Attending to Women in Early Modern England.

No printed text can altogether replicate the intellectual excitement of a first-rate scholarly conference, but this fascinating volume recaptures much of the energy and scholarly depth of a symposium sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland on 810 November 1990. On that memorable weekend over three hundred scholars - art historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and historians from America and abroad - gathered to assess the current state of the new scholarship on early-modern Englishwomen; to consider how scholars trained in radically different disciplinary fields can work together to re-work the wider discipline of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century studies; and to discuss how the new research on women - and indeed the methodologies informing that research - might best be taught.

Participating in the Attending to Women symposium was in itself an experience in feminist pedagogy. Although the conference included four plenary sessions and an evening keynote speaker, its true center was a decentralized series of twenty-six workshops, each led by three or four organizers whose task was not to display their own knowledge but to provide material and direction for discussions of topics such as witchcraft (Joan Larsen Klein, Carole Levin, and Barbara Rosen); religious writings (Judith Kegan Gardiner, Mary Ellen Lamb, Lynette McGrath, and Anne Lake Prescott); race and gender (Juliet Fleming, Kim Hall, and Wendy Wall); and women printers (Elaine Kalmar, Lyn Kent, Nati Krivatsy, and Nancy Klein Maguire). In this volume, lively summaries of those twenty-six discussions provide food for thought for readers unfortunate enough to have missed the workshops themselves. Each summary is accompanied by a brief and exceedingly helpful bibliography of related readings. The book as a whole closes with an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary materials "presented as a starting point for persons preparing a course on gender in the English Renaissance" (360).

Attending to Women also prints the weekend's keynote speech and the position papers (and formal responses to them) presented in plenary sessions on Disciplinary Conventions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives; Structuring Public and Private Selves; Visible Women, Invisible Women; and Pedagogy. In the introduction to the volume, Betty Travitsky points to an aspect of the conference that she and the rest of the organizing committee evidently saw as a "problem": "the preponderance of literary scholars among the conferees." This preponderance, which perhaps reflects the actual demographics of scholars now working on early modern Englishwomen, Dr. Travitsky fears "may tilt work in the field - and perhaps tilted work at the conference - too strongly in the direction of literary study" (27). That tilt may be seen in the workshops mentioned above - and also in the wonderfully helpful excerpts of responses to a survey asking participants how they introduce women into traditional survey courses (319-35). But the tilt toward literary analysis is corrected in this book, as it was at the conference itself, by the strong voices of Nanette Salomon and Keith Moxey (art history) and Retha M. Warnicke, Susan Dwyer Amussen, Judith Bennett, and David Cressy (history), who spoke with and against literary scholars Margaret Hannay, Heather Dubrow, Margaret Ferguson, and Jean R. Brink in the plenary sessions, and by Lisa Jardine, whose keynote address, "Unpicking the Tapestry: The Scholar of Women's History as Penelope Among the Suitors," argued the need for a completely new historical narrative of early modern England and for a "new history in which women's and men's interventions in past time will weigh equally" (140).

The new historical narrative for which Professor Jardine argued in November 1990 is not yet altogether written, but evidence that it is being drafted can be seen in many places: in articles printed in recent issues of Renaissance Quarterly, new textbooks being published, new courses being taught, and new titles gracing Ph.D. dissertations. It was seen, too, at the University of Maryland in April 1994 when once again some three hundred scholars gathered for yet another extraordinary conference - this time on the happily expanded topic Attending to Women in Early Modern Europe.

ELIZABETH H. HAGEMAN University of New Hampshire