Renaissance Women: A Sourcebook. Constructions of Femininity in England.

Kate Aughterson, ed. Renaissance Women: A Sourcebook. Constructions of Femininity in England. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 8 illus. + xv + 316 pp. $55 (cl); $16.99 (pap). ISBN: n.a.

Aughterson's accounts of women and femininity in early modern England will serve as a valuable and accessible collection for feminists and Renaissance scholars alike. The book is divided into nine sections covering the following areas: theology, physiology, sexuality and motherhood, politics and law, education, work, writing and speaking, and proto-feminisms.

Aughterson draws upon books and pamphlets, which, for the most part, are too long to cite in their entirety. Her selected extracts, usually no more than two pages, make for an insightful and provocative mannerist reading. A casual flip through the volume reveals the following sampling: extracts from the Bible and Calvin; Ludovic Mercatus's laughable study of "womb hysteria"; Nicholas Culpepper's advice to barren women not to eat stag's heart and mints, nor wear sapphires and emeralds; a rather modernist essay of Jane Sharp, who believed that love was no more than sex misspelled: "the chief pleasure of love's delight [lies] in copulation; and indeed were not the pleasure transcendently ravishing in us, a man or a woman would hardly ever die for love" (130) and a phallocentric essay on The Doctrine of Superiority, and of Subjugation by the aptly named Robert Pricke, as well as Poulin de la Barre's ideologically apposite essay, The woman as good as the man, of the equality of both sexes.

Aughterson's general introduction is well intended but less praiseworthy. Aughterson deconstructs the narratives of Phillip Stubbes and Jane Anger in order to demonstrate that female perspectives in the documents are filtered through a male perspective and/or how to read the documents in order to understand how women often resisted dominant formulations of identity and behavior. An alternative reading might have focused on early modern England's apparent need to socially maintain gender difference and the subordination of one gender to the other in order to support a hierarchical vision of social order and division of labor.

My strategies are different from Aughterson's, who, of course, is free to interpret the texts anyway she likes. But as the editor of the volume, Aughterson is naturally aware that by placing her interpretive strategy at the beginning of the volume, she is encouraging the reader, presumably a university student, to read the documents in a certain way. As editor, Aughterson selected certain texts over others and then further selected extracts that highlighted her biases of critical import. All anthologies and sourcebooks do this. While no reading of a text is entirely innocent, it is unusual to see a further "How to analyze" approach in a collection of documents. The search for a subversive or transgressive reading in these extracts is an admirable undertaking, and one that Aughterson performs with skill. Nonetheless, her selections and analysis of institutional biases and recorded enactments are in themselves a reflection of her own biases and intellectual concerns. By stating unequivocally her own critical stance, she further filters not only what is read between the covers of her volume, but how it is to be read. This ultimately limits, though in no way undermines, the scope and use of her selections.

JEFFREY KAHAN University of California at Riverside