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COPYRIGHT 2006 Rice University
In writing a review of some eighty books, the first task is to sort. Since it quickly became apparent to me that the naming of the basic categories of critical work is itself a judgment about where the discipline is going, I begin this review by considering the categories themselves and what they reveal about the field or at least about my own sorting practices. My primary criterion was to determine which books seemed to be in conversation, whether in agreement or in disagreement, collaborating in an often winding line of inquiry. I found, however--and no doubt you will too--that no categories completely cover the material, that the very act of packing up these individual ideas leaves bulges here and spaces there, with some items left partially hanging out of the metaphorical suitcases. In particular, it is not possible to do justice to the array of individual essays in collections, but I have attempted at least to mention the subject of most of them in the hopes of attracting interested readers. This inherent messiness of thought is itself heartening. While there are discernible trends and shared questions, I wish to celebrate the originality and even the occasional quirkiness of this year's work. To move my suitcase metaphor into a cliche, this year's group of scholars seems very willing to think outside the box.
This untidiness is in part an effect of the market. Book publishing has become increasingly expensive and as I understand it, library orders are down. Since it has become economically necessary for publishers to expand the base of appeal for individual volumes, there are only a few books about single authors, except for Milton, in this year's group. This is not entirely a drawback. Juxtaposing one author's work against another spins out new webs of significance. This initially commercial need to gather together various authors in single volumes may well contribute to the vitality of cultural studies, where startlingly diverse topics such as sport, melancholy, death, taste, grief, and horses provide common points of thought among early modern writers. Treated with erudition and some resourcefulness, unusual topics provide unexpected insights not only into authors' works but also into their cultures. This portmanteau approach seems to have moved into classroom practice as well. Relatively inexpensive paperback anthologies of works suggest a market demand created by courses on women and on Reformation thought. Handy paperback editions of such noncanonical works as John Aubrey's Brief Lives (edited by Richard Barber), Ben Jonson's "Epigrams" and "The Forest" (edited by Richard Dutton) and Thomas Lodge's A Margarite of America (edited by Donald Beecher and Henry D. Janzen) may enliven standard courses with new material. Edited by Ewan Fernie, Ramona Wray, Mark Thornton Burnett, and Clare McManus, Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader models ways to present critical issues such as histories, identities, and materiality to students, although the inclusion of snippets from essays might empower weaker students with a dangerous sense of mastery not yet achieved. Rather than irrelevance and preciosity as has sometimes been claimed, the result for our students and for ourselves is, I believe, a larger context that stretches the mind's capacity for making connections. I anticipate the future of scholarship in this field with optimism and excitement.
In brief, these are my categories and some of the primary issues they make visible. I begin with more focused areas of women's writing and the history of the book, move on to the broader areas of cultural studies and histories, and conclude with a single-author category of Milton.
1) Women and Writing about Women. Margaret Cavendish was the most-discussed woman writer, receiving a single-author study as well as extended discussions. In this area recently characterized by newly discovered texts, there was only one edition, the Life and Letters of Elizabeth Cary. In general, studies puzzled over social issues--exogamy, mystical marriage, the relationship of public and private, political and national affiliations. An elaborate and informed anthology Reading Early Modern Women responds to a felt need for further social context to support the teaching as well as scholarship on women writers. Running through many if not most of these works by and also about women is a shared concern with women's agency.
2) The History of the Book, together with Letterwriting and Dialogues. This year focuses attention on the ordinary (as opposed to the extraordinary) and the actual (as opposed to the implied) reader, as detected in marks, annotations, signatures, broken seals, and transcribed poems. The implications of this work for the field are substantial, potentially moving us, in terms used by Adam Smyth, to a sociocentric as opposed to an authorcentric approach toward early modern verse. Critics may immerse themselves in the beauty of material letters, made widely accessible in photographs included in two catalogs from Folger Shakespeare Library exhibitions.
3) Cultural Studies/Cultural Histories. Much of this year's work in cultural studies has usefully clustered around two topics--the passions (including shame, melancholy, grief, and love) and the geographical or racial other. For the most part, studies of both of these topics evince an intellectual maturity based on previous work. A collection Reading the Early Modern Passions launches a nuanced discussion of the role of Galenic humors on early modern subjectivity. The Age of Beloveds ventures compelling parallels between western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. In a third group, perhaps the most purely the product of cultural studies, individual works on plague, dance, drink, sport, dance, taste, and horses refuse to cluster at all. Providing significant insights into early modern modes of thought and social commerce, these studies in this third group raise important questions concerning the parameters of cultural studies. What are the criteria? Inherent interest? Richer readings of literature? The ability to lead to further work? The general excellence of the studies devoted to the passions and the Other eloquently demonstrates the necessity of continuing exploration of questions that initially may themselves have seemed, long ago, a quirky by-path rather than a major road.
4) Histories: Nationalism and the English Reformation, Royalists and Martyrs. This year's studies generally qualify vigorous earlier work on the evolving nationalism of the early modern period, as the unity implied by the term "nationalism" continues to be fractured by differences among classes, political allegiances, and religious affiliations. Religious desire, even to the point of martyrdom, is a particularly significant topic this year. Discussions divide between approaches that contextualize, or refuse to contextualize, devotional poets within a secular world. Perhaps an awareness of social differences contributed to the period's new conceptualizations of social contract.
5) Milton. Milton is, oddly enough, the only author to attract a number of volumes devoted to his works alone. By including Milton at the end, I can take advantage of his presence in a number of studies discussed in earlier sections as I lay out some of the current controversies in this perhaps most fraught of the areas of early modern studies. Areas of debate include Stanley Fish's attack on cultural studies in favor of a new-ish aestheticism and a continuing assessment of Milton's perspective on gender.
WOMEN AND WRITING ABOUT WOMEN
Maureen Quilligan's Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England is both provocative and frustrating. Working primarily with Gayle Rubin's critique of Claude Levi-Strauss, Quilligan posits agency for women in incest ("an erotic choice within their own close kin" [p. 13]) as a primary way of halting the traffic in women. In her study of the Trobiand Islanders, Annette Weiner has observed the political power issuing from a continuing endogamous relation, especially with brothers, maintained by women, who are kept by their natal families as inalienable possessions even as they are given away as wives. Quilligan pushes Weiner's model of "sibling intimacy" toward incest, noting that Weiner "does not exclude actual sexual congress" and that many cultures claim "a myth of brother-sister intercourse at the origin of a powerful family" (p. 24). Quilligan then argues that Elizabeth's awareness of Henry VIII's sexual relationships with the sisters Anne and Mary Boleyn led to the incestuous presentation of the soul's relationship with God as simultaneously that of mother, sister, and daughter in her translation of Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir de l'ame pecheresse. This "holy incest" (p. 37) then influenced Elizabeth's representation of her incestuous relationship with her country as simultaneously its mother and wife. Quilligan is on safer ground in her claim that the various collaborations between Mary and Philip Sidney (her role as reader of his Arcadia, her efforts to enhance his reputation after his death, her continuation of his versified Psalms) represented "noble gifts to each other" (p. 108), still kept as inalienable possessions that increased the authority of the giver and of their family. But do not such gifts represent endogamy more than incest? Quilligan's reading of endogamy in Mary Wroth's Urania is useful: she interprets the frontispiece as "an idealized view of a family seat" (p. 181) enabling female authority; she observes the emphatic placement of Urania's lament for her ignorance of her natal family at the beginning of the romance; she comments on the presence of many brother-sister pairs. Noting that Wroth's affair with her first cousin William Herbert would not have been considered incestuous by the Church of England, Quilligan soft-peddles incest in this chapter, focusing instead on Pamphilia's (and presumably Wroth's) unrequited constancy, outside of any origin in male desire, for her beloved as an act of autonomous will. Interesting in their own right are her various discussions of Wroth's rewritings of Spenser, part of a "parodic nature of Wroth's romance" (p. 187).
As the many works by women analyzed hereafter suggest, Quilligan pushes her argument further than necessary in reading incest, or even the larger halt in the traffic in women, as an apparent condition, as opposed to merely an aid, for women's agency as writers. Incest is itself a tricky subject, for allegations of specifically erotic desire, as opposed to familial love, between early modern subjects are difficult to prove (or to disprove). Her argument is most persuasive when she focuses on endogamy, an important topic that future scholars might explore further in the context of how women's subjectivities were shaped by early modern kinship structures described in Natalie Zemon Davis's essay "Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century-France" (1986). Admittedly, however, an alternative title such as Endogamy and Agency lacks pleasurably perverse appeal.
In Erica Longfellow's case studies of women who use mystical marriage to legitimate their writing, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, she provides an alternative approach to the incest Quilligan attributes to Elizabeth's (and Marguerite's) fluid relationship with God. Largely based on the Song of Songs, a rich tradition of medieval writings on mystical marriage provided a means for women to negotiate a gendered paradox: "Was it possible to be a light to the world, as Christ had commanded, if one was not allowed to speak or write?" (p. 13). For the Margaret Clifford addressed in Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus, the understanding of the divine and of the self that is derived through desirous gazing on the suffering Christ bestows on her the power to heal ills, including implicitly Lanyer's own need for patronage. In her manuscript devotional poetry, Anne Southwell uses mystical marriage to promote the ideal of a husband capable, like Christ, of sacrificial love rather than abusive authority. Wreaking political havoc during the Interregnum, Anna Trapnel authorizes her prophesies, uttered in a prayerful trance, as her marital duty to her husband Christ, who speaks through her without her agency. Lucy Hutchinson's divinely appointed marriage provides a "primary link with the divine" (p. 203), supporting her efforts in her husband's republican cause as "God's cause" (p. 191). Longfellow uses the public implications of manuscript verse and spoken prayers to argue vigorously against the traditionally gendered binary of private/female and public/male.
The sophisticated argument of Marta Straznicky's Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550-1700 rings various thought-provoking changes on the relationship of public and private as "shifting rather than fixed points of reference" (p. 1). Rather than a control on women's authorship as previously thought, closet drama was often a hyper-political and/or socially exclusive genre. Staged within households or private theaters, and sometimes issued widely in print, closet drama was not dependably private; and closet dramas designed to be read were not necessarily untheatrical. Rather than gender (in the attempt to control or to protect a female author), the pertinent issue for Cary's production of a closet drama is social rank. In its composition and eventual publication, her Tragedie of Mariam anticipates two elite readerships: 1) the family and personal acquaintances circulating her manuscripts and 2) a "knowing minority" (p. 53) of educated readers. The closing of the public theaters during the Interregnum politicized Cavendish's writing of closet drama, whether as manuscripts read aloud in small groups or as a printed volume by a wider audience. For Cavendish, a private space was often a locus of public and political engagement. With the reopening of the theaters in the Restoration, playwriting became a collaborative business enterprise shared among actors and directors catering to public taste. Although her closet dramas were highly theatrical, Anne Finch insisted on an amateur status protecting her from the stigma of professional commercialism. Rather than a women's genre unable to rise to conditions of performance, closet drama evolved according to its own traditions and contingencies.
In contrast to the complex negotiations between public and private described by Longfellow and Straznicky, Hero Chalmers unabashedly privileges the writings by Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn precisely because they are public, either published or, in the case of Philips's manuscripts, "'circulated indiscriminately--almost as if, in a sense, they were in print" (p. 4, quoting Peter Beal). Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689 attributes this "birth of the modern woman author" (p. 2) to royalist affiliations enabling them to claim a personal agency traditionally suppressed for religious women writers. Cavendish was early on influenced by the respect for women's musical achievements in the circle around the royalist Henry Lawes; by her duty to present public petitions to restore the estates of her prominent royalist husband; by the feminine public displays necessary, according to Chalmers, to affirm aristocratic status after the Civil War; and by the tradition of the femme forte circulated in French and English court circles as well as by royalist Oxford poets. Down-playing commonly attributed lesbian values, Chalmers interprets Philips's female friendships in terms of a royalist political code, reinforced by the female-dominated salons encountered in exile in France, affirming civilized affiliations within an endangered society. For both writers, the urge to represent retirement as a space of personal and political power reflects the situation of royalists during the Interregnum. Writing during the Restoration, Aphra Behn exploits a heroic eroticization of royalist affiliations most evident in her public exposure as a writer for the theater; in various plays, she also criticizes the disregard of Tory libertines for women. Chalmers argues that the royalist affiliations of these three women enabled them "to alter the profile of Englishwomen's writing" (p. 196).
Rather than the binary of public-private, Lyn Bennett's Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer attempts to break down the binary of gender by using a presumably gender-neutral rhetorical tradition to present women writers primarily as skilled poets rather than women poets. Mary Sidney displays impressive oratorical skills in her translation of the Psalms, even as she expresses distrust of rhetoric. The circular form of Wroth's corona, in which the last line of one poem serves as the first line of the next, suggests a divine love that interpenetrates a secular passion for an earthly beloved. In Lanyer's Salve Deus, "Eves Apology" represents "pathos-as-praxis" (p. 187), uniting rhetoric with logic in its "reasoned argument and its comparatively unornamented style" (p. 197).
Edited by Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham, the anthology Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy brings a transnational context to the early modern as well as modern canonization of women's writings. In a range of informative essays, it becomes clear that the English system for circulating women's writings in manuscript or in a large single-sex anthology such as Thomas Bentley's The Monument of Matrons did not promote lasting canonicity (John King), while the French and also the Italian mixture of gendered voices in sonnet exchanges by such writers as Veronica Franco led to a more lasting survival (Fabio Finotti). The rise of a vernacular poetry emphasizing love as a source of refinement in Italy proved receptive to the decorous writings of Vittoria Colonna, whose conformity to ideals of the aristocratic and the feminine enhanced courtly ideology (Virginia Cox). The changing value invested in Catholic-Reformation religious beliefs and in classical learning caused Laura Battiferra first to be canonized and then to be un-canonized (Victoria Kirkham). Differences between women poets in their original contexts became flattened by 1545, when Lodovico Domenichi's first printed anthology of women's verse participated not so much in canon formation as in a contemporary culture of collecting (Deanna Shemek). Luisa Bergalli's eighteenth-century anthology preserved a number of women's writings, including a sonnet by a converted Jew from 1571 that otherwise might have been lost (Stuart Curran). In an incisive essay, Ann Rosalind Jones demonstrates how later editors distorted writings by Tullia d'Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco according to gendered stereotypes such as the reformed and penitent prostitute. A quite different ideological agenda supportive of the Fascist state shaped the anthology of Italian women's writing edited by Jolanda De Blasi in 1930 (Lina Insana). Elaine Beilin ably traces how religious ideologies intersect with gender in representations of Anne Askew from her own day up to a recent television show, Tales from the Tower. Early modern women were themselves active in authorizing themselves through creating their own canons. Christine de Pizan inserted herself into her personal canon of authoritative male writers, of exemplary women writers, and of near-contemporary French poets (Kevin Brownlee). Importing the concept of literary canons from Italy, Lanyer infers her own high standing as a writer by claiming canonical status for Mary Sidney's Petrarchan translation, "The Triumph of Death." Other essays capably treat French dialogues (Janet Smarr), defenses of Eve in Italy and France (Thelma Fenster), Italian canons of religious life (E. Ann Matter), and mystical writings (Armando Maggi).
Sylvia Bowerbank's Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England applies an ecological feminism perhaps unfamiliar to some scholars of the field. Bowerbank explores how writings by Wroth, Cavendish, Mary Rich and Catherine Talbot, Jane Lead and Anne Bathurst, as well as (moving into the eighteenth century) Anna Seward and Mary Wollstonecraft promote a respectful and harmonious relationship with nature, in contradistinction to a scientism aimed at mastering nature in the interests of knowledge and profit. Employing a "pathetic stylistics" (p. 35) associating the human with the natural domains, the women of Wroth's Urania construct their relationship with nature through solitary meditation, camping/hunting, and storytelling in forests, sites of gendered melancholy over the "toxic nature of love in a patriarchal society" (p. 49) as well as loci of aristocratic privilege. Wroth's romance balances nostalgia for a simpler life within an abundant nature of an illusory past with a clear-eyed recognition of women's prolonged experience of oppression. Married to the Lord Warden of Sherwood Forest, Cavendish's relationship to forest settings is mediated by a personal sense of the loss over spoilations during the Civil War that reveal the collapse of the old laws protecting forests. Cavendish's much-quoted and mocked admiration of the experiments of the Royal Society expresses her insistence on the free play of an abundant nature not measurable by scientific rationality. In other chapters and for other writers, Bowerbank shows links between a piety and an ecology promoting harmony with the human and natural environment. Explicit in her concluding account of the pollution of a nearby marshy bay, Bowerbank's passion for her own ecological agenda in no way detracts from the sophistication of her argument. The issue underlying the book--how best to live in harmony with the resources of our planet--remains urgently important.
Three single-author books provide focus on specific women writers. Emma L. E. Rees's Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile joins other recent works rehabilitating the reputation of a writer judged as eccentric or even insane by her contemporaries. Rees considers Cavendish's writings during the 1650s as a response to her triple exile as the wife of a banished royalist, as a woman writer in an environment hostile to women's writing, and as a royalist proponent of an aesthetic of theatricality antithetical to the values of the Interregnum. Exploiting her gender, her outlandish public appearances...
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