Women Writers in English: 1350-1850.

One of the most dramatic changes in Renaissance studies over the past ten or fifteen years has been the reshaping of the canon to include works by women writers who had been neglected for many years. Virginia Woolf's famous elegy for the missing works of Judith Shakespeare was written largely in ignorance of this substantial body of work; as the general editors of the Oxford series point out, "there were many, Judith Shakespeares, and . . . not all of them died lamentable deaths before fulfilling their literary ambitions."(1) The rediscovery of these writers emerged from the academic feminism of the 1960s and 70s and was nourished by several groups: in a colloquium held at the Folger Shakespeare library from 1985-89, then in new colloquia founded by members of the Folger group; in New York (at CUNY); New England (at the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies); and in Washington (at the National Museum for Women in the Arts), which ultimately cooperated with the others to organize the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (EMW).(2) Ongoing work on these writers has been furthered by three interdisciplinary conferences on "Attending to Early Modern Women," by sessions organized by EMW at other conferences, and by scholarly initiatives such as the Brown Women Writers Project. Although many teachers have already begun to include works by these writers in both graduate and undergraduate courses, those who are less familiar with them may need guidance when faced, suddenly, with eighteen new editions and facsmiles of works by writers they have not previously encountered.(5) Questions facing someone contemplating the inclusion of women writers in a course for the first time might include: What works should I include in my survey courses? Are translations and polemical tracts sufficiently "literary"? What texts are available? Are these writers really worth teaching?

Works by two authors in particular have emerged as significant literary achievements and are now clearly a part of the canon of early modern English literature. Certainly a comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century literature ought to include selections from Lady Mary Wroth's prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, and her sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, and an Elizabethan and Jacobean drama course ought to include Elizabeth Cary's play The Tragedy of Mariam. Wroth's Urania and Cary's Mariam now exist in fully annotated editions and can easily take their place in both undergraduate and graduate courses.(4)

The other writers represented in these editions are, for the most part, working in forms that are less widely recognized as "literary": letters, religious tracts, polemical pamphlets, and translations. However, the influence of New Historicist and materialist criticism as well as cultural studies has increasingly provided an imperative to extend both scholarly and teaching attention to such "non-literary" texts. Reading through the offerings from the two series that comprise most of the books under review here strongly suggests that any attempt to represent early modern culture without inclusion of these texts by women will not just be incomplete - any such representation will be partial - but incorrect by virtue of excluding significant elements which materially change our perspective on early modern texts and their contexts. Arbella Stuart's view on the late Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, for example, lets us see Elizabeth's decisions about her own virginity and marriage in light of the decisions she made on Stuart's behalf.(5) Anne Askew's unique first-person account of interrogation and torture bring the doctrinal controversies of the mid-sixteenth century dramatically to life. Aemilia Lanyer provides an illuminating example of a woman who, as a court writer/musician, negotiated with difficulty the complexities of her social status; her writings provide the perspective of someone who might not have been so different from Shakespeare's hypothetical sister.

WOMEN WRITERS IN ENGLISH, 1350-1850

As the forward by series editors Susanne Woods and Elizabeth Hageman makes clear, these books are "lightly-annotated versions based on single good copies or, in some cases, collated versions of texts with more complex editorial histories, normally in their original spelling" (ixx). The texts are based on the Brown Women Writers Project textbase and are published (in paperback editions) in order to "make available a wide range of unfamiliar texts by women." These texts are especially useful for teaching since they are reasonably priced and their copious introductions are uniformly helpful, providing necessary information about each author's life and placing the works in both literary and cultural contexts. In addition, they provide annotations that make it possible for students to read these original spelling editions.

As a series, these texts represent a remarkable range of editorial practices and principles, but all are thoughtfully chosen in light of the situation of each particular text and its intended readerships. Although I would usually expect more uniformity in a series, the general editors have been wise to let the editors of separate volumes make these decisions independently. Editors of texts by early modern women writers are often torn between the imperative, influentially articulated by Sara Jayne Steen, to retain original spelling and punctuation so as to preserve the voices of these long-silenced women as faithfully as possible, and a desire to modernize texts so that they can reach more readers, especially students who have difficulty with unmodernized texts. The editors of the Oxford texts (and the two non-series texts reviewed below) have often found creative means for a partial achievement of both goals.

Elaine Beilin's edition of The Examinations of Anne Askew makes available Protestant martyr Anne Askew's own account of her interrogation by church authorities, with commentary by John Bale. It is a fascinating and readable account of the doctrinal matters which were contested in the 1540s, and Askew's first-person narrative, as well as the drama of her ultimate fate, make this an ideal way to introduce students to the central issues of religious controversy in the first half of the sixteenth century. Beilin's volume includes both the earlier versions based on Bodleian Library copies of John Bale's 1546 and 1547 editions of the "First" and "Latter" examinations, as well as a version from John Foxe's Acts and Monuments which deletes Bale's commentary and adds some other material, including a description of her execution. Askew's accounts of her straightforward and often witty answers to the (clearly) frustrated and puzzled prelates who questioned her are compelling, as is her understated but moving description of torture at their hands. Bale's comments provide a counterpoint that tells us a great deal about patriarchal attitudes toward strong and outspoken women, since, as Beilin has noted elsewhere, he takes great pains to emphasize that Askew's strength during the ordeal could only have been provided by God's help - proof, for Bale, that God must be on the side of the reformation.(6) Beilin's introduction clearly and usefully sorts out what can be known about Askew's life (including difficult issues of dating) and goes on to place her examination and execution in the context of "evolving Protestant doctrine, Henry VIII's religious conservatism, court politics, and cultural attitudes to women" (xxiv).

The Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, edited by Esther S. Cope, represents the works of another Protestant woman writing one hundred years after Askew, under circumstances which were both similar and different. It is certainly surprising to open this volume and learn that Sir John Davies, author of two late-Elizabethan philosophical poems (Orchestra and Nosce Teipsum) which celebrate order and hierarchy, was married to someone who believed that she was called by the prophet Daniel to "announce to the world the date of the Day of Judgment" (xi). Sir John evidently tried to prevent her from making her prophecies public by burning them, but she was able to predict his sudden death in 1626 more accurately than the date for the Last Judgment. The editor points out that "by prophesying without the permission of officials, Lady Eleanor challenged the hierarchical and patriarchal authority which was the basis of order in family and society and in church and state" (xiv-xv). This wife of the celebrant of order and hierarchy was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned, at least once in Bedlam. Unlike other radical Protestant reformers in this period, Lady Eleanor was far from advocating a program of radical social reform; indeed, she insisted on her aristocratic heritage as a way of authorizing her prophecies. However, it is equally surprising to learn that she was the sister of Lord Audeley, the second earl of Castlehaven who was tried and executed in 1631 for rape and sodomy. Clearly, Davies provides a fascinating example of a woman whose subject positions place her in relation to very different cultural milieux. Cope's introduction is, in fact, comparatively brief, and I found myself wanting to know more about Lady Eleanor - especially in relation to other early to mid-seventeenth-century prophetic writers - and also a more detailed account of her complex political position (in relation to, for example, her brother's scandal and various factions at court).

Susanne Woods's edition of The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer is based on the Huntington Library copy of Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), one of nine extant. Her textual introduction provides an account of all the extant copies, some of which are incomplete, and usefully corrects errors in the STC's description of these volumes. It is now hard for me to imagine teaching Jonson's country-house poem "To Penshurst" without also teaching Lanyer's (probably prior) "The Description of Cooke-ham," so usefully do the two poems illuminate each other. This edition makes that poem available and allows it to be placed more fully within the context of Lanyer's life and other works. The introduction traces Lanyer's life on the fringes of court and nobility, including the time she spent in the household of the Countess of Kent, her position as mistress of Henry Cary, Lord Hunsdon, and her visits to Simon Forman which were recorded in his diary, along with a candid record of his probably unsuccessful attempts to seduce her. Woods makes a strong case for Lanyer's groundbreaking importance as perhaps the first woman to claim for herself the authority to write original poems (rather than translations) and also her use of dedicatory poems in "the unapologetic creation of a community of good women for whom another woman is the spokesperson and commemorator" (xxxi).

The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, edited by Barbara Lewalski, contains Speght's Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) and her poems Mortalities Memorandum and A Dreame (1621). Lewalski's introduction provides what little information is known for certain about Speght and places the Mouzell within the context of Jacobean controversy over women and cross dressing. Speght wrote the Mouzell in response to Joseph Swetnam's Araignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women (1615) - possibly, Lewalski speculates, at the request of the bookseller Thomas Archer, who had published Swetnam and desired an answer to drum up sales. (Two other answers were published in 1617 under pseudonyms, Ester hath hang'd Haman by "Ester Sowernam" and The Worming of a mad Dogge by "Constantia Munda," for which one should refer to the facsimile edition of Defences of Women below). Lewalski points out that Speght is unusual not only in publishing under her own name but also in the structure and approach of her volume which eschews Swetnam's "jumble of proverb lore, rowdy jokes, invective, authorities, anecdotes and examples ... cobbled together from the entire tradition of misogynist writing" (xxi) in favor of a more serious attempt "to re-interpret biblical texts so as to make the dominant discourse Protestant biblical exegesis - yield a more expansive and equitable concept of gender." Lewalski includes in an appendix the angry and scurrilous marginalia from the Yale edition, arguing plausibly that they represent Swetnam's own notes for a response (which never appeared).

Sara Jayne Steen's edition of The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart is based on arduous and careful editorial work. Most of the letters printed here are based on manuscript copies in the hands of Stuart or her secretary; only a few are based on other sources because manuscript versions are not available. In some cases multiple versions exist, reflecting Stuart's own revisions, and Steen either includes these alterations in the text or prints multiple versions of much-revised letters. In addition, some letters included here have never before been published. This text carefully preserves Stuart's spelling, word division, and punctuation in order, Steen argues, to preserve her voice: "in early modern England, an oral culture was in the process of becoming a print culture, and because spelling and punctuation were not yet fully fixed, they were especially reflective of the writer's internal voice" (108). The long introduction is really a full, if necessarily concise, biography of Stuart, and the letters are helpfully placed in context. There is a wealth of information here which untangles the complex familial and political relationships relevant to Stuart's life and fortunes during the final years of Elizabeth's reign and after James's accession. Steen helpfully cites Karen Newman's suggestion that Stuart's story represents a particularly interesting site for analysis of "the position, and rights and voices of women in early modern England."(7) Steen's edition will make this kind of analysis much more easily performed.

Anna Weamys's A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia has been edited by Patrick Colborn Cullen, who has chosen to include both a modernized, annotated text (analogous to the Oxford editions of Sidney's Arcadias) for undergraduate readers and also a corrected reprint of the 1651 text (based on the editorial principles of the Cambridge Sidney). Though aware of and sympathetic to Steeds ideas about preserving the writer's voice by preserving original spelling and punctuation, Cullen decided to include a modernized edition because Weamys "has been ignored for over three centuries; it would be a dreadful irony to edit her in such a way as to assure her continuing to be ignored" (lxv). This work, published in 1651, is a completion of the "New Arcadia" fragment from the composite 1593 Arcadia published after Sidney's death by the Countess of Pembroke. Weamys's work is one of several seventeenth-century continuations of the Arcadia, the only one written by a woman. Uncertainties surrounding the authorship of this work as well as the little that is known about Anna Weamys (who is generally accepted as the author) make clear the challenges of working on authors for whom basic biographical research is made more difficult by their relative obscurity even in life. Cullen provides a thorough discussion of these issues, drawing conclusions and providing conjectures where warranted, but never pushing evidence farther than it can go. He places Weamys's decision to "complete" the Arcadia in the context of early modern literary practices of imitation and argues for her independence and willingness to reshape Sidney to her own ends.

THE EARLY MODERN ENGLISHWOMAN: A FACSIMILE LIBRARY OF ESSENTIAL WORKS

PART 1: PRINTED WRITINGS, 1500-1640

This series is also designed to rebut the notion that "there were no Judith Shakespeares in early modern England." The larger series, The Early Modern Englishwoman, is designed "to make available a comprehensive and focused collection of writings in English from 1500 to 1700, both by women and for and about them" (Askew, vii), and this first series of facsimiles "provides a comprehensive, if not entirely complete collection of the separately published writings by women" (vi). By publishing facsimile editions, the general editors hope "to remedy one of the major obstacles to the advancement of feminist criticism of the early modern period, namely the unavailability of the very texts upon which the field is based" (vi). Each of these editions is based on a "carefully chosen" copy text with an appendix of significant variants, a short introduction to the life and work of the writer, and a brief survey of the most important scholarly work done to date. These introductions are not as long or detailed as the introductions to the Oxford editions; clearly, the facsimile editions will be most immediately useful to scholars who are already familiar with these writers. However, the special dilemma of editors of early modern women's texts - which is the desire to preserve original spelling or to present readable modernized editions - has led in many cases to a salutary self-consciousness about editorial practice. In several cases, these facsimiles will be invaluable both to scholars seeking to retrace an editor's logic, and even to students, who can be introduced to the problems and processes of textual editing through comparison of a critical edition and a facsimile.

John N. King's edition of the works of Anne Askew includes an introduction and facsimiles of the two Bodleian copies of Askew's First examinacyon and lattre examinacyon (STC 848, 850), upon which Beilin's Oxford text is based. The Beilin and King volumes together make a useful set. King's introduction is brief, like all in this series, and emphasizes the contrast between Askew's own strong self-presentation and Bale's insistence on her womanly weakness. Margaret W. Ferguson, coeditor with Barry Weller of the critical edition of Elizabeth Cary's Mariam, has prepared facsimiles of Works by and attributed to Elizabeth Cary. This volume contains not just The Tragedie of Mariam, but also the less firmly attributed The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, and The History of the Most Unfortunate Prince. The text of Mariam reprinted here is that of the Huntington library copy (STC 4613) of Creede's 1613 quarto. Since the Ferguson/Weller edition (see below) contains explanatory notes which detail the editorial procedures and decisions used in preparing that modernized text, this facsimile will be extremely useful to students who want to understand more concretely what those copious notes are talking about. This volume also prints two historical works on the life of Edward II, which some scholars attribute to Cary. Ferguson's introduction here deals largely with textual matters, but the Ferguson/Weller edition provides extensive information about Cary's life and the play in the context of Jacobean drama.

Janel Mueller has selected and introduced the volume of writings by Katherine Parr, which contains Prayers or Medytacions, The Lamentacion ofa synner, and variant leaves from the first edition of the Lamentacion. Mueller's concise introduction provides necessary information about Parr's life and religious beliefs, including her conversion to Protestantism, her influence in directing the education of Edward and Elizabeth, and the crisis of 1546 in which she was narrowly able to escape accusations of heresy. Mueller explains that Parr's Prayers or Medytacions are based on Thomas a Kempis's Imitatio Christi and were probably intended to "provide a vernacular manual for private devotion to circulate along with the English translation of the Litany" (xi). The Lamentacion of a synner was published after Henry's death and voices more strongly Protestant opinions. Mueller bases both texts on editions of 1548, the British Library copy of the fourth edition of the Prayers (STC 4822), and the Cambridge University Library copy of the Lamentacion (STC 4828, but includes as an appendix seven leaves from the Pembroke College copy of the first edition, STC 4827).

Volume 4 of this series contains four Defences of Women, the texts written by Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, and Constantia Munda in response to Swetnam's tract, selected and introduced by Susan Gushee O'Malley. There are facsimiles of Jane Anger her Protection for Women; A Mouzell for Melastomus; Ester hath hang'd Haman; and The Worming of a mad Dogge. O'Malley's introduction briefly details what is known about the actual identities of Anger, Sowernam, and Munda, although there is not room to discuss these matters in detail.(8) Volume 5 includes facsimiles of three works attributed to the Catholic and royalist writer Susan Du Verger. Editor Jane Collins explains in the introduction that the Admirable Events of 1639, a translation of a moralizing novella written by a French bishop, is the only work traditionally attributed to Du Verger; however, Collins provides convincing arguments for attribution to Du Verger of a translation of Camus's Diotrephe (1641) and an original work, Du Vergers Humble Reflections, which as an answer to criticism of monastic life contained in Margaret Cavendish's The World's Olio (1655) would represent an interesting example of serious religious debate between two women. Unfortunately, both the translation of Diotrephe and the Humble Reflections are outside the chronological boundaries of the series (1500-1640) and are not included in this volume. Instead, rather curiously, it includes a translation of another work by Camus (Certain Moral Relations) which was published in the same volume as Admirable Events but which the editor does not seem to believe was written by Du Verger. It is to be hoped that the second part of the series, to include works published between 1641 and 1700, will include the Humble Reflections.

Gary Waller has selected and introduced the works of Mary Sidney Herbert, sister of Sir Philip Sidney and aunt of Lady Mary Wroth. This volume includes Mary Sidney's two translations from French of Philippe De Mornay's Discourse of Life and Death (1592) and of Robert Garnier's Antonius, A Tragedie (1592).(9) Waller's brief introduction notes that despite the fact that Mary Sidney "rarely moved beyond translation," (x) she had an important role as a patron and member of an influential literary coterie. Her translation of Antonius was part of the well-known efforts of that coterie to establish a tradition of neo-classical closet drama to counter the "barbarism of the increasingly popular public theatre" (ix). These translations, perhaps surprisingly for works written by an aristocratic woman, were published during her lifetime and the facsimile is based on the Huntington Library copy of the 1592 edition (STC 18138).

Patrick Cullen has edited the seventh volume of the series, which contains Alice Sutcliffe's Meditations of Man's Mortalitie (1634). Cullen notes that not much is known about the life of Sutcliffe (he cites the work of Ruth Hughey and the unpublished work of Jesslyn Medoff as the source of most of it) but it is clear that she was connected to the innermost circles of the court of Charles II. Cullen compares the Meditations to Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a religious work framed by self-promoting encomia and dedications. The Meditations themselves consist of six prose works and a long poem. Although there was a first edition published in 1632-1633, no copies survive. The facsimile is based on the Folger copy of the second edition (STC 23447) with a few illegible lines patched from the British Library copy (xii). As there are only four copies of the second edition and no modern edition, this facsimile should make Sutcliffe's work much more available.

Volume 8, the works of Margaret Tyler selected and introduced by Kathryn Coad, contains The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (1578) and a translation of a Spanish romance, the Espejo di principes y cavalieros by Diego Ortunez de Calahorra. The editor notes the historical importance of this translation, since Tyler was "the first woman to publish a romance in England and the first English translator to work from an original Spanish romance rather than from a French translation of the Spanish" (ix). Coad similarly notes the importance of Tyler's preface as "the earliest Englishwoman's defence of women's literary work" (x). The brief introduction outlines what little is known about Tyler's life, and a useful bibliography is provided. The facsimile reproduces the Huntington Library copy of the first edition (STC 18859). Anne Wheathill's A handfull of holesome (though homelie) hearbs (1584) has been selected and introduced by Patrick Cullen as volume 9 of the series. Nothing is known about Anne Wheathill except that she was a Protestant and (as she indicates in this volume) a gendewoman. Her handfull is, in Cullen's words, "part of the history of the English Reformers' effort to revise the Roman Catholic primers and Books of Hours to satisfy the private devotional needs of a Protestant middle class" (x). This facsimile, the only modern edition, is based on the single surviving copy of Wheathill's book, located at the Folger (STC 25329).

Volume 10 makes available a facsimile of the privately owned copy of the 1621 edition (owned by Dr. Charlotte Kohler) of the first part of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, which contains Wroth's handwritten corrections. This volume, selected and introduced by Josephine A. Roberts, contains both The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), and makes this important copy publidy available to scholars for the first time. This facsimile will be most useful in tandem with Josephine Roberts's massive and encyclopedic critical edition of the first part of the Urania (see below). The introduction to the MRTS critical edition tells the dramatic story of how Roberts, in the course of methodically checking variants in all existing twenty-nine copies of the 1621 edition, was amazed during what she thought was a routine check of the twenty-seventh copy to discover marginal notes in Wroth's own hand. The facsimile allows us all to share in the excitement of that discovery.

Both Wroth's Urania and Elizabeth Cary's Mariam have also recently been published in full critical editions which are not part of a women writers' series. Both of these editions are fitting vehicles for both scholars and students to become acquainted with and to engage in serious study of these two important works. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, edited by Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995) represents the longawaited first part of Josephine Roberts's definitive critical edition of the Urania. The joy of those who work in this field at now having such a thorough and meticulously edited edition has been tempered by Roberts's sudden death last year in an automobile accident - not just because her edition of the second part was not quite complete at the time of her death, but because her generosity, learning, and good humor are sorely missed and will continue to be for many years. Fortunately, the edition of part two is being completed and will be published by MRTS as Roberts planned, with the two books "comprising a whole" (ix). This edition will be especially welcome since the second part exists only in a handwritten manuscript in the Newberry Library in Chicago and has not been very widely read for that reason. Roberts's edition of The First Part gives us Wroth's important work in an edition comparable to major critical editions of canonical male authors. The introduction provides a very helpful placement of the text in its many complex contexts: the literary tradition of prose Romance, the political and social contexts of the Jacobean court, and the important personal context of the extended Sidney family (including brief biographies of those most important to Wroth and most important within the Urania, and a helpful genealogical chart). Roberts treats Lord Denny's scandalized reading of the Urania as a roman a clef with subtlety and sophistication. Rather than attempting narrowly to decode the text, she uses the early modern concept of "shadowing" to argue that Wroth presents quasi-fictional portraits based in part on her contemporaries. Roberts is especially good on Wroth's own multiple (and, necessarily, partly fictional) self-representations. The introduction has copious notes, making this work encyclopedic not just in its mine of information about the seventeenth century but also in its citation of the most important and recent critical work on the role of women in the period.

Margaret W. Ferguson and Barry Weller have prepared a similarly complete critical edition of The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland, Her Life. This edition is available in paper, making it affordable to students. The volume contains a lengthy introduction, a modern spelling edition of Mariam, and a modern spelling edition of the biography written by Cary's daughter. Like Robert's introduction to the Urania, this volume provides necessary information about both literary and cultural contexts for the play. Such information is especially crucial in the case of Mariam, since if it is to be taught successfully (as it should be) alongside other Jacobean plays, it is important for students to be carefully introduced to its differences (as "closet" drama) from public theater plays.(10) Ferguson and Weller decided to modernize the text but to also supply endnotes which, in the case of Mariam, "foregrounded the whole process of (re)constructing a seventeenth-century text for modern readers" (49). This self-consciousness about editorial practice makes their text especially useful for graduate students, and in tandem with Ferguson's facsimile edition provides an ideal way to introduce students at all levels to the constructedness of modernized texts from this period.

The volumes reviewed here bear witness to the excitement, energy, and careful labor that has been devoted to the resurrection of these works by early modern women in the ten years since the Folger colloquium. These eighteen volumes, with many more editions and critical works already published and in preparation, represent an astonishing alteration of the field of early modern studies in such a short space of time. If, as some have argued, women did not have a Renaissance in the early modern period, these writers are surely, if belatedly, experiencing one now.

BOSTON COLLEGE

I would like to thank Naomi J. Miller for her help with this review

1 From the General Editors' Forward, ix-x, in each volume.

2 See the EMW website (http://chnm.gmu.edu/emw).

3 Help in teaching these authors will be readily available in 1999, when a new MLA volume, Options for Teaching Early Modern British Women Writers, ed. Margaret Hannay and Susanne Woods, will be published. For general bibliographies of work on these writers, see Elizabeth Hageman, "Recent Studies in Women Writers of Tudor England: Women Writers 1485-1603," English Literary Renaissance 14 (1984): 409-25; and Elizabeth Hageman, "Recent Studies in Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century (16041674)," English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 138-167.

4 Critical work on both of these writers has proliferated in recent years, so only a few central examples can be cited here. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA, 1993), has chapters on both Cary and Wroth. On Cary see also articles by Sandra K. Fischer, "Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny, Domestic and Religious," in Margaret Hannay, ed., Silent But for the World: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH, 1985): 225-237; and Margaret W. Ferguson, "Running On with Almost Public Voice: The Case of 'E.C.'" in Tradition and the Talent of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana, IL, 1991): 37-67. On Lady Mary Wroth see the collection of essays edited by Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England (Knoxville, TN, 1991); as well as books by both Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington, KY, 1996); and Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, 1993). See also Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, 1993), 330-38.

5 The works of Hizabeth I herself, including speeches, poems, and letters, have also received renewed attention. A new edition of Elizabeth's writings is currently being prepared by Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 1999.

6 For a longer account of Askew and her writings, see Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1987), 29-47.

7 Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), 143.

8 For the controversy as a whole, see Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, eds., Half Humankind. Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England (Urbana, IL, 1985).

9 A major, two-volume critical edition of The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford, 1998) is forthcoming.

10 Mariam has also been included in a new anthology, Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London and New York, 1996).