Attending to Women in Early Modern England.

By Betty Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1994. 382pp.).

The papers included in Attending to Women in Early Modern England were presented at a 1990 symposium sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park. The editors of the volume retain their excitement and pleasure that the symposium occurred and that it drew such large numbers. In her introduction, Betty Travitsky notes that more than 300 people participated in the conference, a fact she atrributes partially to the: "coming of age of women's studies scholarship in the early modern period." Travitsky suggests participation and attendance constitute almost an "intellectual contract," obligating scholars of art history, history, and literature to pursue their work in an interdisciplinary way (13). Her belief in this quasi-contract is not shaken by her own acknowledgement that the conferees were predominantly literary scholars (27) and that, "sometimes, in some encounters, speakers seem not to talk with, but rather at, one another," an assessment borne out by the collected papers. an assessment

As Travitsky lays it out, the conference was intended to focus on four central questions: methodologies, or how to attend to women in the early modem period; public and private constructions of the self; issues of class and hierarchy; and how to incorporate the new reaming about women into classroom instruction.

The methodology papers present perhaps the clearest example of the difficulties in communicating among disciplines. Margaret Hannay's article is an attempt to reconstruct the lives of Renaissance women through a wide variety of sources. A literary scholar, Hannay uses the traditional tools of the historian and some of the art historian: estates books, reports by estate managers, letters, commissioned portraits. Her less than convincing argument is that Renaissance women "fashioned" their own self-definitions which, albeit that nodding to gender stereotypes, yet subverted them. Judith Bennett, an that historian, in response observes that the "self-fashioning" convention at the heart of Hannay's paper is not well accepted by women's historians. Bennett's own work highlights continuity in the history of medieval and early modem women; she questions the validity of the self-fashioning convention both modem because it stresses discontinuity and because it is a convention based on the study of men. the

Bennett's response, with its gentle suggestion that Hannay would have done better to interrogate than accept this convention, shares with others in the volume a determinedly positive tone. Noting that Hannay addressed a question of interest to only a single discipline, Bennett, nonetheless, lauds her for addressing a question important in that discipline with interdisciplinary methodologies and for advancing feminist purposes.

This positive supportive approach is reserved mainly for works which consciously advance feminist agendas and reach conclusions which challenge and, as literary scholar Lisa Jardine puts it, unweave and then reweave traditional historical narrative, weighing "women's and men's interventions in past time" equally (140). Jardine's keynote address praises the pioneering work of Natalie Zemon Davis in creating "gender-equal history." Jardine also draws attention to the relative paucity of men at the conference and the attacks on Davis's masterwork The Return of Martin Guerre, as indicative of the reluctance within the field of history to accept narratives in which women are central and are active agents. Jardine's essay further undermines confidence in the extent and success of the "intellectual contract" posited by Travitsky.

Heather DuBrow, another literary scholar, follows up the assault on traditional historical narrative--and narrators--by pondering how particular narratives or models become privileged in other fields. DuBrow notes the widespread acceptance within literary criticism of Lawrence Stone's version of the early modem family, despite the continuing debate within the field of history over the validity of Stone's model. DuBrow inclines toward other historical and psychological models. In his response to her paper, David Cressy, an historian, points out that her conclusions are heavily influenced by the models she accepts and notes that historians are likely to demand to see evidence or, as he terms it in this instance, case histories bearing out those conclusions. It is in such exchanges that the value of this volume for historians rests. historians

Few of the articles collected in the volume offer research new to historians. Several, however, like Cressy's, offer prescriptions for how to use and conduct research that are of interest to students of history and to those who share an interest in early modem women. Cressy actually lays out questions important for scholars in several fields and offers suggestions on how to begin to get answers. He carefully explains the problems historians and others face in trying to understand what early modem women meant when they spoke or, as some few did, wrote, and what they heard when they listened to sermons or other "public testimon[ies]." Several contributors to the volume underscore the importance of context: early modem women, like women today, vary by class and by religion and by education and by parental status and by many other significant factors. To these contributors, reaming just what these factors did signify must be a key goal of women's studies. Indeed, Jean R. Brink, speaking of bringing the scholarship of women's studies into the classroom, provocatively questions the exclusive focus on women. Women lived with men who surely played significant roles in women's lives. Can, she asks, we really attend to women and gender without attending to men?

Included in the volume are summaries of the workshops offered at the conference. As with the papers presented in full, some of these address questions of interest to historians as well as literary and art history scholars in ways that might be fruitful; others seem to have been more mired in jargon and the concerns of a single field. Several of the workshops reiterated the importance of context a workshop on race and gender asked whether race was, the in fact, "a category of difference in early modern England" or an anachronism (285). A workshop on recovering women's texts and images underscored the importance of considering social class. underscored the

The editors thoughtfully append a select bibliography intended for the use of persons planning a course on gender in the English Renaissance. They note that many of the listings were taken from the broader bibliography developed by Brink in conjunction with the conference and append, too, excerpts from the responses to the survey on the the classroom materials used by conference participants and selected others from which Brink had constructed her bibliography. Reports from the trenches as they are, rather than tendentious papers prepared for an interdisciplinary conference, these excerpts provide some of the most useful information for those who would incorporate the study of women into the study of literature, history, or art history.