"My Name Was Martha": A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem.

With this book, Robert Evans and Barbara Wiedemann provide the welcome first printing of Martha Moulsworth's 1632 autobiographical poem - recently unearthed at Yale's Beinecke Library and entitled "The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth / Widdowe" - followed by several chapters analyzing the poem from literary, historicist, and feminist perspectives. The editors' stated threefold goal is to make the poem widely available, to establish the poem's artistry, and to begin to place the poem in the contexts of other autobiographical pieces and other writings by early modern women.

The amply annotated 110-line poem itself is a delight to read both for the glimpses of the early modern Englishwoman's life it provides and for the author's eloquently versed musings on topics ranging from the value of educating women, to the dilemma which of her husbands she "shall call husband in [y.sup.e] Resurrection" (99). Covering the years 1577 to 1632, Moulsworth relates her experiences as a young gentlewoman whose father taught her not only "godlie pietie" but also Latin, as a three-time wife and widow, and as a bereaved mother. The tone is sometimes tender, restrained, and lyrical, as when she writes of her children: "I by the first, & last some Issue had / butt roote, & fruit is dead, [w.sup.ch] makes me sad" (71-72). At other times, e.g. when she reasons that women ought to have at least one university since men have two, Moulsworth comes across as keen-minded and a touch defiant. At still other points she sounds as plucky and as worldly as Chaucer's Wife of Bath: "I had my will in house, in purse in Store / what would a women old or yong haue more?" (66-67).

Evans explains that the first of the essays following the poem is "deliberately old-fashioned and 'formalist'" because he wants foremost to value Moulsworth's poem as "a highly complex work of art" (xii). Accordingly, Evans alternately scrutinizes Moulsworth's language - especially its "balanced syntax" (14) and "parallel phrasing" (22) and draws conclusions about Moulsworth's character and attitude. A subsequent chapter overviews recent scholarship on the education of women in early modern England and on women's roles as daughters, wives, mothers and widows during the period. This chapter urges readers not only to enlarge their understanding of the poem by considering it within Moulsworth's own historical context but also to appreciate the value of the poem itself as a historical document that provides rare access to private female thoughts on marital and other relationships during this era. In the following chapter on the poem as autobiography, Evans echoes his earlier discussion of Moulsworth's consistently "balanced" poetic language when he observes that she likewise balances her ego as woman and writer (evident in the very act of penning her life, her poem) with her self-defining relationships with men.

The final chapter, "Feminist Contexts," will be especially useful to readers not familiar with feminist theory. Wiedemann first overviews some respected theories on gendered writing and then submits that "Moulsworth - using male forms, structure, and language to tell her story - is ostensibly doing 'man's writing,' but the gaps or silences of her poem imply a feminist message" (104). The final few paragraphs of this chapter are its most intriguing, and one is left wanting more detailed analysis about the particular nature of those "gaps" and "silences." Though there is no final attempt to synthesize the "old-fashioned," formalist analysis of the poem with the historicist and feminist analyses, this lack of synthesis seems intentional and may in fact present greater accessibility for the general reader or for students with various interests in Moulsworth's poem.

LORI SCHROEDER HASLEM LeMoyne College