The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance.

Wendy Wall prefaces her excellent book with a documentable fact of real importance: print publication overlapped with manuscript circulation for nearly 200 years, with a conflict between the two arising in the latter half of the sixteenth century when print became popular and affordable. Wall's book argues that the successful dominance of print circulation included a definition of authorship that negotiated social and sexual anxieties about being "pressed," and sought ways to define authorship as masculine authority. Since "part of the threat of publication was its encouragement of a female readership, it is hardly surprising that gender served as an important idiom for managing and organizing anxieties about the press" (15).

The book contains five discrete chapters framed by an introduction and an afterword. The introduction ("To Be a Man in Print") establishes her thesis that "in the early modern period, writers, printers, and compilers re-thought manuscript authority," and in the process developed a language that gendered the new models of authorship (21). Wall sets her readings of gendered language in a very broad context, gaining in range what she might lose in focus.

The first chapter, for example ("Turning Sonnet: The Politics and Poetics of Sonnet Circulation"), adds something new to the traditional history of the sonnet by analyzing the difference between "permeable" manuscript collections of occasional verse and the rise of the sonnet sequence as an emblem of poetic authorship. Wall illustrates both the overlap between manuscript and print models of the book, and the emergence of the idea of the author in the early seventeenth century. I particularly commend her discussion of the transitional character of the popular Songs and Sonets (1557), which post-romantic culture has insisted on unifying and authorizing by naming it Tottel's Miscellany. The role of the lady in the gestures of courtship represented by the sonnet is less central to this chapter than it tries to assert, but Wall has interesting things to say about how and why the figure of the lady is first reified and then obscured.

Other chapters are similarly comprehensive. In "Author(iz)ing Royal Spectacle: The Politics of Publishing Pageantry," Wall supplements and occasionally challenges the recent spate of studies on pageantry and power in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; she takes issue, for example, with the notion that the spectacle was mightier than the book (113). I found the discussions of Gascoigne and Mulcaster particularly interesting in this chapter. In "Prefatorial Disclosures: 'Violent Enlargement' and the Voyeuristic Text," she examines language of privacy, display, and eroticism in a wide range of prose and verse prefaces. Prefatorial disclaimers, she claims, used the language of gender, disclosure, and "dilation" in an effort to make print "acceptable to audiences who understood and valued the text within the patronage system of manuscript exchange" (173) and at the same time create an "erotics of commodification that constructed Renaissance publication as an enticing and dangerous cultural event" (226). "Impersonating the Manuscript: Cross-Dressed Authors and Literary Pseudomorphs" analyzes how Spenser, Gascoigne, and Daniel each "reshaped and introduced a new authorial career by developing a literary pseudomorph that he could supersede" (250), and amply documents that "patterns of authorial emergence . . . are frequently cast in a language that relies on sexual difference" (260).

The last chapter, "Dancing in a Net: The Problems of Female Authorship," will be for some of us the most interesting. Here Wall directs her attention to women writers who have only recently begun to emerge from what many now believe is an unwarranted obscurity. "How could a woman become an author if she was the 'other' against whom 'authors' differentiated themselves?" (282), Wall asks. She uses the gloss of mothers' advice books to work back toward readings of such various writers as Isabella Whitney, the Countess of Pembroke, Aemilia Lanyer, and Lady Mary Wroth, to offer "a sampling of the wide range of strategies that women writers developed in describing their relationship to their texts and reading public" (338). While there is not a great deal new to those who have read the work of Ann Rosalind Jones or Barbara Lewalski on women's authorizing strategies, Wall provides an excellently contextualized introduction to the problem of women and the authority of print in early modern England: "Just as Spenser, Gascoigne, and Daniel reshaped authorship by restructuring its relationship to femininity and love, these women writers enlarged the emergent concept of authorship by situating it within the tradition of female legacy, biblical sanction, and family lineage" (339).

Wall concludes in her afterword that "gender difference itself was being produced in the debate surrounding authorship" (346), and that the vexed and submerged history of women as authors has its origin in this complex conflict.

This book should be read by those interested in English Renaissance poetry, the history of print, and gender studies - and also by those of us involved in the transformation from a traditional print culture to the culture of electronic communication. Wall's subtle and complex discussion of the fluid significance of print culture in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England should inspire us to pay better attention to the significance of an analogous interaction between print and online cultures as we move into the twenty-first century. Computer-generated concordances are our incunabula, mitigating the need for leisure and patience and access to fine libraries in order to do close textual study. The Text Encoding Initiative, an internationally-funded effort to standardize the way we describe texts electronically, is our Royal Academy. Novelists such as Robert Coover are inviting communal and interactive composition. As in the competition between manuscript and print circulation, the newer form has the potential further to democratize access to information and authority, or to limit the circulation and ownership of knowledge to those who can buy or earn e-mail addresses. Wall's book reminds us how radical the moment is, and how uncertain the outcome.

SUSANNE WOODS Franklin and Marshall College