A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing ed. by Patricia Phillippy (review)

This consistently excellent collection of twenty-two essays is essential reading for researchers and students in the fields of early modern British literature, history, religion, politics, and material culture. Many of the contributions are authored by internationally renowned experts in their respective areas. Following an insightful introduction and an especially helpful opening section that outlines “Critical Approaches and Methodologies,” the chapters are organized both into meaningful historical groups spanning the period 1526 to 1676 and into six themes: “Reformations,” “Collaborations and Coteries,” “Transmissions,” “Transnationalities,” “Form and Genre,” and “Material Textualities.” Phillippy’s introduction provides the reader with a detailed table showing how each essay fits with the others in relation to the volume’s sophisticated organizational scheme (7). The chapters also participate in four overarching debates concerning “Recoveries and Transmissions,” “Authorial Agency and Identity Politics,” “Subversion, Orthodoxy, and the Canon,” and “Tradition and Truth in the Archives.” Most of the essays focus on specific women, including Frances Aburgavenny, Anne Askew, Anne Cooke Bacon, Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Carleton, Elizabeth Cary, Elizabeth Cavendish, Jane Cavendish, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Clifford, Jane Grey, Lucy Hutchinson, Esther Inglis, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Melville, Katherine Philips, Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth Tyrwhit, Isabella Whitney, and Mary Wroth. The volume also includes eleven useful figures.

A great strength of this monumental volume is its acknowledgement of what Margaret J. M. Ezell eloquently calls the “sparkling multiplicity” of women’s writings (45): appropriately enough, attending to this multiplicity corresponds to writing a history of early modern women’s writing, not the history, as the book’s title itself makes clear. As Phillippy asserts, “The intention of this volume. . .is to present a history that respects and acknowledges the multiplicity of women’s writing while at the same time seeking grounds in the subject to support a unified narrative and to work against the unfeatured accretion of names and titles that can easily result in a disjointed account of unrelated textual events” (6). The introduction explains how the chapters collectively address the methodological challenges posed by the diverse nature of women’s writings, as well as by complex, persistent questions of canonicity and gender. To put those challenges and questions in context, Phillippy gives a concise, accessible account of early approaches to writing women’s literary history.

The first section of the book includes four chapters on methodologies that should be mandatory reading for anyone who works on early modern women. Ezell’s outstanding essay on what she terms “invisibility optics” begins the section by providing an analytical overview of the complex, contradictory narratives about women’s writing that have emerged in different historical contexts, by interrogating the specific cultural and material circumstances under which women writers become invisible or visible, and by using Esther Inglis and Aphra Behn as effective case studies to illustrate her points. Next, by focusing on the life and writings of Anne Cooke Bacon, Jaime Goodrich “proposes two new ways of considering the identity politics of women writers: first, by viewing women writers simply as writers, not as women; and second, by considering how female authority emerged from a variety of overlapping identities” (47). Patricia Pender then transhistorically interrogates “the conundrum of canonicity” by analyzing the critical reception of Anne Bradstreet and by paying special attention to questions of subversion and orthodoxy (72). Megan Matchinske’s chapter ends the section on approaches: she creatively uses the Mary Carleton bigamy debates to meditate upon the “methodological quandaries that continue to beset modern-day truth seekers who disagree as to the nature of what constitutes the past, what qualifies as evidence, and how one goes about proving things that happened long ago” (84).

The rest of the volume is organized in terms of historical eras. The first historical section includes chapters on the Tudor Era (1526–1603). Susan M. Felch provides a vital account of the culturally central role played by royal women patrons and laywomen in sixteenth-century...