Elizabeth Jane Weston. Collected Writings.

Ed. and trans. Donald Cheney and Brenda M. Hosington with the assistance of D. K. Money. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2000. xxxi + 9 b/w pls. + 448 pp. index. $80. ISBN: 0-8020-4472-7.

Donald Cheney and Brenda M. Hosington have made a major contribution to scholars of the early modern period with this first modern edition and translation of the writings of Elizabeth Jane Weston, a prolific Neo-Latin writer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Cheney and Hosington note that Weston was "[w]idely celebrated throughout the Neo-Latin republic of letters as Virgo Angla, 'the English Maiden'" (xv) and saw two editions of her works published in her life-time. But the very thing that made her a writer of international renown in her own day--her decision to publish only in Latin--is largely what has hidden her from more recent students and scholars. Cheney and Hosington's edition, which contains the Latin text along with a facing-page English translation, makes Weston's vast range of writings "accessible for the first time to non-Latinists" (xxvi).

Born sometime in 1581 at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, Elizabeth Jane Weston was taken as a child to Bohemia where her stepfather Edward Kelley worked as alchemist to Rudolf II in Prague (xv). Although she spent most of her life in Prague, she considered herself English, and she "arguably enjoyed the greatest international fame during the first decade of the seventeenth century of any English writer who was not--like More or Sidney--of predominantly extra-literary interest to Europeans" (xv). Weston's Parthenica (ca. 1608), at 307 pages, forms the bulk of Cheney and Hosington's volume and is "supplemented by a wide range of individual poems found in various European libraries" (xiii). The Parthenica itself represents the impressive range of styles utilized by Weston and by other Neo-Latinists, including elegies, epitaphs, epithalamia, and shorter verse forms such as epigrams, as well as a sampling of Weston's extensive correspondence with family members, friends, and scholars, and, most particularly, with would-be patrons. As such, the work provides an invaluable view into the concerns and desires of a learned early modern woman who entertained ambitions of becoming "a well received published poet" (xxi).

Cheney and Hosington emphasize that Weston's work is not important solely because it was produced by a woman, but that it was the work of a woman undoubtedly adds a layer of interest to it. Scholars will find it particularly enlightening to read this collection alongside and within the context of works by other early modern women writers and those who wrote to and about women writers. Her "Catalogue of Learned Maidens and Women," which appears at the end of Parthenica, lists women of antiquity, as well as more recent women and some of her contemporaries, and makes an interesting comparison with Christine de Pizan's much earlier Livre de La Cite Des Dames (ca. 1405) and with other compendia of famous women. In addition, her moving In Obitum ... Ioannaeon the death of her mother, offers a glimpse into the too-often overlooked intensity of the relationships between and among women in this period.

Weston rarely employs apologies for her femaleness as had some earlier women writers (as well as some of her contemporaries), but among her correspondents are those who display a variety of the prevailing stereotypes about women. One correspondent points out, for instance, that Weston has "singular gifts, and those magnificent ones which are most rare in the feminine sex, namely Prudence and Learning" (195). But many also refer to her as "Sapho" or "Sulpitia," while others even "sometimes declar[e] her to be in the same company as Virgil and Ovid" (xviii).

Weston herself exhibits some of the chilling prejudices of the period, however, as in her "On baptized Jews," in Parthenica (95), or the epigram, "A Jewish merchant" in book 2 of Parthenica (131-32). Thus, she seems both a writer unusual for her time, as well as a writer very much of her time.

Overall, Elizabeth Jane Weston: Collected Writings opens up a wealth of possibilities for scholars and students of early modern European literature and of literature by women. Cheney and Hosington's useful introduction, as well as their translations of Weston's writings and those of her correspondents, will introduce many readers to the largely neglected body of Neo-Latin writing and to the international community of writers who engaged in that work.

GAIL E. COHEE

Brown University