenth century and a likely candidate for being the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's Sonnets; the Tartar girl acquired in Astrakhan by the Muscovy Company agent Anthony Jenkinson as an offering for Elizabeth I and later becoming "Ipolita the Tartarian" and the "deare and welbeloved woman" mentioned in the Queen's wardrobe inventories; Teresa Sampsonia, the Circassian wife of Robert Sherley who accompanied him in his diplomatic missions in Europe in the service of Shah Abbas I, the Safavid ruler of Persia; and Mariam Khanim, the Armenian wife of two successive East India Company agents who travelled to England from Mughal India and possibly crossed paths with the Sherleys at the Cape of Good Hope as their trajectories took them in opposite directions to and from the Islamic world.

Andrea posits the records and resonances left by these five women as Derridean "supplements," that is to say marginal, yet constitutive elements that take part in an emerging Anglo-centric and male-centric discourse of empire. Her meticulous research, supported by extensive examination of archival documents and up-to-date scholarship, opens fascinating new perspectives inside male-oriented records of empire that generally tended to understate or even entirely erase women's contributions and their impact. Andrea reaches that result by incisively engaging with isolated marginalia, brief mentions in inventories, and allusions in literary works, to rewrite the global narrative and restore agency to gendered subalterns.

Among the strengths of this volume are the avenues that lead to cross-cultural proto-feminist self-fashionings, particularly the discourse of imperial authority built by and around Elizabeth I through the indirect agency of the Tartar girl in chapter two. The Tartar girl is also instrumental in Lady Mary Wroth's negotiations of her authorship and authority by means of the figure of the Tartarian–Persian princess in her Urania in chapter three. In chapter four, racial and gender tropes are brought together through the figure of the Amazon as it appears in a number of entertainments and plays—from the Gesta Grayorum to Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors performed on the occasion of the 1594 New Year revels at Gray's Inn, and another nearly contemporary play by Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. In chapter five, masques of blackness, from their early sixteenth-century Scottish models to their early seventeenth-century Jonsonian version and their indirect echoes in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, offer the occasion for revisiting the discourse of fairness and blackness within a proto-imperial frame. In this chapter, Andrea demonstrates that Queen Anna and her ladies' use of blackface and of the trope...