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

While still relatively overlooked, food studies is a field that has blossomed over the last decade. To this field, Madeline Bassnett’s Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England is a welcome and fascinating addition, interrogating the relationship that early modern English gentlewomen had to food practices in their households and communities and, by extension, the relationship that these women had to politics and the governance of the nation. Bassnett’s central argument is that “women’s writings about food practices are crucial to the work of estate hospitality, personal and political alliance, and relations of private and public authority” (p. 5). To support her argument, she examines the works of four Protestant women estate holders who wrote from the end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes (completed by 1599); Elizabeth Clinton, Dowager Countess of Lincoln’s The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (a maternal nursing pamphlet, published 1622); Margaret, Lady Hoby’s diary (written 1599–1605); and Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth’s Urania (published 1621, manuscript continued until c. 1630).

Bassnett offers new and nuanced readings of texts that were composed by only Protestant gentlewomen in a narrow temporal range but are otherwise incredibly varied and rich. Together, the texts paint a vivid picture of the ways in which English gentlewomen understood and articulated their (and others’) responsibilities in regard to food practices. Crucially, Bassnett argues that not only does women’s writing reflect a politicized agriculture but also that these women actively “establish the domestic site of food exchange as . . . political, as they extend, comment on, and advise others about the virtues of manifesting God’s good governance on earth” (p. 7). According to early modern English medical, religious, and intellectual movements, the food one consumed affected physical, spiritual, and moral health, so elite women—who often controlled their estates’ food production and consumption—wielded power over the people with whom they exchanged food. The women Bassnett discusses understood their writing as an opportunity to communicate and establish political power, even as far as influencing the health of the nation, in part by encouraging monarchs to practice good governance through appropriate food management.

After the introduction, the second and third chapters examine famine and scarcity. Written during the “dearth-ridden 1590s,” Sidney Herbert’s translation of the Psalmes includes agricultural metaphors that “establish God’s gifts of food as dependent on his approval of the monarch’s rule, and more worryingly, the absence of crop growth as God’s disapproval, a punishment for country and ruler alike” (pp. 65, 25). The translation thus identifies Queen Elizabeth as directly responsible for England’s famines and encourages her to adopt “policies that might return England to God’s favour” to end the national famine (p. 55). Clinton’s The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie, also written in a time of dearth, discourages the common practice of wet-nursing and encourages maternal breastfeeding, praising it as an example of a woman’s being graced by God’s bounty, made all the more significant during famine. Just as crop failure reflected the loss of God’s favor through poor governance, a woman’s ability to feed her child expressed her retention of God’s favor, a reflection of the nursing woman’s spiritual virtue. The act of nursing also allowed virtuous women to give their child physical and spiritual nourishment, produced “through divine intervention” (p. 83).

The fourth chapter focuses on Margaret Hoby’s diary in which she records her meals and prayers—complementary spiritual practices, according to Hoby. As the middle case study and the only private (not circulated) work considered by Bassnett—Hoby’s diary was not printed until the twentieth century—this manuscript is an interesting departure from the argument that early modern women were actively establishing their political power through writing about food practices...