Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World ed. by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea (review)

This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary collection brings together essays that enrich our understanding of the history of women's travels within England and far beyond in the early modern period. Familiar texts, such as Shakespeare's Othello and Antony and Cleopatra, and lesser-known sources, such as the narratives of Teresa Sampsonia and Mariam Khan, form the backbone of this cohesive work. Its essays stake out the centrality of girls' and women's mobility to our appreciation of global networks and transnational exchanges in early modernity. Challenging interpretive tendencies that view women's travel as an "absent presence," the volume's introduction insists that women's movement is part of a larger critical turn towards "restoring women's visibility" (4). As Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea argue, "women's travel was culturally significant and copious, even if proscribed" (11). Indeed, the essays in Travel and Travail view women's movement, their subjectivity, their cosmopolitanism, and their heterogeneity as part of a larger global circuit of exchange and influence. Without the stories of these women travellers, our understanding of the global Renaissance remains incomplete.

Travel and Travail draws its title from a conjugation of movement and women's labor in childbirth, which highlights the importance of gender in accounts of early modern travel. How do we theorize women's agency in this context? That is one of the many important questions that animates the essays of this volume, where women's mobility signifies active worlding or being-in-the-world. The concept of worldmaking, as critics such as Ayesha Ramachandran and Dennis Cosgrove have argued, relies on the human imagination in conceiving the totality of the cosmic world. In this volume, women are not only central to our knowledge of global encounters and imaginings but are situated as being-in-the-world, forging, producing, harnessing, and reacting to the expanding world they inhabit. But what happens when this agency is curtailed? Travel and Travail renders visible the extent to which women's travel and biopolitics, or the management of populations, are inextricably linked. For example, reproductive sexuality, which these traveling women embody, is seen as a liability, threatening the commercial, political, or military interests of the period's expansionist project. In this context, the restriction of women's travel becomes a crucial governing technology that polices sexuality for the well-being of the state, trade company, or military mission.

In response to this tension between worldmaking and biopolitics, experience and proscription, the essays in Travel and Travail not only read new meaning into women's travel, but, more urgently, devise fresh tools of scholarly inquiry because, as Mary Fuller observes in the volume's afterword, "finding the women who are [in the archive of early modern travel] is neither easy nor straightforward" (331). Part 1, "Early Modern Women Travelers: Global and Local Trajectories," which focuses on historical women travelers, opens with Richmond Barbour's compelling essay on Desdemona's and Ann Broomfield's, the wife of General Keeling of the East India Company, subversive resolve to travel alongside their husbands, which threatened the commercial interests and loyalties of the corporation. This will to travel, Barbour argues, shows agency and subjectivity in the face of the company's restriction on women's moveability. In the same vein, Karen Robertson tells the story of Mariam Khan, a Christian Armenian woman raised in the Mughal court. Khan traveled back and forth between continents in the company of her two English husbands. Continuing with the archive of historical women travellers, Amrita Sen traces what she dubs "moments of gendered crisis" (65) in two different case studies, where the sexual anxieties and threats relating to women onboard company ships surface in the correspondences and reports of the East India Company. But these moments, according to Sen, also uncover the cultural heterogeneity that mobile women embodied...