Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England by Madeline Bassnett (review)

How did elite English women use the discourse and practice of food management as a means of establishing social and political power in the early modern period? Madeline Bassnett tackles this key question in Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England. Building on scholarship that has disclosed the political and public nature of the premodern domestic sphere, Bassnett focuses on the writings of four women who shared a commitment to Protestant politics: Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Clinton, Margaret Hoby, and Mary Sidney Wroth. The author seeks to show how these women expressed "the cultural, social, and political functions of food exchange" (5), an exploration that engages topics such as "agricultural cultivation, hospitality, charity, nursing, dining, and gift-giving itself" (7). The book makes a valuable contribution to correcting misguided views that men chiefly orchestrated shifting alliances among militant Protestant families in the period. Aristocratic women, Bassnett demonstrates, launched entire careers that exploited the estate governance and faith-based hospitality expected of their gender as a means of commenting on political issues and consolidating social networks.

Implicitly modifying the adage that "food is love," Bassnett identifies two key early modern assumptions that might be summed up as "feeding is governance." First, food sustenance was perceived to be a foundational gift from God that, however, could be withdrawn due to poor governance or the sinful nature of a polity. Second, eating was not merely part of a complex physiological regime, but a trustworthy index of a person's character. Building on these tenets, elite women capitalized on their domestic authority in managing food to debate foreign policy, negotiate the terms of sovereignty, consolidate their regional power bases, and establish alliances grounded on shared ideas about civic order.

The book comprises two sections of two and three chapters, respectively. In the first chapter, Bassnett situates Mary Sidney Herbert's 107 translations of Psalms within the dire food dearth of the 1590s, noting that Sidney Herbert intensified the Biblical language of food providentialism by making food tropes more "vibrant" (55) and substituting food imagery for other figurative language. Comparing the stylistic choices of the Geneva Bible and the French Psalter of Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze (Beza) to Sidney Herbert's translations, Bassnett concludes that Sidney Herbert created an "agriculturally sensitive" text (27) that bound land cultivation to theories of just rule. In particular, Sidney Herbert emphasized that God punished bad rulers by withholding the land's bounty. Because Sidney Herbert wrote during a period of both food shortage and Protestant resistance, Bassnett argues, the Psalms imply that Elizabeth I's lack of support for continental wars makes the monarch accountable for famine.

The second chapter continues to explore how food providentialism could be leveraged in public policy debates. Bassnett turns somewhat unexpectedly to Elizabeth Clinton's 1622 polemic on maternal breastfeeding, The Covntesse of Lincolnes Nvrserie, a tract published during the 1620s grain shortages. Although Clinton had availed herself of wet-nurses for her own eighteen children, she nevertheless claimed that her daughter-in-law, Bridget, was a worthy Protestant leader precisely because of her bounteous breastfeeding, displayed at a moment when James I (stylized as a nurse-king in sermons such as William Yonger's 1617 The Nvrses Bosome), failed to provide nurturance for his people. Milk had become a strikingly intensive site of ideological struggle in the 1620s, and linked in several interesting ways to debates about religious doctrine and political legitimacy. Bassnett reads Clinton's appreciation of Bridget's lactation as an implicit authorization of a regional Protestant network that opposed James's foreign policies. The fact that Clinton's granddaughter sailed off with the Massachusetts Bay Colony expedition in 1630 is just one sign of the family's increasingly visible political dissent. Early modern women, Bassnett notes, could symbolically point to their "blessed" bodily production of food to figuratively indicate God's endorsement...