Volume 51 (2021)

While much important work has been done on the early modern fascination with the political nature of bees and bee societies, this essay instead takes a closer look at the conflation of honeybees, women, and domestic spaces within the multi-generic textual ecology of early modern beekeeping. In the early modern period women were the primary beekeepers. As key participants in this art of sustained and intimate collaboration across species and environment, these women managed their own hives using the multifaceted skills of the early modern housewife, including textile arts, brewing, distilling, medicine, horticulture, and husbandry. This essay highlights the tension between knowledgeable women apiarists and male textual authorities in early modern apiary treatises and husbandry manuals and focuses on the persistent descriptive slippage between both bees and women and the hive and home in early modern sources. In early modern texts women’s bodies, domestic spaces, and hives are all over-determined entities invested in containment, preservation, and productivity. This essay emphasizes the ways in which early modern women and the occupants of the hives they cared for resisted and worked within the allegorical, anthropocentric, and patriarchal frameworks provided for them in the textual narratives of the early modern period.

<i>Nancy Bradley Warren</i> The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700<i>The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700</i>. Nancy Bradley Warren. University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. ix +339.

Property, and the Letters of Law in Early Modern England examines the competing narratives of property told by and about women in the early modern period. Through letters, legal treatises, case law, wills, and works of literature, the contributors explore women's complex roles as subjects and agents in commercial and domestic economies, and as objects shaped by a network of social and legal By constructing conversations across the disciplinary boundaries of legal and social history, sociology, and literary criticism, the collection explores a diverse range of women's property relationships. Recent research has revealed fissures in our knowledge about women's property relationships within a regime characterized by competing jurisdictions, diverse systems of nature, and multiple concepts of property. Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England turns to these points of departure for the study of women's legal status and property relationships in the early modern period. This interdisciplinary analysis of women and property is written in an accessible manner and will become a valuable resource for scholars and students of Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century literature, early modern social and legal history, and women's studies. [book jacket]

Reviewed by: Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith Diana Barnes Ross, Sarah C. E., Rosalind Smith, eds Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ( Early Modern Literature in History), London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; hardback; pp. 370; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €99.00; ISBN 9783030429454. Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics is an exciting new collection of fifteen essays on early modern women's complaint which represents a welcome extension of current scholarship on early modern women's engagement with complaint, one of the most pervasive literary modes in English writing in print and manuscript over the years 1550–1700. Much scholarship to date has identified Ovid's Heroides as the locus classicus for early modern complaint, but Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith, the editors of this collection, argue that the mode is far more capacious. The volume traces the genealogy of female complaint through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious, political, legal, and philosophical discourses, and its critical reception and recent representation in digital scholarly resources. For early modern writers, Ovid's verse epistles voiced by heroines addressing the heroes who raped, entrapped, and abandoned them, paired with some replies, thematized the potentials of women's writing to overturn the priorities of hegemonic discourses. Although a number of early [End Page 253] modern women writers, including Isabella Whitney, cite this tradition, Ovid's Heroides was a troublesome legacy owing to its licentious subject matter and its male-authored ventriloquy of women's complaint. As Early Modern Women's Complaint shows, the Heroides was just one element in early modern women's complaint. The essays are organized in four chronologically ordered sections, followed by an afterword. Part I, 'Sixteenth Century', comprises four chapters. Susan M. Felch contends that Anne Lock deployed prophetic and penitential complaint to instruct her readers and thus advance Calvinist Reform over the 1540s to 1590s. Micheline White outlines Katherine Parr's evolving use of religious complaint to lament on behalf of her husband, Henry VIII, in Psalms and Prayers (1544), and later, writing as the dowager queen, to urge for Protestant reform in Lamentation or Complaint of a Sinner (1547). Tricia A. McElroy analyses the prevalence of female-voiced complaint in Scottish political propaganda of the 1560s and 1570s, when the ideal of wifely virtue was fraught following the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567. Lindsay Ann Reid examines Isabella Whitney's adaptation of autobiographical affect derived from Ovid's Tristia rather than his Heroides to articulate careerist poetic ambitions in The Copy of a Letter (1566–67) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573). Part II, 'Seventeenth Century', includes four chapters. In the first, Emily Shortslef investigates Mary Cary's use of complaint to embrace anti-Stoic inconstancy in her closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Paul Salzman examines how Mary Wroth employs the 'dirty pain' (p. 142) generated by complaint to 'bridge between the personal and political' (p. 138) in her manuscript play Love's Victory and in the second part of her romance Urania. Danielle Clarke tracks the 'interpellation of complaint (p. 158) indebted to Du Bartas through the writing of Aemilia Lanyer, Anne, Lady Southwell, and Lucy Hutchinson. Sarah C. E. Ross challenges the association between Ovidian complaint and 'isolation, distortion, and deception' (p. 186), demonstrating how Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and John Milton use the Ovidian figure of Echo to construct female community within pastoral complaint. Part III, 'Restoration', contains three chapters. Gillian Wright considers Aphra Behn's complaint 'Oenone to Paris', in John Dryden's collection Ovid's Epistles, Translated by Several Hands (1680), to redirect critical attention from Dryden's theorization of translation towards the ideological and political implications of Restoration complaint. Whereas Dryden expressed 'clear signs of unease with royal sexual self-indulgence' (p. 210), Behn 'dramatiz[ed] conflicts between power and sexuality' (p. 219). Susan Wiseman extends the discussion of complaint to North America with a fascinating account of how Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) is 'deeply mulched with the matter of complaint' (p. 233), adapting 'experiential testimony and...

This chapter refutes the sidelining of premodern critical race studies within early modern women’s studies and urges premodern critical race studies scholars to integrate into their analyses (and not simply mention) historical women’s cultural productions. The chapter begins with Margo Hendricks’ ‘state of the field’ essays, where she adjudicates ‘the epistemology of race in the period’ and engages with ‘feminist historiography’. It cites Kim Hall’s articulation of ‘a semiotics of race’ for assessing Renaissance culture and Joyce Green MacDonald’s diachronic-dialogic approach to ‘the intersection of race, gender, and performance’ from the early modern era to now. It proceeds to Hendricks’, Hall’s, and MacDonald’s explications of early modern English women’s writing and their excavations of subaltern women’s agency as English colonialism intensified over the course of the seventeenth century. The chapter concludes with Elysabeth Grace’s Daughters of Saria romance series, where she builds on these investigations to imagine reparations on a cosmic scale.

Reviewed by: Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity Jennifer C. Vaught Keith M. Botelho . Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. xiv + 199. $80.00. In this excellent study of rumor and early modern masculinity, Keith M. Botelho begins by contextualizing Renaissance earwitnessing, or judicious listening, in terms of the importance of discerning truth in our noisy, modern world. In the preface, "Listening in an Age of Truthnapping," he contends that our auditory and visual senses are continually subjected to cell phones, the Internet, radio programs, and the nightly news that spins stories as if they were entertainment. These multiple, rapidly changing sources of news contain unverified information that can generate devastating rumors, a distortion and garbling of the truth distinct from gossip because of their large-scale social and political implications. In the Renaissance, "Rumor or Fama" is "an ambiguously gendered figure" that relentlessly undermines masculine and feminine authority, onstage and off (3). In the introduction, "Buzz, Buzz: Rumor in Early Modern England," Botelho outlines the literary, historical, and theoretical implications of his innovative [End Page 361] argument about earwitnessing in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Cary. Throughout this well-executed, carefully constructed, and witty book, he examines a wide range of texts about rumor and related subjects like cautionary aural discernment. His accessible, detailed analyses of dramatic works are impressive in a project that contributes to existing criticism on sound studies by Bruce Smith, Kenneth Gross, Wes Folkerth, and Gina Bloom (22). He makes an important contribution to early modern scholarship by complicating the restrictive alliance of hearing and its accompanying ideas of "obedience and receptivity" with femininity. Instead, he focuses on dramatists who feature men whose informational authority is based on their earwitnessing when subjected to male rumormongers (3). Despite the vilifying and scapegoating of the tongues of women allied with gossip in Renaissance dramatic works, conduct books, and marriage manuals, Botelho presents the ear as an alternative site of female resistance to their disempowerment in a number of Shakespeare's plays (75). Botelho makes effective use of recent, compelling works on masculinity such as Mark Breitenberg's Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, Bruce Smith's Shakespeare and Masculinity, and Jennifer A. Low's Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, among others. The study as a whole could benefit from the inclusion of even more theoretical, secondary sources about gender, masculinity, and femininity to further illuminate the large number of plays he discusses. Nevertheless, his historicizing of early modern concepts of masculinity in relation to earwitnessing and rumor is strong. He deals insightfully with Elizabeth I, whom he calls the "paradigmatic earwitness of the period" (23), Francis Bacon, and humanist education theorists such as Juan Luis Vives and Roger Ascham. Though he sometimes blurs the distinctions between literary and historical men and women with respect to earwitnessing, he points out the common link between historia and storia in an early modern age when opposing and alternative interpretations of current events were printed rapidly and distributed widely like pulp fiction (54). In fact, the rise of print culture and relatively high literacy rates in Renaissance England markedly increased one's vulnerability to rumor and gossip (21). He concludes that "perhaps this pastiche of voices—an historical and theatrical babel—becomes a more accurate representation of truth than any one particular account" (54). In chapter 1, "Table Talk: Marlowe's Mouthy Men," Botelho sets the stage by examining the playwright's rumor-filled life and humanist education treatises that emphasize careful discernment. He then analyzes Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris, and Edward II in terms of male rumormongers and failures of earwitnessing. Botelho concludes that in these plays, "the uncontrolled speech of men" threatens "to undermine and destroy male authority" despite the fact that multiple early modern discourses tend instead to stigmatize women as gossipers [End Page 362] (36). Yet in Dido, Marlowe relies on "gendered binaries" of male "controlled speech" and "silence" and female "raving" (39). Dido reinforces the stereotype of "the woman who attempts to destroy a man's fame with her loose tongue" (39). In Edward II, Queen Isabella...

Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman M. C. Bodden (2011) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 257pp. Early Modern Women in Conversation Katherine R. Larson (2011) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 218pp.

The central character in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is not the embodiment of mercantile or proto-capitalist values that many readers have taken him for, and in fact repudiates those values. In a real sense, he is not a merchant at all. Barabas is never interested in profit or in money as it is commonly understood; he is spectacularly economically irrational from the first scene to the last. His famous celebration of “infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37) is profoundly hostile to the very idea of money. Barabas defies economic logic, whether mercantile or Marxist, because he does not seek gain. He can best be understood through Georges Bataille’s concept of pure expenditure, the drive toward loss and waste as ends in themselves. Barabas is an enemy to profit, the scourge of Malta’s marketplace. He represents an archaic anti-Semitic fantasy that tropes Jews as economically irrational, and promotes a set of xenophobic nationalist fantasies that reject bargaining or trade. [J.M.]

Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks. Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011. xiii +248 pp. $124.95. ISBN: 978–0–75460–6742–1. - Volume 65 Issue 1

Early modern women's engagement with verse was predicated upon their command of literary form, yet formalist approaches to women's writing remain sporadic and undertheorized. This article argues that we need to think more imaginatively about formal composition if we are to better understand the work of early modern women as writers and readers, both in print and manuscript. Indeed, rhetorical ornament and display—foundational to Renaissance writing on formal composition—were key to the construction of women's literary capital in the period. This article considers that construction of literary capital across Renaissance literary criticism directed at women; women's writing in manuscript; Katherine Philips's commentary upon the writing process and the response of “Philo-Philippa” to her work; contemporary praise for women's writing, and the emergence of a female literary tradition. Further, an expansive understanding of rhetorical display allows us to experiment with more far-reaching analyses of women's engagement with manuscript culture, particularly its dialogic nature. By attending to early modern literary modes with more sensitivity, we may begin to rethink the dimensions of women's literary history.

Which early modern female authors were read, and how? How did early modern women writers achieve reputations in the early modern period? These questions are central to this chapter, which brings together theoretical and methodological developments at the intersection of reception studies and early modern women’s writing. The chapter’s focal example is the RECIRC project, which aimed to produce a large-scale quantitative analysis of the reception and circulation of women’s writing from 1550 to 1700. The project is positioned within a wider context of emerging digital projects concerned with the history of reading and reception. Driven by the research questions with which it opens, the chapter takes an expansive view of reception, arguing that a capacious set of activities constitutes engagement with a female author’s work. The discussion concludes by considering literary history—our critical work today as well as that of earlier generations and contemporary readers—as reception.

In Stephen Frears's recent film The Queen (2006), Elizabeth II, played by Helen Mirren, is deeply concerned about the boundary between private family life and public persona in the period immediately following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In seeking to protect the privacy of her family and especially that of her grandsons, to allow them to grieve in private, she inadvertently projects an uncaring public persona. It falls to the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, in collaboration with the Queen's long-suffering secretary, to persuade Her Majesty to pursue a different course of action and thus placate the mass public. Whatever the fairness of this representation, the Queen, while clearly in command of her role as head of state, is portrayed as a leader no longer in command of her public image and even unable to comprehend its importance. I'm tempted to recommend that Frears's Queen acquaint herself with the sophisticated communication tactics of other female rulers by reading Kelley Harness's Echoes of Women's Voices. Whether wives, widows, or nuns, early modern Italian noblewomen were adept at using patronage to shape their public image. Of course, sometimes they too had to practice damage control-a topic to which I shall return. Echoes of Women's Voices is an absorbing study of female self- fashioning in early modern Florence that documents successes and mishaps in the pa­ tronage strategies of women regents and women religious. The main focus is on Archduchess Maria Magdalena of Austria, widow of Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, during her joint regency of Florence (1621-30) with Christine of Lorraine, but there are also two chapters on the institutional patronage of the convent of Santa Croce (known as La Crocetta), home to Princess Maria Maddalena, Christine of Lorraine's daughter and therefore Archduchess Maria Magdalena's sister-in-law. The concept of patronage as a means of fashioning a public identity is familiar, but aside from William Prizer's articles on Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia (e.g., 1982; 1985; 1999), and studies of convents by Robert Kendrick (1996), Craig Monson (1995), and Colleen Reardon (1996; 2002), there is little substantial work on women's musical patronage in Italy. Harness draws upon research into early modern women's patronage of the visual arts, particularly highlighting the idea from Roger Crum (2001) that, regardless of who commissioned a work,

Upon becoming a widow, an early modern woman was often faced with patriarchal anxieties and stereotypes about her new status. This held particularly true for widows who embarked on legal proceedings. While rejecting certain stereotypes, other tropes could work to her advantage. This could mean that widows fashioned a different image of themselves at different times, or in different areas of their lives. The persona a widowed litigant chose to adopt was dictated by the kind of suit she brought. Other models were tied to specific circumstances. This, together with the nature of these legal records, forced widowed litigants to fashion themselves as a particular kind of widow, while life-writing demonstrates that they may have been all of the above at the same time. As such, never were they merely widows, but they were biblical widows, wives and/or femes soles.

A unique selection of seventeenth century pamphlets revealing the populars press' obsessive concern with female violence -- a violence that is almost always domestic -- is presented in this book, along with a discussion of the texts' historical and cultural contexts. Modernised and annotated, these pamphlets vividly illustrate the precarious and often contradictory legal position of the early modern English woman. Because the early modern woman was so thoroughly defined by her marital status (either married or to be married), the crimes chronicled in this study -- infanticide, child murder and husband murder -- focus almost exclusively on women's roles as wives and mothers.

The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of their own arts and for their accomplishments as creators. Whether they delivered infants or governed as monarchs, or produced embroideries, letters, paintings or poems, their visions, the authors argue, have endured across the centuries. As the title of the volume suggests, the essays gathered here participate in a wider conversation about the relation between biography, historical fiction, and the growing field of biofiction (that is, contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures), and explore the complicated interconnections between celebrating early modern women and perpetuating popular stereotypes about them.