Representing Women in Renaissance England.

Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997. xii + 250 pp. $62.50. ISBN: 0-8262-1104-6

The coupling of these two volumes in a single review serendipitously provides a Janus-like view of the course scholarship has taken in the study of early modern women. Representing Women in Renaissance England is reminiscent of the initial groundbreaking anthologies of essays, published in the mid-1980s, that presented titillating pieces of biography or of literary analysis, while English Women's Poetry, 1649-1714 provides an excellent example of how those earlier titillating bits can provide the seeds for a full-scale revision of literary history when women and their writing are taken into account.

While Representing Women contains some illuminating and provocative, even polemical, pieces, it suffers from its origins: that is, as a conference proceedings, it lacks coherence. "Representation" as a concept is defined in this anthology in several ways: the self-representation of a woman writer, the representation of "women" or "woman" by a male writer, the representation of "women" or "woman" by female writers, the re-presenting of lost works by the editors and authors - the cultural definition of the gender. Ultimately, this inclusivity renders the title of the volume more diffuse than comprehensive.

That is not to say that many of these essays are not quite provocative. Janel Mueller's argument, for example, that religion should be offered a fourth place in the theoretical paradigm of "race, class, and gender" not only offers a wake-up call to the strange absence of this so important category in both literary and historical scholarship of the early modern period, but it also usefully problematizes the three other categories. Interesting couplings, such as works by Isabel Whitney and John Donne, King James's Daemonologie and Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens, and John Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso and native English defenses of women, in the essays by Ilona Bell, Lawrence Normand, and Pamela Joseph Benson, respectively, also suggest ways in which literary history can be rewritten. Literary history itself is problematized in Judith Scherer Herz's essay on Aemilia Lanyer and in Barbara K. Lewalski's discussion of a male reader's response to Rachel Speght's A Mousell for Melastomus. Examination of text and context, such as Paul Parrish's essay on Crashaw, Mary Collet, and Little Gidding, further illuminates the new history that feminist scholars are rewriting. The presentation of such "newly-recovered" women writers, such as Martha Moulsworth and An Collins, by Robert C. Evans and Sidney Gottlieb, as well as Roger B. Rollin's listing of the "everyday" women in Robert Herrick's Hesperides certainly reminds us that the work of retrieving the lost biography and writings of women is yet unfinished. Other essays provide suggestive transformations of previously male categories: Helen Wilcox demonstrates the subversive nature of the apparently culturally-accepted practice of women's devotions; the late Josephine A. Roberts "de-codes" woman's pastoral in Lady Mary Wroth's Love's Victory; Gareth Roberts examines the use of magic and witchcraft in the male poet's amatory negotiations with his mistress; Cecilia Infante charts John Donne's negotiations with the literary tradition and representation of Sappho in "Sappho to Philaenis"; and Stella P. Revard details the complex intertextual and contextual appropriation of meaning by Abraham Cowley in his responses to Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips's pindarics. However, all these essays could have been better served if the editors had located them within certain topical and/or theoretical categories. We have moved past the time when "women" alone, or even "representations of women" can suffice as meaningful categories of analysis.

The antiquated nature of such a paradigm is obvious when one turns to Carol Barash's study of women writers of the late Stuart period. Positioning such major writers as Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Anne Finch, as well as less prolific and or less-canonical writers such as Anne Killegrew, Mary Lee, Lady Chudleigh, Jane Barker, and Sarah Fyge Egerton within the political and literary communities of the period, Barash challenges a number of oppositional paradigms normally used to describe the period: "chaste" Philips vs. "transgressive" Behn, private woman vs. public man, Catholic vs. Protestant, royalist vs. parliamentarian. In so doing, she relies on current feminist theory, such as Judith Butler's concept of "gender performance" and Julia Kristeva's understanding of "abjection," filtered through careful bibliographical and textual study. The result is a finely-nuanced, carefully-wrought, and detailed argument, which relies substantively on the closest of readings.

Barash succinctly presents her thesis in the introduction: that these women writers form a tradition in that they respond "in similar ways to a shared set of political and cultural problems, shifting configurations of monarchic, religious, and linguistic authority; tensions between political and literary communities and poetic legitimacy, and attention to the place of gender in debates about political and linguistic authority" (2). Specifically, after examining origins of this tradition in the native English tradition of religious radicalism and the Continental conception of the "heroic woman," Barash traces the beginnings of this tradition in Philips's creation of a female community of friendship which, in spite of its customary depiction as a quiet, private community for women, destabilizes the concept of heterosexual marriage as well as political stability. Aphra Behn, in her poems to royal women, uses the heroic-woman tradition in the context of political debates about monarchic and linguistic authority. Jane Barker and Anne Killegrew continue this debate as they find authority for their writing in Mary of Modena's position as a Catholic and as queen regnant, while Anne Finch, finding a model of rule in the actual monarchy of Queen Anne, discovers a female poetic voice that balances "gestures of muted political opposition and collective, symbolically feminine emotional inwardness" (287). Barash's argument is exceedingly more complex and nuanced than this simple summary, and it is supported with twenty-nine illustrations, as well as seven appendices, which mostly provide a bibliographical and textual foundation for the main commentary.

Both these volumes (in spite of the absence of a theoretical construct for the essays in Representing Women) attest to the vitality and excitement inherent in the study of early modern women: not only are we still recovering texts that are important as both artistic and historical documents, not only are close readings of these texts and contextual studies illuminating small pieces of the literary history, but the recovery and creation of new knowledge and the employment of new methodology and theory have together begun the radical and necessary process of remapping this literary and historical landscape.

NANCY A. GUTIERREZ Arizona State University