Representing Women in Renaissance England (review)

Reviews 321 words: h o w m a n y readers would understand when, in answer to a question about what a w o m a n was eating, she replies '"I'm chewing dulse"' (Vol. I, p. 151 and elsewhere)? Occasionally there are incorrect uses of English words, as, for example, '"I'm not eager to breach [recte 'broach'] the question with him'" (Vol. 1, p. 4). Inevitably, there are some words and phrases that any reviewer would translate differently. O n the whole, however, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is a work of high quality and a major addition to the resources available to the English reader w h o takes an interest in Old Icelandic literature. I t will also be of great use to the student of Icelandic and even the scholar. In this respect it complements a recent Icelandic edition of the sagas of Icelanders and a C D - R O M edition issued in 1996, together with a n e w Icelandic literary history of Old Icelandic literature, Islensk bokmenntasaga I-II (1992-93). Margaret Clunies Ross Department ofEnglish University of Sydney Summers, Claude J. and Ted-Larry Petworth, ed., Representing Women in Renaissance England, Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press, 1997; cloth; pp. ix, 250; 1 b / w illustration; R.R.P. £35.95. This collection is one of a series of volumes edited by Claude J Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth on Renaissance subjects and arising from biennial conferences held at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. In this case the conference was held in late 1994, but the essays have been revised and m a k e valuable contributions fo ongoing discussion of women's studies in the 322 Reviews context of Renaissance England. The title is deliberately equivocal: w o m e n are considered both as authors of representations of themselves and others and as subjects and objects of representations by male authors. A s the editors claim, the essays, which cover a diverse range of works and individuals, 'illustrate the manifold ways in which hierarchically ordered male-female relations are at the very heart of Renaissance literature' (p. 8). Helen Wilcox's chapter on devotional representations of Renaissance Englishwomen is the first of a number of essays to examine women's strategies of self-representation in relation to religious and spiritual beliefs. She considers such writers as Anne Bradstreet, Mary Sidney, and the author of Eliza's Babes, whose use of devotional discourse 'licensed an often outspoken representation of the female self (p. 10). Wilcox contends that these writers 'mold and create selves that make possible a continual process of dialogue and spiritual renewal' (p. 22). Janel Mueller examines the complex intertextual relations that come into play between Katherine Parr's 1547 work, The Lamentation ofa Sinner, and the well-known sermons of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, w h o was beheaded with Thomas More in 1534. Mueller focuses on the metaphor 'the Book of the Crucifix,' in order to unravel the complicated doctrinal, institutional and gender contrasts which arise when Parr re-uses the bishop's phrase in a Protestant, female and print context. Sidney Gottlieb studies the poetic, religious and personal complexities of A n Collins's Divine Songs and Meditacions, which survives in a single copy from 1653. Written amid the political and religious turmoil of the civil war years, Gottlieb argues that Collins's verse is not narrowly conservative, as some have claimed, but offers in its most striking poems an 'evocative and multilayered rendering of personal and political affliction' (p. 226). Another group of essays considers depictions of w o m e n by Reviews 323 male authors. Pamela Joseph Benson contrasts female characters and notions of femininity in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and in Sir John Harington's translation. Where Ariosto uses ethical and intellectual grounds to praise women, Harington translates these ideas into practical and emotional terms which he claims are particularly apposite for English women. In this way Harington reorients the Furioso 'toward the issues that had been prominent in native English defenses of womankind since the mid-sixteenth century' (p. 47). In her essay on Donne's Sapho...