Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England 9781442627376

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1. Studying Early Modern Women Writers
CHAPTER 2. Women in Early Modern England
CHAPTER 3. The Genres of Early Modern Women’s Writing
CHAPTER 4. Six Major Authors
Postscript
APPENDIX A. Women and the Rise of Print Culture
APPENDIX B. Chronologies
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

WOMEN’S WRITING IN ENGLISH: EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

In this introduction to the diversity and scope of the writing by women in England from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Patricia Demers discusses the creative realities of women writers’ accomplishments and the cultural conditions under which they wrote. There were deep suspicions and restrictions surrounding the education of women during this period, and thus the contributions of women to literature, and to the print industry itself, are largely unknown. This wide-ranging examination of the genres of early modern women’s writing embraces translation (from Latin, Greek, and French) in the fields of theological discourse, romance and classical tragedy, original meditations and prayers, letters and diaries, poetry, closet drama, advice manuals, and prophecies and polemics. A close study of six major authors – Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Lady Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips – explores their work as poets, dramatists, and romantic fiction writers. Demers invites readers to savour the subtlety and daring with which these women authors made writing an expressly social craft. (Women’s Writing in English) patricia deme rs is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Alberta.

WOMEN’S WRITING IN ENGLISH

Series Editor Gary Kelly, Professor of English, University of Alberta

Published Titles Anthea Trodd, Women’s Writing in English: Britain 1900–1945 Laurie A. Finke, Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England Patricia Demers, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

Patricia Demers

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2005 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8710-8 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8664-0 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Demers, Patricia, 1946– Women’s writing in English : early modern England / Patricia Demers. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8710-8 (bound). – ISBN 0-8020-8664-0 (pbk.) 1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. English literature – Women authors – History and criticism. 3. Women and literature – England – History – 16th century. 4. Women and literature – England – History – 17th century. I. Title. PR418.W65D45 2005

820.9⬘9287⬘09031

C2004-905882-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In memory of my mother and father, Margaret Sexton and Louis Cyrille Demers

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

ix xi

1 Studying Early Modern Women Writers

3

2 Women in Early Modern England Chiselling the Image, Unwinding the Rhetoric Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing Educating Women Praising and Blaming Women Wiving and Thriving Childbearing

14 19 26 37 46 56

3 The Genres of Early Modern Women’s Writing Translation Margaret Beaufort, Margaret Roper, Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Basset Jane Lumley, the Cooke sisters, Anne Vaughan Lock, Margaret Tyler, Mary Sidney Herbert Theological Debate, Romantic Intrigue, and Classical Tragedy: Elizabeth Cary, Susan DuVerger, Judith Man, Katherine Philips Meditations and Testimonials Prayers Letters and Diaries Poetry Elizabethan Poets: Isabella Whitney, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, Anne Vaughan Lock, Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Dowriche, Elizabeth Melville

64 65 78 93 99 112 119

128

Contents

Esther Inglis and Elizabeth Jane Weston in the Republic of Letters Jacobean Polemical Talents: Aemilia Lanyer, Bathsua Reginald, Rachel Speght, Lady Mary Wroth Caroline, Protectorate, and Restoration Poets’ Complication of Early Modern Selfhood: Diana Primrose, Mary Fage, An Collins, ‘Eliza,’ Elizabeth Major, Gertrude Thimelby, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips Drama and the Dramatic ‘Closet’ Drama: Translations, Adaptations, Original Creations Mothers’ Advice Books: Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Clinton, Elizabeth Joscelin, Elizabeth Richardson Prophecies and Polemics, Petitions and Missionary Accounts: Radical Women and Godly Zeal

139 148

159 174 176 180

4 Six Major Authors Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621) Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645) Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland (1585–1639) Lady Mary Wroth (1587–1653) Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda (1632–1664)

195 202 208 215 225 234

Postscript

241

Appendix A Women and the Rise of Print Culture Appendix B Chronologies Notes Bibliography Index

243 246 275 305 347

viii

Preface

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, XIV

This book provides an introduction to the diversity and scope of the writing of Englishwomen from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. I discuss the cultural conditions and creative realities of their accomplishment, for the conditions under which these women wrote, for private or public circulation, furnish one understanding of their context. The postmodern conditions in which we encounter and read their work are another. Cyberculture is transforming early modern studies in several ways; not only are previously rare texts now available in facsimile or paperback editions and on websites, but concepts of authorship, textuality, and meaning themselves are being reformulated. In following the twists and occasional hairpin turns of their work across a wide range of genres, I have been guided by a principle of trust in the author herself – however sketchy the biography, however enigmatic or unfashionable the text. Always aware of my position in the here and now, I attempt to enter into a dialogue with the early modern past, which can seem both foreign and familiar. Because religion – either late medieval Christianity or mainstream Protestantism – was often a matter of life and death, we may be surprised to find parallels between early modern tensions and contemporary tumultuous conflicts, as Philip Jenkins outlines them in The Next Christendom. Fears of the desacralization of the world and the decline of an integrated divine view on one hand, and resistance to or rejection of ecclesiastical prescriptions and dictates on the other, could also link readers today with early modern forerunners. Instead of assuming an attitude of intellectual or emotional

Preface

superiority, I am seconding Diarmaid MacCulloch’s conclusion, in Reformation, that only now are we re-examining the alternative views of radical thinkers and writers, among whom women figured prominently, to consider the connection between their perennial human anxiety and sense of imperfection and our own. Patriarchal assumptions and their accompanying binaries, fears, and paradoxes seeped into every layer of early modern existence; postmodern gender theorists – from Judith Butler to Nancy Tuana – could remind us of some baffling parallels. The early modern period combined a series of paradoxes. It was bloody and innovative, martial and transforming, restrictive and pathbreaking. Pitted with wars and executions, it began and virtually closed with regicides. Its dreams of peace and utopia clashed with the violent upheavals of battles for religious and commercial hegemony. In placing Englishwomen’s writing, which crackles with wit, anxiety, and anger, in this geopolitical and cultural context, I invite you to savour the subtlety and daring of their achievements. Creative, ambitious, and original, these women authors used writing as an expressly social craft. Through a variety of media and genres they explored, critiqued, and imagined otherwise the lived realities that linked private and public spheres. They adapted roles as bricoleurs, improvisers, and makers; they used the receptors of eyes, ears, and fingertips; their writing registers and recounts the fragments of often contradictory information about the worlds inside and outside the body.

x

Acknowledgments

A grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada began and sustained the research for this book. Librarians at our own Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, the British Library, the Bodleian, the Folger, and the Huntington have been extremely helpful. I am grateful to astute research assistants, especially Maureen King and Laura Bonikowsky. In the process of composition graduate students have taught me a great deal – through the illuminating theses of students who are now members of the academic community (Dr Maureen King and Dr Rachel Warburton), through the exciting work-in-progress of Margery Monsma, Aida Patient, Lesley Petersen, and Kirsten Uszkalo, and through the zesty exchanges of one memorable seminar involving Michelle Balen, Paulomi Chakraborty, Robin Durnford, Margaret Hayes, Karine Hopper, Mark Irvine, Aida Patient, Kirsten Uszkalo, and Denise Winter. I am also endebted to my colleagues, particularly Sylvia Brown, Rick Bowers, John Considine, Roz Kerr, Isobel Grundy, Jonathan Hart, David Gay, and Ian Munro, whose work has clarified many pathways. I must thank, too, the anonymous reviewers; their generous comments were filled with so many excellent leads. My greatest debt is to the general editor of this series, my colleague and Canada Research Chair, Gary Kelly, for his insightful observations, tenacity, and amazing patience. The recent death of my mother has caused me to think more – and more fondly – of my parents’ exceptional, inspiring example.

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WOMEN’S WRITING IN ENGLISH: EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

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CHAPTER 1

Studying Early Modern Women Writers

This xx of October I in ANNO DOMINI: A Thousand: v. hundred seventy three as Alminacks descry. Did write this Wyll with mine owne hand And it to London gave: In witnes of the standers by, whose names yf you wyll have. Paper, Pen and Standish were: at that same present by: With Time, who promised to reveale, so fast as she could hye The same: least of my nearer kyn, for any thing should vary: So finally I make an end no longer can I tary. Isabella Whitney, ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573) To speake trulie without vaine glorie, I thinke assuredlie, that there is not in this forme anie thing extant which is more forceable to procure comfort to the afflicted, strength to the weake, courage to the faint hearted, and patience unto them that are persecuted, than this little worke, if it be diligentlie read and well considered. Anne Dowriche, ‘To the Reader,’ The French Historie (1589) This is a Dreame, and yet I thought it best, To write the same and keepe it still in minde: Because I knew there was none earthlie rest

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England Preparde for us, that have our hearts inclinde To seeke the Lord: we must be purgde and finde: Our drosse is great, the fire must trie us sore And yet our God is mercifull and kinde, He shall remaine and help us evermore. Elizabeth Melvill, Ane Godlie Dreame (1603), stanza 42

The exploration of the lives and writing of early modern women is a growth industry. Like all scholarly undertakings, it embraces an interlaced, crisscrossed network of actions and meanings, patterns of development and dissemination. It also continues to evolve – from excavations and, in most cases, exhumations to probing comparative analysis, from path-breaking anthologies to standard critical editions. This recovery-discovery project has generated a considerable amount of heat. Wrangles between New Historicists and feminists about the role of gender have given way to widespread recognition of the productivity of dissent, the articulation of contingency, and the multivalencies of gender itself. In fact, the main contests now involve allusive, labile wordplays and the positioning of social agents in specific historical contexts. The recent focus on early modern women has altered the field of early modern literature so substantially that an anthologist of their writing can refer to ‘the blossoming of a subjective self-consciousness and a femalespecific cultural scrutiny,’ while editors of a teaching manual devoted to this recuperated writing can acknowledge that ‘we are just beginning to learn (and teach) the genres, topics and styles of half our heritage.’1 The imbrication of women’s lives and writing within a particular cultural moment entwines the observer in the research in arresting ways. The exercise prompts some readers to reconsider many of the received histories and paradigms ‘to reveal the absence of any single universal vocabulary defining [“History”]’ and to complicate the ‘cultural dynamics’ contributing to ‘subject construction.’2 Drawing inferences from textualized traces and recognizing that norms, past and present, are embedded in all accounts are not new or uniquely postmodern activities. The socially constructed, aggregative nature of subjects, narratives, philosophies, and histories – involving the ‘iconoclastic questioning of varnished reality’ and the ‘dichotomy between appearance and reality’ – is as ancient or pre-modern as Plato and Kant and, as Ian Hacking reminds us, ‘really very old-fashioned.’ Although he deflates postmodern presumptions, Hacking supplies a nuanced, working definition of constructionism that underscores much of the contemporary excitement and activity in probing the creation of meaning around early modern women; constructionism, he argues, includes ‘various sociological, historical, and philosophical projects that aim at displaying or analyzing actual, historically situated, social 4

Studying Early Modern Women Writers

interactions or causal routes that led to, or were involved in, the coming into being or establishing of some present entity or fact.’3 The cues in Hacking’s final phrase can trigger enthusiastic speculations about relationships between past and present. Postmodern and early modern cultures have proven to be remarkably compatible and comparable. The profound transformations of the fifteenth-century communication shift from manuscript to print culture can be compared to the ways digital modes are changing how we locate and identify ourselves in culture; they have all opened up unthought-of worlds. Regiomontanus’s 1474 Nuremberg press and the primers and books of hours from the Westminster presses of William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde throughout the 1490s, like the instantaneous, universal dissemination of cyberspace, altered circumstances within what Elizabeth Eisenstein has called ‘the Commonwealth of Learning.’4 Yet the comparison also reveals deep, foundational differences, the most palpable of which concern numbers and literacy rates. Along with the immense gaps separating litteratus (liberally educated, learned) and illitteratus (unlettered, uneducated, unlearned), we must remember the distinctions between ‘phonetic and comprehension literacy’ as illustrated by the non-literate Margery Kempe and thousands of others who ‘could decode Latin syllable by syllable and pronounce it, though unable to read and understand silently.’5 School enrolment statistics also indicate vast differences in scale and single-sex exclusivity. While it is true that in Tudor England ‘more boys were then in school than in the eighteenth or even nineteenth centuries,’ the opportunities were much more restricted for girls; in fact, beyond the rudiments of reading and, in rarer cases, writing, the level of education we would associate with high school, college, academy, or gymnasium ‘was out of the reach of most people.’6 UNESCO documentation projects that post-secondary enrolment worldwide will more than double from 82 million in 1995 to over 200 million in 2025; in addition, unlike their early modern counterparts, who were acquiring skills for a non-industrial, low-tech economy, students today live in a world of globalization and ever-new technology. Such contemporary revolutions in meaning making as thick descriptions of culture, ethos, identity, and nation have effected genuine reorientations in thinking. Where the early modern period signalled the rediscovery of ancient learning and its incorporation in new world-views, cross-fertilized fields of intellectual inquiry are now the order of the day. Therefore, we need to be wary of blithely creating links between early modern situations and our own, between the cultural traces of the struggles of early modern women for meaning and our own. Scholars working in the fundamentally enlarged and altered field of early modern literatures are alert to the dangers of endorsing kinship too hastily. They have proceeded from anxieties about a decentred or demythologized 5

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

canon to embrace the mixture of high and low, widely retailed and recently uncovered, in the early modern cultural marketplace. Two decades ago, invoking the self-presentations of such early female poets as Isabella Whitney, who jauntily announces the date of her premature will; Anne Dowriche, who produces a mini-epic recounting three famous ‘bloudie broiles’ of Huguenot resistance; and Elizabeth Melvill, Lady Culros, who composes sixty ballade stanzas to relate a dream pilgrimage, would have seemed very esoteric. Despite the fact that Elizabeth Melvill’s work went through ten editions to 1737, it was possible to complete doctoral studies in the area of early modern, or, as it was then more customarily called, Renaissance, literature without ever encountering her or her less successful female contemporaries. While their names are still not household words, they are now more readily identified. The advent of cyberspace has also opened up early modern scholarship in astonishing ways. On both sides of the Atlantic, major computer-based recovery projects have been established. The Brown University Women Writers Project, in association with Oxford University Press (New York), not only continues to produce affordable, paperback scholarly editions of early modern women’s writing, but has also released online over two hundred English texts by women written before 1830 (www.wwp.brown.edu); preformatted files facilitate printing for course packages. The Perdita Project at Nottingham Trent University is devoted to providing a comprehensive listing of early modern women’s manuscript compilations (http://human.ntu.ac.uk/foh/ ems/perdita.html). Early English Books Online from Bell & Howell Information and Learning advertises the ease of browsing through thousands of early printed works as ‘breathing life into the past’ (wwwlib.umi.com/eebo). Such electronic dissemination illustrates how postmodern cultural literacy makes the ivied stone walls of research libraries and private collections transparent and permeable. The number of conferences and periodicals devoted to early modern women has also expanded. Along with regular sessions at the MLA, Kalamazoo, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Shakespeare Association conferences, and symposia and institutes hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Newberry Library, one of the zestiest and most consciously interdisciplinary gatherings is the Attending to Early Modern Women Conference, sponsored throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century by the University of Maryland, College Park. Since 1984, English Literary Renaissance, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has regularly published special issues on ‘Women in the Renaissance’ (14.3, 1984; 18.1, 1988; 24.1, 1994), to which series an issue on Studies in Gender Relations has been added (28.3, 1998). Earlier, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (vol. 23, 1993) assembled an issue on ‘Privileging Gender in Early Modern England.’ The twenty-fifth 6

Studying Early Modern Women Writers

anniversary issue of English Literary Renaissance (25.3, 1995), devoted not just to responsible stock-taking but to what its editors identify as ‘seismic cultural shifts that call into question the larger premises concerning literary practice and knowledge,’ cues many of those transformative shifts. Lisa Jardine notes that ‘the canonical works of English Renaissance literature no longer seem to occupy center stage at all’; Louis Montrose corresponds with David Bevington to describe gender and power as ‘interdependent master categories’ and observe that ‘the current issues focus on sexuality and property.’7 A concept of history that acknowledges partiality and discontinuity, as distinct from sureties and continuity, underpins these transformations. As historian Dominick LaCapra addresses the role of the academic as scholarteacher, the past and the present exist ‘in a tense relation of mutual interrogation’; he labels this interplay ‘dialogism.’ For LaCapra the dialogic exchange with the past centres on two simple related questions: ‘What is the other saying or doing? How do I – or we – respond to it?’8 This engaged conversation with the past is also key to Jean E. Howard’s formulation of new historical literary criticism as ‘a construct made up of textualized traces assembled in various configurations by the historian/interpreter.’9 One focal point of the conversation between past and present is the role of the anthology or miscellany, a literary construct simultaneously familiar yet remote. The popular miscellany was as important to early modern literary history as the anthology has been to postmodern discovery of early women writers. In fact, the sixteenth- and late-twentieth-century forms, reflecting different historical moments and concepts of authorial roles, share many seminal, standard-setting functions. Although miscellanies could be ‘little more than trifling nosegays,’10 at least three Elizabethan examples helped to shape the status of the author and the text: Richard Tottel’s collection, Songes and Sonettes (1557); A Mirrour for Magistrates (1559); and Thomas Bentley’s The Monument of Matrones (1582). We can link them proleptically to the collections of the 1980s and early nineties, which have promoted the recovery of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors. Songes and Sonettes, containing the poetry of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and the more dubious Nicholas Grimald, along with anonymous work, went through nine editions in Tottel’s (d. 1593) lifetime.With contributions from William Baldwin, George Ferrers, Thomas Chaloner, and Thomas Phaer, A Mirrour for Magistrates not only continued the stories of Boccaccio and Lydgate ‘to shewe the slippery deceytes of the waveryng lady, and the due rewarde of all kinde of vices’ (‘To the Reader’) but also announced an admonishing standard, ‘that it may stande for a patarne.’11 Thomas Bentley explained ‘to the Christian Reader’ the exemplary role of women’s prayers, precepts, and deeds catalogued under the seven lamps of The Monument of Matrones: ‘Mee thought I could not better spend my time, nor emploie my talent, either for the 7

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

renowne of such heroicall authors and woorthie women, or for the universall commoditie of all good christians: than in, and by some apt treatise or collection, to reduce these their manifold works into one entire volume, and by that meanes, for to register their so rare and excellent monuments, of good record, as perfect presidents of true pietie and godlinesse in woman kind to all posteritie.’12 The didactic aim of this repository of piety was clear: it offered ‘a burning Lampe for virgins, but also a christall Mirrour for Matrones, ... a delectable Diall for ... true devotion, ... [a] homelie or domestical librarie’ (B1). The next major collection of women’s writing, imbued with similar encomiastic fervour but placing a greater stress on classical as opposed to strictly pious learning, was George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences (1752). Consisting of excerpts rather than transcriptions of sixty-four learned women’s work, prefaced by annotated biographical summaries, this early anthology has exercised immense influence, from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century. Subsequent histories – Horace Walpole’s A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland and Ireland (1806), Jane Williams’s The Literary Women of England (1861), Myra Reynolds’s The Learned Lady in England (1920), and Doris Stenton’s The English Woman in History (1957) – acknowledged their endebtedness to the Memoirs. For all its antiquarian quirkiness, Ballard’s text is also a town-andgown success story; Ballard, the ‘studious mantua-maker,’13 was assisted in assembling material by boarding-school mistress Sarah Chapone and by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Elizabeth Elstob, whose notebook entries on famous women provided the germ of Memoirs. Elstob’s pioneering work in providing women access to Old English literature by writing its first grammar in English was surely an inspiration. With the additives of feminist interest in the recovered concept of agency, many comparable paradigms link Elizabethan and contemporary anthologies. Evolutions from collections of appetite-whetting snippets and lightly edited extracts to genre-specific, critically and theoretically positioned samplers of annotated texts of early modern women’s writing are traceable in the last couple of decades. In 1973 Joan Goulianos’s edited anthology By a Woman Writt, dedicated to ‘works which focus on women’s experiences,’14 included three extracts from Renaissance women. Betty Travitsky’s The Paradise of Women (cloth, 1981; paperback, 1989, with updated notes), a collection of unedited, generically arranged, carefully introduced extracts, addressed a field which Travitsky originally described as ‘largely neglected by scholars’ but eight years later classified as ‘burgeoning’; she announced the desired goal of revising ‘our notion of canonicity to include materials which widen our appreciation of the entire human experience.’15 This landmark anthology was 8

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followed in short order by Angeline Goreau’s The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England (1985), Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus’s Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (1985), Simon Shepherd’s The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Women’s Pamphlets from the Renaissance (1985), and two English and Continental anthologies from Katharina M. Wilson: Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (1987) and, with Frank J. Warnke, Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century (1989). In less than a decade, available selections had expanded from English excerpts to fully contextualized polemics about women, and to genuinely European samplers of novellas, sonnets, secular and religious lyrics, letters, and autobiography. Team-edited anthologies devoted to specific genres were also appearing. In Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (1988) Germaine Greer and her co-editors supplied a chronological, annotated, and edited digest of poets they introduced as ‘guerrillas, untrained, ill-equipped, isolated and vulnerable.’16 In Her Own Life; Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (1989) Elspeth Graham and her co-editors contextualized and annotated a combination of prose and verse to investigate systems of meanings, ‘linguistic, doctrinal, social, even literary’ and to provide ‘access to a historically different world in an intimate way.’17 Along with volumes devoted to individual authors from the Brown Women Writers Project, the first half of the 1990s saw the publication of four separate editions of the first original play (1613) by an Englishwoman, Elizabeth Cary, the Lady Falkland’s The Tragedy of Mariam Fair Queen of Jewry. The availability of texts and the tensions inherent in moulding women’s writing to correspond to established or canonical genres are critical issues. Maintaining that ‘the study of early modern women has become one of the most important – indeed perhaps the most important – means for the rewriting of early modern history,’ general editors Betty Travitsky and Patrick Cullen have addressed their ten-volume facsimile library, The Early Modern Englishwoman; Printed Writings, 1500–1640 (1996), to remedying the major obstacle of ‘the unavailability of the very texts upon which the field is based.’18 Additions to their series in this century include a new thirteenvolume set, Printed Writings 1500–1640, examining confessional writings, Neo-Latin poets, Protestant and Recusant translators, and advice books; the volumes in the Printed Writings 1641–1700 part of the series extend the scope to autobiography, almanacs, and writing on education and medicine. Readers, such as those compiled by N.H. Keeble and Kate Aughterson, have provided an array of early modern material conceptualizing, presenting, and prescribing women’s activities. By the late nineties, team- or co-edited collections concentrated on the deft blending of recovered, unabridged texts and the provision of fully detailed doctrinal, mercantile, cultural, and dramatic con9

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

texts for those texts. The collected works – poems, letters, and translations – of Katherine Philips and the complete poems, translations, correspondence, and psalms of Lady Mary Sidney Herbert are major editorial collaborations. Critical editions from different publishers of the first part (1621) of Lady Mary Wroth’s romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, and of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s utopian fantasy, The Blazing World (1666), and of a selection of Cavendish’s plays, indicate the thriving enterprise early modern women’s writing has become. Since the point of this growth chart is to illustrate that the study of early modern women did not spring ex nihilo, it is instructive to register the differences between early- and late-twentieth-century approaches to the topic. The prescriptive context of male pronouncements about female character, deportment, worthiness, and purpose was carefully mined in such early studies as Lucy Hunter Murray’s The Ideal of the Court Lady 1561–1625 (1938), Francis Lee Utley’s The Crooked Rib (1944), Carroll Camden’s The Elizabethan Woman (1952), and Ruth Kelso’s Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (1956). Glancing only indirectly or infrequently at women’s work as writers, these erudite encyclopediae traced several developments and anomalies. Murray sketched the disappearance of the ‘platonic’ ideal, ‘with its exact mixture of grace and virtue,’ and the growing Jacobean divide between ‘the flippant court lady and the sober, puritanical matron.’ Camden observed that ‘the emergence of women as people first and as females second’ disturbed social attitudes. But Kelso concluded more trenchantly that the divide between theory and fact in the rhetoric of doctrines ‘ignores almost preposterously ... facts, circumstances and reality.’ This gap continued to inform the scholarship, with Pearl Hogrefe’s Tudor Women (1975) attending to the various modes of escape from limitations devised by commoners and queens, and Ian Maclean’s The Renaissance Notion of Woman (1980) dispassionately cataloguing the ‘intellectual infrastructure’ in theology, medicine, politics, and law that harped on woman’s ‘levitas, fragilitas, imbecillitas, infirmitas.’19 Joan Kelly-Gadol’s ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ (1977) addressed this gap between rhetoric and fact head-on. The passive and chaste Renaissance woman, Kelly-Gadol argued, was actually more dependent upon men, who alone reaped the benefits of a sexual double standard. One of her pithiest examples was Baldassare Castiglione’s spokesman for female self-control and sexual suppression in the dialogues of The Book of the Courtier, Cardinal Pietro Bembo, who ‘in the years before he became cardinal, lived with and had three children by Donna Morosina.’20 The presence and/or absence of opportunities for women’s rational enhancement, political power, and full subjecthood have become topics of scholarly debate. They demarcate the differences between Hilda Smith’s sense of seventeenth-century women’s enabling group identity in Reason’s Disciples 10

Studying Early Modern Women Writers

and Elaine Hobby’s contention, in Virtue of Necessity, that women of the Restoration were forced back into virtue after the flurry of Parliamentary and millennarian enthusiasm. Essay collections wrestle with related issues of genre, placement, and historicity; their aims also reflect the growth of the concept of the text as a culturally negotiated artifact. Silent But for the Word presents the marginal discourse of patronage, translation, letters, and meditations as avenues where women found their voice. The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print argues for bringing ‘the traditional literary canon and hitherto excluded and neglected women’s writings into momentary counterpoint.’ Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760 undertakes ‘to reshape perceptions of the early modern period by replacing women in it.’ Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740 queries patriarchal structures, asking ‘whose history is it that might be reconstructed, and by whom?’ Gloriana’s Face gathers evidence from art, language, and life to ‘reveal the crucial possibilities for the women of Elizabeth’s time and beyond to enact both their real and their fictive selves.’ Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 acknowledges the ‘uncertainties and assymetries’ of the early modern period in the ‘pervasiveness of religion’ as both restraint and ‘means of expression.’ Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens explores women’s ‘deliberate associations’ with one another. Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain illustrates the ‘ways in which actual women worked to create culture(s).’21 Late twentieth-century critical reception of early modern women’s writing has been shaped by many trends. A principal factor in these changes has been an increasingly sophisticated concept of agency. Joan Scott defines it as an attempt “to construct an identity, a life, a set of relationships, a society within certain limits and with language.’22 Studies at the outset of the recovery stage of early modern women’s writing focused on the dialectics of negation and resistance, while the complexities and multiple layerings of reinterpretation have dominated the field since the late 1990s. Elaine Beilin’s Redeeming Eve demonstrated how the learned and virtuous woman writer could breath new life into conventional discourses of virtue. Marilyn Williamson’s Raising Their Voices contrasted the retirement discourse of Katherine Philips and the Cavalier sensibility of Aphra Behn. Tina Krontiris’s Oppositional Voices twinned and compared the work of Isabella Whitney and Margaret Tyler, Mary Sidney Herbert and Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth. Elizabeth Harvey’s Ventriloquized Voices attended to the male appropriation of female voice as a strategy for both silencing and disrupting. Barbara Lewalski’s Writing Women in Jacobean England studied how women authors – gentlewomen, aristocrats, and royalty – not only resisted patriarchal norms but ‘rewrote the discourse in strikingly oppositional terms.’23 Questions about modes of production, intended audience, and female subjectivity are replacing oppositionalism and static binaries of gender and 11

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power. Aware of the value of ‘that which is disparate or diverse,’ Margaret Ezell cautions that literary historians’ modes of examining nineteenth- and twentieth-century women authors ‘inadvertently may be strangling those women who lived and wrote in centuries when the technology and the ethos of authorship were significantly different than in later times.’ To pursue the question of how Tudor and Stuart women managed to write, Louise Schleiner advocates ‘sociosemiotic modes of study.’ Gender contrasts now illuminate the language of racial difference and the space of the interior self. Kim Hall’s examination of tropes of blackness reveals early modern women writers’ awareness of ‘the racialized nature’ of language. In the gendering of the ‘space of secret thought,’ Megan Matchinske demonstrates the ‘cordoning off [of] the civic from the familial, the utilitarian from the representational, and, of course, men’s minds from women’s.’ Gender operates as a foundational and generative category for Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford; they reclaim early modern women from the archives and contest the patriarchal paradigm as ‘self-referential and self-validating.’ Launching an interdisciplinary series in 1999, Women and Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1750, general editors Betty Travitsky and Patrick Cullen announce their aim of perceiving the period ‘through the doubled vision of gender.’ Danielle Clarke probes early modern women’s contributions to the genres of dramatic, devotional, poetic, and romance writing as “entirely typical of their culture,’ while Mary Moore stretches the single genre of the sonnet sequence across several centuries to explore the female self in Petrarchism, a mode whose particular traits ‘invite female imitation.’24 This project aims to participate in the continuing conversation about the roles of women, specifically writing women, in early modern England. Acknowledging that our postmodern positioning both enables and complicates interrogation of the past, the exploration is based on the understanding that these roles have been constructed by both women and men and that they are embedded in familial, sexual, political cultures. It embraces the task of grappling with and celebrating the nuances of language. The study also investigates the link between writing and doing, signification and enactment. In exploring how texts do what they do, it will gather inferences from both the act of writing and various acts of reading. Recognizing that the concept of agency has an amazing range of valences, it proposes to outline the salient features of early modern women writers’ contributions to the structure of the world of thought. It aims to uncover the ways these individuals and their ideas become what Randall Collins terms ‘nodes in networks of social interaction.’25 An examination of the ways women’s social value was constructed in the literary-discursive order of early modern culture, predominantly in England, and the specific market conditions for the production, distribution, and

12

Studying Early Modern Women Writers

consumption of writing and print introduces the ideologies and implements early modern women had to deploy, deal with, and, on occasion, to re-invent. The study will first outline the range of genres through which women writers manoeuvred their way between private and public settings and then focus on six major authors.

13

CHAPTER 2

Women in Early Modern England

What did it mean to be female in early modern England? Were there opportunities for women’s education and advancement? What connections existed between domestic realities and writing? What kind of voice or presence did women exert in the early modern cultural imaginary? This chapter undertakes to provide some answers to these questions by explaining the interconnected complexities of the ways women were described and defined, usually by men, and the glimpses of their actual lives and accomplishments, often in their own words. In understanding an age ‘passionate about words’1 and their refractions of God, known as ‘the Word,’ it is vitally important to attend to the gradations, colours, and combinatory strengths of language, to respect its power both to present well-constructed exteriors and to penetrate to the inner workings of minds. Chiselling the Image, Unwinding the Rhetoric Quando armate ed esperte ancor siam noi, render buon conto a ciascun uom potemo, che mani e piedi e core avem qual voi; e, se ben molli e delicate semo, ancor tal uom, ch’è delicato, è forte; e tal, ruvido ed aspro, è d’ardir scemo. When we too are armed and trained, we can convince men that we have hands, feet, and a heart like yours; and although we may be delicate and soft, some men who are delicate are also strong; and others, coarse and harsh, are cowards. Veronica Franco, Terze rime (1575)2

Robert Browning’s autocratic monologist in ‘My Last Duchess’ points to two images, a painting of his late wife ‘looking as if she were alive’ (line 2) and a bronze figure of the sea god ‘taming a sea horse’ (line 55), which could supply two metaphors for viewing early modern womankind as sketched, envisioned, constructed, defined, and cast by men. While it is easy to fasten on the 14

Women in Early Modern England

commanding language of the Ferrarese speaker who, having stopped ‘all smiles’ (line 46), continues to control access to her portrait and story, I wish to consider the art works themselves. The modes of creation in these media, as well as the subjects they represent, may help us to apprehend and visualize how the actions and relationships of women were assembled and genuinely manufactured for more than literate consumption, for farreaching dissemination. Let us consider first bronze casting, an intricate process of layering and displacing perfected in sixteenth-century Italy. In a study of comparatively little-known early modern women writers, it is necessary to gauge our awareness of and receptivity to the general notion of early modern women artists – in any media. We need to ask ourselves if our concepts of artists in bronze include not only Cellini, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti but also the Bolognese Properzia de’ Rossi. Onto the initial clay figure the male or female artist added a coating of wax, metal pins, and a vented plaster cast. With the application of heat, the wax melted and molten metal could be poured in to take its place. Eventually the plaster was chiselled away, the clay interior removed, and the pins were cut off. The accretions, the heat, and the resultant polished empty shell may prompt us to think about the ways sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women – albeit from many different points of view, angles, and conditions – were moulded and cast discursively. The painting referred to by Browning’s speaker might recall for us the oils of da Vinci, Raphael, and Holbein, or the self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguisola, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Judith Leyster, with their sumptuous attention to velvets and fine silks, jewel-studded brocades, gilded laces, and tasselled strings. Just as the gendered bronze figure in our metaphor can allow for many images (goddess, madonna, temptress, witch) and roles (queen, wife, mother, co-worker, musician, nurse, artist, sibling, playmate), the portrait could also highlight distinctions between beautiful objects and the modes of their production. To the range of gender roles we must add a consideration of class and race, which systemically differentiate the narratives of high-born and humble women’s education, work, marriage, family, and politics. The portrait itself could convey many class divisions. The aristocratic subject likely had knowledge of a family library, containing an eclectic range of devotional works and secular romances, court circles, and an arranged marriage. The artisanal producers, the first stages of whose work in silk and lace were often supplied by young female labourers, had a vastly different literary knowledge or phonetic literacy, limited to songs, oral tales, and rotelearned prayers. Village girls recruited by age twelve to the silk industry responded to the lure – if they escaped tuberculosis – of building up a dowry to be a practical wife for an ambitious apprentice. Diverting and remunerated aptitudes, though often equally dextrous, accomplished, and discerning, form 15

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

one of the first and longest lasting distinctions between leisured and labouring classes. The stories of women who wore bejewelled garments and of those who made and stitched the fabrics are markedly different. The history of privileged women, for whom decorative needlework was designated ‘a frontline position in the defense of chastity,’3 may seem at times liberating, at times infantilizing. Sewing and reading were integral components of ‘a programme of virtuous activities designed to occupy body and mind.’ In the conduct code added by Austin Fishmonger to a blank flyleaf in a copy of the revised Wycliffite translation of the Epistles of St Paul, the ‘styll, meke, serwyseabyl, dredfwl, chaste, devout’ woman is always working: ‘prayying, redyng, spynnynge, sewyng or wepyng or mornyng for synne for departyng fro her spowse pt ys Cryste.’ The brass engraving of the tomb of Elizabeth Lucar (1537), the twenty-seven-year-old, highly esteemed wife of Emmanuel Lucar, an influential member of the Merchant Taylors Company, praised her fluency in Latin, Spanish, and Italian, her familiarity with the Scriptures, and her accomplishments as a needlewoman – all suitably commercialized skills for ‘executing correspondence and dealing with foreign merchants’: She wrote all Needle-workes that women exercise, With Pen, Frame, or Stoole, all Pictures artificiall. Curious Knots, or Trailes, what fancie could devise, Beasts, Birds, or Flowers, even as things natural.4

Royal and aristocratic women often possessed equally remarkable skills in needlework and writing. Combining extraordinary scholarship and approved female skill, the eleven-year-old Princess Elizabeth presented a handmade New Year’s gift to her stepmother Queen Kateryn Parr, a translation of a devotional work by Marguerite de Navarre enclosed in an intricately embroidered cover of gold and silver wire on blue corded silk.5 So accomplished and shrewd a needlewoman was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, that while she was under virtual house arrest in Tutbury Castle, Chatsworth House, Sheffield, and Shrewsbury, she stitched many emblematic panels full of anagrams, devices, and allusions. One of the best known is her depiction of fruitful and unfruitful branches below the motto virescit vulnere virtus [virtue flourishes by wounding], finished as a present for the man she hoped to take as her fourth husband, the Duke of Norfolk, and a further taunt to her unmarried cousin, Elizabeth – as though, in Antonia Fraser’s observation, ‘the needle could pierce the stony heart where the pen could not.’ Another panel, as Mary admitted to Nicholas White during his visit to Tutbury, ‘she wrought with her needle and ... the diversity of colours made the time seem less tedious’; the Tutbury panel, a dais of state embroidered with the riddle ‘en ma fin est mon commencement’ [in my end is my beginning], echoes in the ‘East 16

Women in Early Modern England

Princess Elizabeth’s embroidered cover for her translation, The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soule (1544). MS. Cherry 36, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Coker’ segment of Eliot’s Four Quartets.6 Decorative, often encoded, needlework has not gone unnoticed. As well as including cross-stitch patterns, John Taylor’s The Needles Excellency (1631) praised the work of three queens (Catherine of Aragon, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth) and two aristocrats (Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and Lady Elizabeth Dormer). Moreover, scholars continue to discover creative connections between the needle and the pen. For example, Linda Woodbridge explores the possible links between Shakespearean comedy and quilting patterns, arguing for the similar art of the patchwork quilt and the literary borrowing and piecing of the ‘aggregative’ dramatic genre of comedy. Susan Frye studies the textile artifacts of Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Talbot, and communities 17

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

of anonymous seventeenth-century needleworkers to substantiate her claim that women used their biblical, mythic, and emblematic subjects not only to reach out to other women but to ‘push boundaries of acceptable female behaviour to include vigorous, public, political activity.’7 Of course not all women loved the needle and the role of Penelope, nor did they have the inclination – or luxury – to pursue it as a pastime. The translation of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s De nobilitate et praecellentia sexus foeminei (1529) lamented the domestic sequestration of woman ‘as thoughe she were unmete for any hygher busynesse, ... permitted to know no farther than her nedle and her threede’ (sig. F8v). Yet Thomas Kyd’s translation of Torquato Tasso’s Housholders Philosophie (1588) dissuaded ‘noble Matrons’ from dirtying their hands and clothes ‘in the kitchin or other soyled places,’ and endorsed their use of ‘wheeles, lombes, & other instruments that appertaine to weaving,’ an ‘arte first attributed to Minerva Goddesse of wysedome’ (fol. 20v). In Memoirs (1671), Lucy Hutchinson, republican wife and widow, reconstructed her childhood of the 1620s. Hutchinson, who herself proceeded to translate Lucretius and compose a work of systematic theology, ostensibly devoted this account to her husband; but she captured the tone of a strong-willed child in this admission: ‘for my needle I absolutely hated it.’8 Another echo of Agrippan frustration appears in a recent anthology of early modern women’s writing which takes its title from a dedicatory poem prefacing Anna Weamys’s Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651), enjoining women, ‘Lay by your Needles, Ladies, Take the Pen.’ Less cossetted girls, for whom childhood was brief and literary opportunities limited, had fewer outlets for high spirits or charming obstinacy. Women spinning and gossiping together provide the backdrop for the lusty practicality of The Gospelles of Dystaves (c. 1507–15), translated from Les Evangiles des Quenouilles by an apprentice of Wynkyn de Worde, Henry Watson. Superstitious and canny, the speakers – many having had several husbands – dispense advice about housekeeping, generation, types of husbands, and remedies for diseases. Actual experiences as opposed to entertaining representations of the labouring classes are less humorous. Views of needlework, a skill necessary for the production of stunning garments as well as practical household upkeep, reinforce divisions between plebeian and elite cultures. Though unlauded and traditionally unrecognized, generations of anonymous silkworkers prepared and provided the raw materials for aristocratic splendour. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, these girls slept ‘in cupboards or under looms,’ sat over ‘basins of scalding water ... to melt the sericine, the sticky substance binding the cocoon together,’ twisted thread, wound shuttles, and drew them through the loom.9 Comparable situations existed in England, where ‘service was the archetypal “growing-up” experience for young women.’10 Learning the rudiments 18

Women in Early Modern England

of sewing, spinning, and knitting at village dame schools or urban charity schools, girls in plebeian families, as J. Child’s A New Discourse of Trade (1673) observed, were often employed ‘in mending the Clothes of the Aged, in Spinning, Carding and other linnen Manufactures, and many in Sowing Linnen’ (75). Service, whether domestic or agrarian and usually a combination of both, was not optional for unmarried plebeian women between the ages of twelve and forty; the 1563 Statute of Artificers (5 Eliz. I c. 4) gave local officials the right to order them – although, significantly, not the parallel cohort of men – into service ‘for such wages and in such reasonable sort and manner as they shall think meet.’ However, apprentices’ lives were also carefully monitored, as Isabella Whitney’s observation in her ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573) reveals about unavailable vintners’ apprentices: ‘handsome men, that must not wed / except they leave their trade’ (lines 165–6). While saving for marriage, which they customarily entered in their mid-twenties, later than their aristocratic counterparts, young women in service earned minuscule wages and were often vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. Thus the manufacture and display of garments and expertise in needlework as a finishing accomplishment or employable skill introduce some of the diversity of gauges needed to calibrate our understanding of early modern Englishwomen. Just as ‘women’ were not a monolithic entity four centuries ago, neither does their writing constitute a single strand of critical opinion and classification today. Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing And if men may & doe bestow such of their travailes upon gentlewomen, then may we women read such of their works as they dedicate unto us, and if we may read them, why not farther wade in them to the serch of a truth ... [M]y perswasion hath bene thus, that it is all one for a woman to pen a story, as for a man to addresse his story to a woman. Margaret Tyler, ‘To the Reader,’ A mirrour of princely deedes and knighthood (1578)

A related sense of the stratification of cultural production and experience must inform any discussion of early modern women’s writing, which can run the full gamut from classical translations to consistory court depositions usually mediated by a male clerk. Readers must be alert to the differing registers of agency and visibility, and levels of access to education. In fact, every part of the description ‘early modern women writers’ requires some comment. The questions these descriptors provoke overlap, relating to concepts of the discipline of literary-historical-cultural studies that is being rethought, re-drawn, and re-entered from an amazing array of theoretical positions in contemporary work. 19

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

Is ‘early modern’ a loaded term? Does it connote a larger span of time and activity than the designation ‘Renaissance,’ stretching from Renaissance and Reformation through Revolution to Restoration? More than a new label, ‘early modern’ for many scholars encompasses a broader span and a more integrative awareness of the constructedness of identity, authority, habits of thought, and cultural production. While it creeps up on the present, it also distances itself from the perceived elitism and canonical touchstones of an older Renaissance history. As Leah Marcus argues, ‘to look at the Renaissance through a lens called early modern is to see the concerns of modernism and postmodernism in embryo – alienation, ... profound skepticism ... , textual indeterminacy ... , and an interest in intertextuality instead of filiation.’ However, other scholars worry about poaching from earlier periods. Does ‘early modern’ cunningly supersede the sense of ‘rebirth’ of classical learning by setting up a norm of modernity? As Laurie Finke questions, do such periodization and terminology ‘reproduce the repression of the Middle Ages from our accounts of European civilization?’11 At a recent annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, an overflow audience listened to the roundtable discussion ‘Renaissance versus Early Modern.’ Richard Helgerson, Randolph Starn, and Richard Strier batted back and forth issues of inclusivity and flexibility, concerns about precision and periodization, and attentiveness to teleology and epistemology. Rebutting claims for the prescient gestures towards modernity, Strier dismissed ‘early modern’ as horribly, incorrigibly vague; for him the allimportant prefix in ‘re-naissance’ and ‘re-formation’ signalled the noncloistered advance of the power of learning. Neither gobbling up the Middle Ages nor incorporating the eighteenth century, ‘Renaissance’ also did not inhibit or cramp concepts of modernity.12 Although there was no clear victor in this discursive scrimmage, it is obvious that the labels often suit different purposes. Studies of sculpture, the visual arts, cartography, confraternities, Italian manuscripts, and politics favour the label ‘Renaissance,’ while women’s writing, gender formation, natural rights and natural law, and historiography often appear under the banner ‘early modern.’ Certainly an awareness of violent disjunctions must inform an understanding of the stretch of history: from the battle of Bosworth Field (1487) and its launch of the Tudor monarchy, marked by executions of privileged and once-influential political and religious dissidents and continuing clashes on land and sea in the name of dominion and possession, to the reestablishment of the House of Stuart and consequent crackdown on radicalism, after civil wars, regicide, successive Parliaments, and a Commonwealth Protectorate. Despite scholarly discomfort with the idealistic assumptions of ‘rebirth,’ early modern studies have proven remarkably fertile ground for a variety of disciplinary approaches. New Historicist models of subversion and 20

Women in Early Modern England

containment, Foucauldian discipline and punishment, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis co-exist with representations of Marxist class struggles, feminist interrogations of patriarchal violence, and incarnations of performance theory. Invoking the term ‘early modern’ allows for greater mobility and flexibility in grappling with the scope, motives, and influences of Tudor and Stuart writing. Like our own ease in adjusting screen displays and computer software packages to meet the needs of different documents, extending the margins back and ahead to include forerunners, comparisons, and developing venues aims to enlarge a field of vision. The adjustment is not designed to appropriate other eras or deny their distinct character, nor is it serving the interests of a simple-minded teleology or meliorism. Instead, this overlapping in periodization enables and enriches our always-incomplete re-entry into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture; it reminds us, inexorably, that literature does political work. It also opens up descriptive and taxonomic accounts of writing systems to show the interrelationships in the field of the literary. By including manuscript and oral as well as printed material of plebeian and privileged men and women, early modern studies can have the effect of shunting the canonical to the periphery or, at the very least, requiring that it share the stage with less memorialized contemporaries. Insisting on the need to ‘turn away from the grand monuments,’ Margaret L. King sketches the interdisciplinary field of the study of early modern women, involving intersecting spheres of religion, power, work, family, and medicine, as the period when women asserted ‘their right to speak and define themselves by speaking.’ As Catherine Belsey observes, ‘to speak is to become a subject.’13 In this age of the emergent female voice, early modern women writers were especially fond of the tropes of debate and trial. It is revealing, for instance, to place the circulation of English translations of The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete, burned as a heretic in 1310, alongside transcriptions of the interrogation and defences of Anne Askew, burned at Smithfield in 1546 for her resistance to the prevailing Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief in the change of the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist to the body and blood of Christ). Unlike the translated voice of Marguerite, conveyed in a gently ruminative and prayerful Carthusian text, Askew spoke with composure and aplomb mainly through the agency of her apologist and eyewitness scribe, John Bale, a vehemently antipapist exCarmelite. The ventriloquized female voice can assume a searing clarity when confronting male interrogators. Father John Mush’s account of the trial of the Catholic martyr Margaret Clitherow, executed for continuing Romish observances in York in 1586, created its own hagiography. This elevation of silence is worth comparing to the stout vocalism of Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel’s self-defence against charges of sedition at the Truro Sessions House in 1654. 21

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

Clitherow’s refusal to speak and her confessor’s disquisitions on deeds stand in contrast to Trapnel’s adroit parrying of the insults of the Cornish justices. Debate was a medium very congenial to another Fifth Monarchist, Mary Cary Rande; with exegetical skill rivalling any university-educated theologian, she methodically addressed and silenced objection to the execution of Charles in her Little Horn’s Doom and Downfall (1651). Similarly, a concept of the long seventeenth century permits the tracing of women’s work in specific genres. In drama, for example, we can plot situational differences and professional similarities linking Tudor and Elizabethan translated closet drama by Lady Jane Lumley and Lady Mary Sidney Herbert to the original and translated drama of Lady Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Delarivier Manley. In a variety of genres the issue of women’s public voice about their own education has a continuity throughout the century, evident in the poetry and prose of Bathsua Reginald Makin, Rachel Speght, Sarah Jinner, Margaret Fell Fox, Mary Astell, and Lady Mary Chudleigh. Throughout the Protectorate spiritual autobiographies and conversion narratives provide particular outlets for a range of differing combinations of analysis and polemics; see, for example, Elizabeth Major’s Honey on the Rod (1656), Anne Venn’s A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning (1658), Jane Turner’s Choice Experiences (1653), and Sarah Blackborrow’s The Just and Equall Ballance Discovered (1660). The effects of women’s doubts, battles, and conversions on the ministers who strove to help or reclaim them form a related archive testifying to the gendered dynamics and moral phenomena of the experience, as witnessed in Thomas Hooker’s narrative of Joan Drake’s conversion and ecstasy, Trodden Down Strength (1647), Henry Jesse’s account of the fearsome battle within Sarah Wight, The Exceeding Riches of Grace (1647), and the exemplarity of Jane Ratcliffe’s life and death, as eulogized in J. Ley’s A Pattern of Piety (1640). Women’s real and imagined adventures in travel cover huge geographical and denominational territories. The poems and letters of Gertrude Thimelby, Winefrid Thimelby, and Katherine Aston attest to Lincolnshire and Staffordshire recusant families’ contributions to Continental convent histories. Quaker missionaries Katharine Evans and Sarah Chevers (sometimes spelled Cheevers), wrote an account of their three-year imprisonment by the Papal Inquisition in Malta. The Duchess of Newcastle created utopian topographies for her Blazing World (1666). By contrast, reports of the actual torments suffered by Quakers Joan Brooksop and Elizabeth Hooton in New England, Barbara Blaugdone in Ireland, and Mary Fisher in Constantinople highlight the daring and perils of proselytizers’ travel. By referring to early modern womankind, I am not suggesting that women constituted a single, non-variable entity. Markers of class, literacy, religion, and race demarcate significantly different opportunities and restrictions. A thick, 22

Women in Early Modern England

layered, and inclusive study of early modern women writers, which recognizes with Emmanuel Ladurie that the elite are ‘a conspicuous minority,’ must first acknowledge the privilege and rarity of these women.14 Such an acknowledgment does not argue for the representation of the woman writer as an isolated genius, a strategy that only widens the gap between women and the male-dominated canon. However, it does accept certain realities. Throughout the early modern period, when over half the population was under the age of twenty-five, only 11 per cent of Englishwomen were literate.15 It is equally sobering to admit that the early modern culture of opportunity benefited particular classes and a male-directed educational, legal, and state hierarchy. Courts imposed no literacy test on women and doubted the worth of female testimony, to the extent that ‘women could not be compurgators [witnesses] at common law.’ Although in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women did serve as church wardens, overseers of the poor, justices of the peace, and compurgators at burough law, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford conclude their survey of women’s roles as citizens bleakly: ‘By the late seventeenth century a consensus had emerged which declared women unfit for civic office.’16 The ability to read and write drew critical distinctions between children who remained at school until at least eight years of age and those who had to leave to contribute to the family economy by age seven, with only the barest reading knowledge of the primer. Learning Latin, like attendance at grammar school, was a privilege extended to few girls; it remained what Walter J. Ong has called a predominantly male ‘puberty rite,’ while, in Judith Fleming’s observation, the less valued, at times disdained, vernacular left women – and few at that – ‘as the patrons and audience for English texts.’17 Examinations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wills, marriage licences, and depositions before ecclesiastical courts show how literacy favoured the propertied class. Carol M. Meale and Julia Boffey’s investigation of the ‘opaque records’ of gentlewomen’s reading habits in the ‘multiple and fluid networks to which [they] might have had access’ and of the eclectic array of vernacular and French texts, Latin Bibles, and service books necessarily limits its inquiry to women from the ranks of the gentry and professional class. In searching through manuscript and print books of hours (horae) and private prayers (preces privatae), Mary Erler speculates that by 1500 ‘1 out of every 35 London merchants, wives, artisans and nuns [was] supplied with a printed Sarum book of hours.’ Although members of the gentry, the professional classes (clergy, lawyers, schoolmasters, scriveners, secretaries), and London tradesmen and tradeswomen were all literate, between 1580 and 1640 90 per cent of London women could not sign. The percentage shrinks more dramatically when we note that female authors constitute merely 1 per cent of the literary production from 1475 to 1640, followed by a tremendous spurt of 23

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

productivity in tract writing during the Civil War decade.18 Hence, in the first instance, we need to consider women’s translations from Latin, French, and Greek, their original and translated closet drama, their poems, essays, treatises, pamphlets, diatribes, advice and household account books, diaries, prayerbooks, and letters as the work of a privileged minority drawing us back to ‘the simultaneously chimerical and powerful centrality of what survives.’19 The extant documents of early modern women’s writing also encourage us to think about writing itself, about authorship and its links to authority and control, and about whether it actually makes a difference to know who is speaking. Our relatively recent sense of the author, as ‘the sole creator of unique “works,”’20 needs to be adjusted when we consider anonymous or pseudonymous works as well as translations, collaborations, and transcriptions, including manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books as forms of cultural participation. Postmodern concerns about the modes of generation and dissemination of textual discourse, its value-ladenness and overt or subtle nods to authority, government, and the state, can likewise enlarge and complicate early modern literature, especially women’s recovered contributions. In postindustrial society knowledge is a commodity to be traded on interlocking political, economic, and intellectual markets.21 Such an understanding can also structure and enable explorations of the physical and metaphorical conditions of knowledge, the access to and distribution of discursive agency, in the early modern period. One fruitful postindustrial approach to preindustrial discourse is an examination of the sociology of texts, embedding the text in every aspect of social interaction and everyday life. Michel Foucault asks: ‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions?’22 It is important to note, however, that the sociocultural or political discourse so prominent in Foucauldian practice does not privilege literary texts. There are more inclusive sociology-of-texts approaches. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s study of the printing press as an agent of change has shown that print technology did much more than spread ideas; it forged new alliances, prompting us to reappraise ‘the divisions that are often assumed to separate scholars from craftsmen, universities from urban workshops.’ Because of what Cecile Jagodzinski calls the ‘democratizing power of print’ and the early modern reader’s freedom ‘to participate vicariously in the author’s self-display,’ her exploration of reading practices positions readers and writers within a culture of surveillance, ‘subversively ... writing about, reading about, judging those in power.’ Evelyn Tribble reads the margins of early modern texts to illustrate how their notes and comments can make the printed page ‘a territory of 24

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contestation upon which issues of political, religious, social, and literary authority are fought.’ Printed marginalia are the focus of William Slights’s study of the ways – from amplification and annotation to parody, gloss, and translation – authors manage ‘inept or recalcitrant readers.’ For the bibliographer D.F. McKenzie, writing of the book as ‘an expressive form,’ the sociology of texts involves a study of such physical realities as layout, page format, typography, and publisher to express intention, direct reception, and channel interpretation. As a drama editor addressing a world of fluid textual free play, Stephen Orgel celebrates the early modern text’s ‘obscurity and imperfection,’ maintaining that ‘the text as process was precisely what Renaissance printing practice preserved.’ Neither transcendent author nor authoritative text, according to Orgel, is a correct representation of early modern dramatic textual practice; ‘the degree to which the authority of a theatrical text is that of the author is all but impossible to determine.’23 Foucauldian questions and a sociology-of-texts approach have led several early modern scholars to revisit the issues of writing and authorship in ways that open up a host of contingent meanings. Their reconsiderations also supply the ground for examining the work of women writers. Annabel Patterson deconstructs censorship to argue that it ‘encouraged the use of historical or other uninvented texts, such as translations from the classics, which both allowed an author to limit his authorial responsibility for the text (‘Tacitus wrote this, not I’) and, paradoxically, provided an interpretive mechanism.’24 Josephine A. Roberts focuses on ‘the conjunction between manuscript and print in women’s writings’ as an especially promising avenue for reconstructing ‘a lost manuscript culture’; Victoria Burke illustrates how the study of early modern women’s manuscript compilations ‘encourages us to turn away from the exceptional writers of the “canon,” and to examine writers who are representative of a more widespread literary practice.’25 An ever-widening range of interpretive possibilities promotes further centrifugal expansions, moving away from stable identities towards historical contingency and the dispersal of authorial voice. Jonathan Goldberg throws voice in question, allowing the claims of echo to be heard, and attends to the metaphysical act of writing ‘within privatized social space.’26 Jeffrey Masten concentrates on collaborations and the processes of exchange in language to acknowledge ‘discourse as intercourse.’27 The study of early modern women’s writing, then, involves following the textual traces and discontinuities of women’s actual struggles for meaning. It implies not only excavating and disentangling a public transcript but also being alert to the evidence and traces of a hidden, often subversive, transcript. Such a designation of public and private melds and disturbs the conventional distinctions assumed to separate the worlds of government, politics, and marketplace from the household, kitchen, and bedchamber; exploration, 25

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discovery, and statecraft from hearth, nursery, and neighbourliness. James Scott identifies the public transcript as the masked and ritualistic interactions between those in power and those over whom they exert power.28 The hidden transcript, though to some degree coded and performative, permits disobedience and transgression through such acts as complaint, curse, and gossip. This large, encompassing enterprise of discovery and recovery means that we must recognize the importance and consequences of social constructions, of shifting identities, and of interpretive contingencies. Without building estimates of this work on ‘restrictive categories and competitive hierarchies,’29 we must strive for an openness to its amazing range and subtlety. We need to be vigilant about the danger of re-reading early modern women’s writing to suit postmodern sensibilities. It would be limiting and distorting to fasten only on those instances when patriarchal directive met proto-feminist opposition. Instead of invoking binaries and their corollary, essentialism, I suggest examining these transcripts with an awareness of the diversity of gendered practices: compositeness and contradictions, coherence and discontinuity, traditions and singularities. Perhaps most important is a willingness, a receptivity, in approaching these women, to see them as more than abstract proofs or embodiments of economic cycles, demographic curves, material culture, or popular religion. Through sympathetic understanding and attempts to immerse ourselves in the world as they saw and experienced it, we can view early modern Englishwomen writers not as caricatured oddities but as flesh and blood human beings – with desires, capacities, foibles, needs, and beliefs. One pulse-taking index of the milieu in which early modern Englishwomen lived is the extent of ideological positions on the desirability of educating women. This discourse of education supplies an illuminating entry into the mindset of early modern culture. Educating Women ... [K]nowing also that pusillanimity and idleness are most repugnant unto a reasonable creature and that (as the philosopher saith) even as an instrument of iron or of other metal waxeth soon rusty unless it be continually occupied, even so shall the wit of a man or woman wax dull and unapt to do or understand anything perfectly unless it be always occupied upon some manner of study. Princess Elizabeth’s letter to Queen Kateryn Parr, 1544 (MS. Bodleian Cherry 36, fols 2–2v)

Most of the perceptions, of attacks on, and defences of women and their responsibilities within family, legal, and political systems were written by men, a reality which adds to the complexity of this examination. The hesitancy and 26

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caveats surrounding women’s education, often masquerading as praise of their quickness to learn, provide an instructive starting point. In Henrician England through to the Restoration of Charles II, they illustrate the unchallenged ways in which a concept of virtue, usually reducible to chastity, gained currency as the inimitable prerequisite and antecedent of learning.In women’s problematic Renaissance, early humanist beliefs in the value of educating women often represented a closing rather than an opening up of opportunities. Stereotypes relegating women to the periphery of early modern culture and politics have a long history. The claim of the influential Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt that ‘women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men,’ calls for huge qualifications. Burckhardt was writing about Renaissance Italy, not England and, apart from their roles as ‘true wom[e]n of the house capable of commanding and guiding the servants,’ his 1860 ‘essay’ was unconcerned with women who, in his estimate, ‘had no thought of the public.’ But his comments are as telling as his omissions. Although he makes no mention of the bold, clever Venetian poet Veronica Franco, the cortigiana onesta, Burckhardt dismisses the ‘sentiment’ and ‘dilettantism’ common ‘in the poetry of women’ and endorses the view of them as ‘dangerous, grown-up child[ren].’30 Educating women for any kind of public, extra-domestic role was a vexed issue. Humanism opened some possibilities for women, yet humanist treatises, which were ‘limited from the start to expanding the private accomplishments of women of high rank,’31 were rarely welcoming or friendly. Further, although the most famous humanists often had mixed careers as noblemen or administrators or civil servants, the cultural capital they consigned to women was restrictive indeed. Thomas More has been hailed as ‘the first Englishman seriously to consider the education of women, whom he considered not a jot less intelligent or scholarly than men’; but for some students today calling More a ‘humanist’ can mean that ‘he was a bourgeois liberal individualist with an essential self and language ... full of stable signifiers.’32 The Continental humanists More admired, Juan Luis Vives and Desiderius Erasmus, expressed an ambivalence about women’s learning that was widely published and enduring. Some historical positioning of Henry VIII’s chancellor and martyr is necessary. This Tudor saint and/or prototypal patriarch was a man of strong convictions; he could be a formidable champion and enemy. His vehement opposition to William Tyndale’s biblical translation on account of its contravention of the Constitutions of Oxford, which forbade biblical translation without episcopal permission, comprises, for one Tyndale scholar, ‘a blot on [More’s] reputation.’33 The father of three daughters and one son, More himself headed a household devoted to their education. Writing to the tutor William Gonell (22 May [1518?]), More used an organic metaphor to 27

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underscore the importance and naturalness of educating boys and girls as ‘equally suited for the knowledge of learning by which reason is cultivated, and, like plowed land, germinat[ing] a crop when the seeds of good precepts have been sown.’ According to More, the harvest is not affected ‘whether it is a man or a woman who does the sowing,’ thereby affirming his belief in the equality of a ‘native rational capacity’34 between the sexes. However, More definitely espouses the view that ‘the accomplishment of the educated woman is an end in itself ’; her education is not ‘a training for anything.’ His letter to ‘sweetest Margaret’ (dulcissima Margareta), after her marriage, makes it clear that her writing is intended for the audience of ‘your husband and myself – as a sufficiently large circle of readers’ (pro eximia pietate qua nos prosequeris satis amplum frequensque legenti tibi theatrum simus, maritus tuus et ego). Though complying with such restrictions, the More women had much to be proud of. In addition to the translation of Erasmus’s treatise on the Pater Noster by his learned eldest, Margaret, and the translation by his granddaughter Mary Basset of his own extended meditation composed in the Tower, De Tristitia, the influence of the More household school and its siblings and wards extended to the Continent and the next century. Margaret Clement, the daughter of his ward Margaret Giggs, was the first prioress of St Monica’s Convent at Louvain and the subject of the first female biography by Elizabeth Shirley in 1612.35 More’s earliest published work concerns the education of children. Even before his own writing and parental careers were launched, as a young man barely twenty years old, More was commenting on ways of teaching Latin. The witty epigrams he contributed to Lac puerorum, Anglice Mylke for Chyldren (ca. 1499) by John Holt, who taught grammar at Cardinal Morton’s school for boys at Lambeth Palace, endorse approaching Latin through English. Clearly siding with the master who gives ‘cups aflow with sweet milk’ (quae dulci pocula lacte fluunt), More also showed his loyalty to the students in asking Quid bene fulta penus prodest tibi, quando retentat Ianua magnificos irreseranda cibos? What good to you is a strong larder if a door which you cannot open keeps you from the sumptuous food?36

In superintending his own children’s education, More made learning fun, setting up the Latin and Greek alphabets as targets for archery. Given access to Latin education and the habits of reading and writing of Western European literary culture, customarily reserved for privileged or promising boys at grammar schools, More’s daughters were especially apt pupils, whom Erasmus pictured as ‘busy, excerpting bees.’ More’s Latin letters to his children indicate how he ‘linked humanitas with nurture and education and preferred encour28

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agement, praise, and love to fear and pain.’ His correspondence characterizes him as ‘a profeminist educator who gave his female students spiritual and ethical autonomy, which the hierarchy of marriage did not require them to sacrifice or compromise.’37 Yet to the student of early modern women’s writing, several aspects of More’s outlook and loyalties, in addition to the restricted readership for accomplished women’s work, remain baffling. Ruefully aware of the productivity of the contemporary fourteen years his junior, he praised Vives’ ‘elegant and learned, ... well-digested’ works; writing to Erasmus, he resorted to lavish rhetoric: ‘who instructs with more cleverness, with more pleasure, or with more success than Vives?’38 The text of this Spanish humanist most concerned with women’s education, Institutione Feminae Christianae, is in fact singularly lacking in the sense of wit, openness, and inclusivity so often attributed to More. Before the advent of feminist interrogation of the canon and the surge of interest in early modern women’s work, the received opinion about Vives was that his treatise, as translated by Richard Hyrde, tutor in the More household, and as corrected by More himself, was ‘a landmark in the history of woman’s liberal education.’39 His very advocacy of education for women registered his resistance to their depiction as ‘sex symbols.’40 But the inherent restrictions of his pronouncements on women’s ethical conduct, both the source and the goal of their education, have also led to more critical recent scrutiny. Preoccupied with conduct rather than education, ‘Vives’ feminist remarks are easily matched by his antifeminist dicta.’41 Despite his lengthy catalogues of saints, sybils, and learned holy women of the past, ‘Vives does not seem to have thought of women using their learning to create anything new.’42 His carefully itemized lists of recommended texts, mainly religious, present reading as a means of control rather than enlightenment. Women’s education ‘was not primarily dialectic; they were not supposed to know evil.’43 Within a year of its Latin printing, Hyrde had translated Vives’ text as A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instruction of a Christen Woman (1524). One noteworthy feature of this translation is the use of binary distinctions. It requires no literary gerrymandering to see this technique’s suitability to a mind that brooks no opposition. In contrast to his own ‘rude and symple translation’ (Aii), Hyrde praises the unmatched copia of the original: no other treatise is ‘garnysshed with more substanciall authoritees / or stored more plentuously of convenient examples’ (Aiiv). Arranged chronologically to address childhood, marriage, and widowhood, and dedicated to Queen Catherine of Aragon to assist in her education of Princess Mary, the treatise, whose ‘prohibitions against women in government would have disappointed and perhaps alarmed her,’44 demarcates the roles and range of male and female education from the outset. ‘Moreover though the preceptes for men be 29

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innumerable: women yet may be infourmed with few wordes. For men must be occupied both at home & forth a brode / both in theyr owne matters and for the comon weale. Therfore hit can nat be declared in few bokes / but in many and longe / howe they shall handle them selfe in so many and divers thynges. As for a woman hath no charge to se to / but her honestie and chastyte wherfore whan she is enfurmed of that / she is sufficiently appoynted’ (Bii). Citations from biblical (Paul), classical (Plato, Pythagoras, Theophrastus), and patristic (Jerome, Ambrose) sources corroborate the duty to protect and monitor, shelter and control female children. Girls ‘be more disposed to pleasure and dalyance’ and inclined to learn ‘unclenly wordes / or wanton / or uncomely gesture & moving of ye body’ (Ciiv). Women should concentrate their greatest efforts on ‘dystaffe and spyndel’ (Civ). By contrast, learning for anything other than holiness is unnecessary. Vives minces no words about the capacity to debate and sharpen wits, which could propel women into a public sphere: ‘As for eloquence I have no great care / nor a woman nedeth it nat: but she nedeth goodnes & wysdome’ (Eii). Iterations of Vives’ strictures continue to circulate throughout the early modern period. His insistence on the domestic enclosure of women’s bodies and minds anticipates many later pronouncements and challenges. In his conduct book The Flower of Friendship (1568), modelled on the discourses of Erasmus and Castiglione, Edmund Tilney fashioned one of the female speakers, the Lady Julia, derived from Erasmus’s good woman ‘Eulalia,’ as the spokesperson for the wife behind closed doors. Julia defended her ‘meaning’ in what may sound like protesting too much. She does not intend ‘to have the maried wife continually lockt up, as a cloystred Nonne, or Ancres, but to consider hereby, what respect she must have in going abroade, and what a vertue it is to kepe well hir house.’ Echoing Heinrich Bullinger’s qualification, in the work translated as The Christen State of Matrimonye, that he would not have daughters ‘shut up as it were in a Cage,’ the defence actually underscores the limitations of the wife’s confined, uninitiating role. Her enclosure makes her the mirror of her husband and requires, as Valerie Wayne observes, ‘an erasure of her own ... affective life.’45 John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s A Godlie Forme of Household Government (1598) reiterated the striking, insistent polarities of the conjugal economy: ‘The dutie of the Husband is to get goods: and of the Wife to gather them together and save them. The dutie of the Husband is to travell abroade, to seeke leving: and the Wives dutie is to keepe the house. The dutie of the Husband is to get money and provision: and of the Wives, not vainely to spend it. The dutie of the Husband is to deale with many men: and of the Wives to talke with few’ (L4). Borrowing heavily from Miles Coverdale’s translation of Bullinger’s matrimonial guide, Der Christlich Eestand (1540), Dod and Cleaver’s version of the household promotes ‘a persuasive fiction of 30

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the well-governed wife’ which underlines the ‘masculine activity of a Christian humanist education.’46 The early modern conjugal household was usually under male control. Richard Brathwait’s directives in The English Gentlewoman (1631) to ‘shut the windowes, that the house may give light’ and ‘ramme up those portells, ... keepe home and stray not, lest by gadding abroad you incurre Dinahs fate’47 repeat Vives’ peremptory tone and monosyllabic commands. Such a cultural commonplace is the image of the woman indoors that Robert Farlie’s emblem ‘Si tu foris, Ego domi’ [If you venture forth, I sit at home], whose icon shows two objects, a man holding a torch and a candle on a table, actually relies on the candle alone to represent the wife.48 But other variations on Vives’ theme openly contest household confinement. Oxford physician John Case distils his experience of twenty years of marriage in his learned commentary on Aristotle’s Economics, Thesaurus Oeconomiae (1597). His prudent reality check argues that ‘no law in any nation now forbids women from going about as they please, doing business outside the house.’49 Case allows this Anti-Aristotelean outburst, as translated by Robert Knapp: ‘Today, women wonder everywhere. They do business in the marketplace, in the countryside, in the theater. They flit about into every corner of the city; no place is forbidden to them. ... They attend spectacles, they come so that they themselves may be seen. Their faces are bare, their breasts are uncovered, their teats are full, painted, and protrude. Therefore this paradox of the Philosopher is cruel, in that he requires wives – as if they were vestal virgins and nuns – to hide away in the cloister.’ Vives’ contention that woman’s frailness and susceptibility to deception make her unsuited to run a school, since ‘a woman shulde nat teache’ (Eiiv), articulates the seemingly immortal stereotype of the untrustworthy, vulnerable daughter of Eve. Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) is concerned with those who are going to affect the ‘Publike Weale’; hence, girls and women virtually disappear, beyond warnings against ‘folisshe’ nurses who mispronounce words and invocations of woman’s ‘pleasant sobrenesse’ to be ‘timerous, tractable, ... shamfast.’50 Two separate English translations of Giovanni Michele Bruto’s Italian and French La institutione di una fanciulla nata nobilmente (1555) both stress the need of strict governance of a gentlewoman’s reading. Thomas Salter’s The Mirrhor of Modestie (1579) advised ‘that it is not mete nor convenient for a maiden to be taught or trayned up in learnyng of humaine artes,’ and W.P.’s The necessarie, fit and convenient education of a gentlewoman (1598) promoted the knowledge of needle, wheel, distaff, and spindle rather than book or pen, out of fear that reading ‘may induce her minde (very delicate of it selfe) to become more feeble and effeminate.’51 Although he dedicated Positions (1581) to Queen Elizabeth as the magnificent exception, Richard Mulcaster, master of the Merchant Taylors School, 31

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denies professional education through either ‘publike grammer scholes’ or ‘universities’ to women, citing the evidence that such a formation has ‘no president thereof in my countrie.’ Despite the promise of his definition of education as ‘the bringing up of one, not to live alone, but amongest others,’ Mulcaster’s emphasis in this treatise in defence of public education is exclusively on male pupils. Girls are only to learn enough to permit them to govern and direct a household; lacking knowledge of geometry, law, and bodily functions, and, suitably, without pulpits to preach in, they are to remain ‘empty caske[s].’52 Gervase Markham characterizes the English housewife as ‘godly, constant, and religious,’53 learning only from the preacher and her husband. For writing master Martin Billingsley the sole reason women need to learn to write, ‘if any Art be commendable in a woman,’ is to assist their memories, which are ‘not the best.’54 Correspondingly Richard Brathwait’s idealized gentlewoman ‘desires not to have the esteeme of any she-clarke; she had rather be approv’d by her living, than learning.’55 We need not call on the regiment of women’s so-called defenders to hear the counterpoint of these views of intellectual frailty. The examples of learned women themselves powerfully illustrate their capacities and accomplishments. How ironic that Vives’ undermining suspicions should have enjoyed such currency during a century of two carefully educated – though differingly astute – queens regnant. At the invitation of Queen Kateryn Parr, Mary Tudor had launched a monumental translation of Erasmus’s paraphrase of the Gospel of St John, before sickness forced her to assign the project to Nicholas Udall, while her half-sister Elizabeth translated from French, Latin, and Greek and prepared a polyglot rendering of Queen Kateryn Parr’s Prayers into French, Latin, and Italian as a present for their father. The classical accomplishments of groups of aristocratic sisters, Ladies Ann, Margaret, and Jane Seymour, Ladies Jane and Mary Fitzalan, and Mildred, Anne, Elizabeth, and Katherine Cooke give the lie to denigrations of ‘she-clarkes.’ They exemplify those ‘younge virgins so nouzled and trained in the studie of letters, that they willyngly set all other vain pastimes at naught for learnynges sake,’ whom Nicholas Udall, Master of Eton, reported as ‘embrac[ing] vertuous exercises, readyng and writyng, and with most earnest studie, both erlye and late, to applye themselves to the acquiryng of knowledge, as well in all other liberall artes and disciplines’ and ‘as familiarlye to reade and reason thereof in Greke, Latine, Frenche or Italian, as in Englishe.’56 Such learned Tudor adolescents are part of what Erasmus called that changed ‘human scene’ in which ‘women love books.’57 Erasmus’s attitude to women’s education and potential is much more nuanced and subtle than Vives.’ His hugely popular Colloquies, selling in the thousands but ending up on the Index librorum prohibitorum for over a century, was condemned by the Sorbonne in 1526 and reviled by the five successive popes who occupied the throne of Peter during the Council of Trent (1545– 32

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63). Luther forbade his children to read them. What was so upsetting about this work? An ordained priest who lived as a cosmopolitan humanist scholar, maintaining an acerbic anti-ecclesiastical honesty, Erasmus also reported candidly on the betrayals women suffered. His dialogues pull no punches about the traps set for gullible young women – either in a convent (see ‘The Repentant Girl’ and ‘The Girl with No Interest in Marriage’) or in a loveless arranged marriage with a diseased but titled old groom, who is a gambler, boozer, whoremonger, cheater, liar, and thief (‘A Marriage in Name Only, or the Unequal Match’). His exchange between the experienced wife ‘Eulalia’ (‘sweetly speaking’) and her shrewish junior ‘Xantippe’ in Coniugium (‘Marriage’) emphasizes the value of winking at weakness, putting up with one’s partner, and seasoning admonitions with wit and pleasantry. Coniugium was adapted into English with a Lutheran treatment in Walter Lyn’s The Vertuous Scholehous of Ungracious Women (1548), later titled A Watchword for Wilfull Women (1581), and as a Puritan dialogue in Robert Snawsel’s A Looking Glasse for Maried Folkes (1610). As adamant as his contemporary, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in opposing forced marriages,58 Erasmus is also a spirited defender of women’s role as mothers. He dramatizes the genuine valour of motherhood through the rebuttal of the soldier’s supremacy by a young woman, who has just had her first child: ‘There’s not a single one of you who, if he once experienced childbirth, would not prefer standing in a battle line ten times over to going through what we must endure so often.59 Married women speaking among themselves, as in ‘The Lower House, or the Council of Women,’ where membership is limited to wives less than seventy years old who have had no more than three husbands, present a more diffuse view of women’s social responsibilities. Although one speaker contends that ‘human affairs would go better if the reins were handed over to us,’ she also admits that the label ‘women’s senate’ could be a ‘joke’; in fact, the women spend much of their time talking about clothes, class distinctions, and the exclusion of prostitutes from their number. There are real toads in this imaginary Erasmian marriage garden, too. The women he depicts show little sign of initiative, superior intelligence, or social agency. The wives dramatized in the Colloquies quietly internalize their inferiority, assuming husbands’ infidelity is their fault, pampering philanderers, cajoling their spouses, and weeping in private. Erasmus’s Institutio matrimonii christiani (1526) goes so far as to compare a woman’s ‘defective’ intellect to menstruation: ‘For, just as in generation a woman does not produce anything perfect without intercourse with a healthy man, and without this she produces nothing but unformed matter that is no more than a mass of bad humors, so also if a husband does not take care to cultivate his wife’s spirit, what else can one hope for?’60 David Clapham’s Englishing of Agrippa’s treatise Of the Nobilitie and 33

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Excellencie of Womankynde (1542) is a vigorous counterblast to derogations and dismissals. In his argument it is only ‘custome, education, fortune, and a certayne tyrannicall occasion, ... no naturall, no divyne necessitie or reason’ (G2v), that constrain women to obey men. Woman ‘infinitely excells man’ (A3v) in nobility of place (surpassing Adam), matter of composition (‘havyng a reasonable soule and a godly minde’), and name received (Eva meaning ‘life’ as opposed to Adam meaning ‘earth’). Adam was in fact the first fully informed sinner: ‘we toke orygynalle synne of oure father the man, not of our mother the woman’ (C6v). ‘If it had bene laufull for women to make lawes, to wryte histories,’ Agrippa echoes Alice of Bath, ‘how gret tragedies (trow ye) wolde they have writen of the inestimable malice of men’ (Ev). But Agrippa’s evocation of female capacity stays in the optative mood. The indicative mood – and the imperative patriarchal voice – is much more common in observations about the education of women. The fact that the cultivation of female intelligence, when it was undertaken at all, was assumed to be the job of the male gardener, as husband, or father, or guardian, is inescapably central. So is the realization that the purpose of women’s education was to make them better wives. The discourses of women’s education and household economics were inextricably intertwined. That men wrote these treatises and were empowered to cast, mould, and frame women discursively tells us about the authors as well as their subjects. Favouring at times Platonic models of dialogue and at others Socratic exchanges of question and answer, keen to buttress their views with catalogues of classical and biblical muses, goddesses, matriarchs, queens, prophets, and judges, their composite picture of womankind presents fluctuating, unstable, often contradictory identities. Yet as Catherine Belsey reminds us, one way of attempting to ‘reclaim early modern writing from patriarchal analysis’ is to recognize that both sides partake of this instability: ‘Masculinity is no more more full, single, and original than femininity.’61 As well as bursting with contradictions about women’s capacity and inferiority, their picture shows how little these gazing, monitoring, pontificating patriarchs actually knew their subject. Two exceptional women, the English Mary Ward and the Flemish Anna Maria van Schurman, who promoted and modelled the education of their sex, provide counterblasts to the prevailing patriarchal rhetoric. Religion was at the core of both their lives – Catholicism for Ward, Calvinism and later the Quaker-like teachings of Jean de Labadie for van Schurman. Both exerted considerable influence in England:Ward through her schools and van Schurman through the translation of her Dissertatio logica de ingenii muliebris ad doctrinam et meliores litteras aptitudine (1641) as The Learned Maid; or Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar (1659). In light of the forced closure of Ward’s schools and the renunciation of scholarship as vanity by van Schurman, who had been hailed as the most learned woman in Europe, it is easy to conclude that their 34

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experiments and advocacy were of limited, possibly nugatory, value. Such a conclusion, however, would be very shortsighted. In assessing the ways of thinking Ward and van Schurman initiated, we should not forget the centuries-old tradition of belittlement and blame against which they were kicking. The work of the Yorkshire-born recusant pioneer of women’s education, Mary Ward (1585–1645), illustrates the twinned impulses of female determination and patriarchal – in this case ecclesiastical – interference. From the evidence of her Autobiography, letters, and spiritual exhortations, displaying proficiency in English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, Ward saw the schools she established – in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Bavaria, Hungary, and England (at Hungerford House and Knightsbridge in London and at Hutton Rudby, York, and Heworth in Yorkshire) – as a way of allowing women to work as ‘Apostles’ in the Counter-Reformational harvest. As she explained in Latin to Pope Paul V in 1616, arguing for ‘a mixed kind of life’ for the unenclosed sisters of her foundation, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (I.B.V.M.), ‘especially in these times, in which, as in early times, the Church is sorely oppressed in our country; [we propose] that by this means we may more easily instruct virgins and young girls from their earliest years in piety, Christian morals and the liberal arts, that they may afterwards, according to their respective vocations, profitably embrace either the secular or the religious state.’ The curriculum of Ward’s schools for English refugee boarders and local poor girls was exceptionally comprehensive, consisting of languages, mathematics, astronomy, geography, and history, as well as needlework, liturgical music, painting, drawing, and dancing. To squelch a rumour circulating in the College of Cardinals that the fervour of her cause would decay because her sisters were only women, Ward wrote to Pope Urban VIII in 1624 in what is often called the ‘Verity’ speech: ‘There is no such difference between men and women. It is not veritas hominis, nor verity of women, and this verity women may have as well as men. If we fail, it is for want of this verity, and not because we are women, for fervour is not placed in feelings but in a will to do well, which women may have as well as men.’ Nevertheless Ward’s followers experienced great successes and torments; the English Roman Catholic clergy labelled them ‘Galloping Girls,’ denouncing them to the Pope in 1621 as ‘a great shame and disgrace, with loquacity in words displaying such boldness and rashness as if England could not be converted without them.’ Aware of the innovative ‘spectacle’ her sisters were enacting, Ward’s ‘Third Speech’ exhorts them to persevere: ‘Men, you know, looketh diversely upon you; all looketh upon you as beginners of a course never thought of before, marvelling what you intend and what will be the end of you. Some, thinking we are women, and aiming at greater matters than was ever thought women were capable of, they expect perhaps to see us fall, or come short in many things.’ Removed from her foundation, Paradeiser 35

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Haus, in Munich in 1631 as a ‘heretic, schismatic and rebel to the Holy Church,’ Ward was imprisoned in a monastery of the Poor Clares for two months. She corresponded with her sisters using coded language and writing with lemon juice on the scraps of paper in which her food was wrapped. The Papal Bull of Suppression (1631) referred to the presumptive authority of this new religious order, likening its members to ‘weeds,’ ‘brambles,’ and ‘poisonous growths.’ Schools were closed and the nuns, most of whom were homeless and destitute, were left with the option of becoming Ursulines or returning to their families. One view of Mary Ward could assess her educational experiment as an utter failure; she could not be referred to as a ‘foundress,’ for the Institute was not officially recognized until the early eighteenth century, and her schools had no firm footing until well after her death. But another view stresses the daring of her enterprise, the sartorial freedom and agency for women she advocated, and the fears of usurped authority she provoked.62 Artist, polyglot, and mystic, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), labelled the Dutch Sappho and the Learned Maid of Utrecht, commanded ten languages (Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldaic among them), corresponded with Descartes, delighted Marie de Medici with her singing as well as her prodigious learning, and wrote an autobiography, Eukleria, at age seventy. Clement Barksdale’s English translation of The Learned Maid, which appeared in 1659, also included a sample of van Schurman’s correspondence with Dorothea Moore, the wife of a colonel quartered at the Hague, and with such reputed scholars as John Beverwyck (requesting that he not dedicate his treatise De Excellentia Foemini Sexus to her), the Professor of Theology at Leyden, André Rivet (praising the scriptural knowledge of the ‘incomparable Princess Jane Grey’), and the English aristocrat Sir Simonds D’Ewes (commending the ‘most learned matron’ Bathsua Makin). With a practical attention to the conditions of everyday life that we associate with Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, van Schurman lays out the preliminary requirements of the female scholar: ‘an indifferent good wit,’ the provision of ‘necessaries’ and freedom from ‘want,’ ‘spare houres from her general and speciall calling,’ ‘the salvation of her own soul,’ and ‘that she may instruct and direct her Family, and also be usefull, as much as may be to her whole Sex.’ Although the subjects recommended include ‘the Circle and Crown of liberal Arts and Sciences,’ with Theology and Moral Virtues having a special prominence, she also stresses the importance of knowledge of Politics and Civil Government. Organizing the thesis as a syllogistic argument, she entertains and proves some propositions and disproves objections to corroborate the claim that ‘A Christian Maid, or Woman, may conveniently give her self to Learning.’ Van Schurman’s own offering to learning was a veiled affair; the only way she could accept the invitation of the Calvinist scholar Gisbertus Voetius to attend 36

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his lectures at the university in Utrecht was to listen from behind a curtain. Attentive to the ‘testimonies of wise men’ such as Erasmus, but equally aware of the accomplishments of Thomas More’s daughters, Lady Jane Grey, and Queen Elizabeth, van Schurman, the quintessential Christian maid who devoted a significant portion of her life to learning, also provided important first steps in the slow development of the discourse of women’s learning and capabilities. Treatises on women’s education and – as corollary and consequence – in praise and (more frequently) dispraise of women overlapped. Their shared subtext of economic, sexual, and cultural control constitutes what Randall Collins would call a ‘combinatorial construction in intellectual topics.’63 These subjects were intricately allied to the literary sports of dialogue and debate. Just as men envisaged women educated for tractability, they praised female docility, but feared – and therefore censured – female independence. Praising and Blaming Women

F ret, fume, or frumpe at me who will, I care not, I will thrust forth thy sting to hurt, and spare not: N ow that the taske I undertake is ended, I dread not any harme to me intended, S ith justly none therein I have offended. Rachel Speght, Certaine Quaeres to the bayter of Women (1617)

Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean periods, witnessing exceptionally rich decades for the production of texts in the controversy about women, created their own traditions of thought and practice. Such traditions either overtly or implicitly compelled the woman writer to define her subject-position by negotiating a relation to this debate that could interrogate or reinforce its central tenets. Peak periods in the debate involve three specific decades. In the 1540s a flurry of treatises coincided with Henry VIII’s experiments with his last three wives. In the 1560s another vogue corresponded to the numerous strategic matches being resisted by the unmarried Elizabeth. In the second decade of James’s reign both misogynous and pro-woman material circulated as this bisexual monarch was installing new knights and male favourites. Questions of women’s rationality and constancy, responsibilities and conduct, worthiness and specific virtues, were embedded in the cultural and educational contexts in which early modern women writers lived and worked. Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Defence of Good Women (1540) launched the Tudor diatribes by delineating praise as conformity to humanist ideals. Although the curlike Caninius charges that women are imperfect, Candidus exposes the 37

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secret of misogyny by declaring that ‘Poetes wrate agaynste women in wanton ditties, to content men with newe fangled devises’ (sig. Civ). When the virtuous widow Zenobia, who had studied moral philosophy before her marriage, joins the conversation, Caninius is won over. Edward Gosynhyll split the offensive and defensive roles in two rhymeroyal texts. In The Schole House of Women (1541) he lobs a volley of charges against proud and sensuous women who delight in kissing ‘with open mouth and rowling eyes,/ Tung to tung’ (lines 101–2) and in keeping schools: The yung to drawe after the olde, Meeting ever upon their stooles, Of every matter that they have would By meane wherof the yung wax bolde. (lines 295–8)

His recantation the next year, The Prayse of all women, called Mulierum Pean (1542), dismisses The Schole House as ‘lewdely compyled’ (sig. Aii) and recasts women as painstaking mothers and models of divine handiwork: That god made all thynge parfetlye Howe shulde the woman then tonge have none And be of goddes creacyon. (sig. Biiv)

So complete is the about-face that, in contrast to his earlier jocular etymology of ‘pean’ from ‘pehan,’ he now concentrates on man as ‘the adiective’ and woman as ‘playne the substantyve’ to prove ‘Wythout the womans helpynge hande / By hym selfe [he] may nat longe stande’ (sig. Biiiv). The early modern controversies about women were consciously intertextual, with Gosynhyll not only answering himself but eliciting another response in Robert Vaughan’s A Dyalogue Defensyve for Women agaynst malycyous detractours (1542). This overheard debate between a prating Pye and gentle Falcon flits back and forth between misogynous and women-centred positions on topics of anatomy, rationality, susceptibility to temptation, frugality, and clothes consciousness. The Falcon never tires of countering the Pye’s obstinacy and perversity, pointing out, ‘thou art peevyshe and blynde as a blocke, ... thou raylest agaynst reason’ (sig. Civ ). With a penitence that lasts only a few lines the Pye admits ‘Malyce me moved, of women to lye,’ but promptly justifies his action as a strategic response to the realpolitik: Womans power is small, in felde and in towne Therfore I them sclaunder, therfore I them skorne Men rule and governe, by see and by lande Promocyons and profytes, by them I may have. (sig. Eii)

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Unlike the generalizing formulae of praise and blame and humanist erudition in the Tudor tracts, the Elizabethan texts focused on the highly topical issues of rule and marriage. Timing and temperance were not strong suits for John Knox, the Calvinistic Scot whose The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous regiment of women (1558) appeared in the year of Elizabeth’s accession. In a white heat from the outset about any encouragement of woman’s ‘rule, superioritie, dominion or empire’ as ‘the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice’ (9), Knox invokes the Bible, Aristotle, Augustine, Ambrose, and Basil to corroborate ‘that all woman is commanded, to serve, to be in humilitie and subiection’ (22). John Aylmer, Archdeacon of Lincoln and later Bishop of London, rebutted Knox with an even larger panoply of biblical and classical precedents; hailing Elizabeth as Judith and Deborah, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subiecties (1559) favourably compares the new monarch to kings in Israel. Aylmer’s refutation of Knox rested largely on the distinction between the monarch’s two bodies, the physical (and private) and the political (and public): ‘I graunte that, so farre as pertaineth to the bandes of mariage, and the office of a wife, she muste be a subiecte: but as a Magistrate she maye be her husbands head’ (sig. C4v). The intricate convolutions of arguments about women’s rule and power resulted in several ironic separations and pairings. The anonymous The Proude Wyves Pater Noster (1560) is constructed as a series of doubles, splicing the petitions of the Pater Noster with the secular speaker’s desire for ‘goodly gay gere’ (line 334). The rhyming couplets of Edward More’s The Defence of Women (1560), a delayed response to Gosynhyll by the twenty-year-old bachelor grandson of Thomas More, are oblique defences at best, rationalizing women’s ‘lacke of strength, bewty, wyt’ as ‘Gods wyll’ (lines 59, 61). Another belated recognition of Gosynhyll’s doubleness is C. Pyrrye’s The Praise and Dispraise of Women (ca. 1563–71), with the opening third of dispraise endebted to The Schole House and the larger second section of praise derived from Mulierum Pean; its closing dialogue between W[ooer] and C[ounsel], ‘Knowe before thou knitte,’ emphasizes the indissolubility of marriage. Edmund Tilney’s A brief and pleasant discourse of duties in Mariage called the Flower of Friendshippe (1568), so popular that it went through seven editions in less than twenty years, brings the Erasmian dialogue into an Elizabethan context; the speaker, Isabella, modelled on the unmarried queen, contends that it is ‘as meete ... that the husband obey the wife, as the wife the husband, or at the least that there be no superioritie betwene them, as the auncient philosophers have defended’ (lines 1132–6). The first woman to enter the discursive fray was Jane Anger, whose Jane Anger her Protection for Women To defend them against the Scandalous Reportes of a late Surfeiting Lover, and all other like Venerians that complaine so to bee overcloyed 39

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with womens kindnesse (1589)64 was purportedly written in response to a nowlost text. Through several references in Anger’s tract and proximity in names, we can deduce that this text was likely Boke his Surfeit in love with a farewel to the folies of his own phantasie (1588). The possibility also exists that the author, whose given name could have been Joan or Jane, may have been responding to a portion of John Lyly’s larger work, published separately as Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587), a misogynous attack on temptresses. Anger’s bold and direct defence is supremely serious, removed from the witty ridicule of female and male foibles in Thomas Nashe’s The Anatomie of Absurdity: Contayning a breefe confutation of the slender prayses to feminine perfection (1589). Anger addresses rhetorical questions and exhortations ‘To all Women in general, and gentle Reader whatsoever’: ‘Shall surfeiters rail on our kindness, you stand still and say naught: and shall not Anger stretch the veins of her brains, the strings of her fingers, and the lists of her modesty to answer their surfeitings? Yes truly.’ Women’s ‘greatest fault’ is their credulousness, she argues, ‘for could we flatter as they [men] can dissemble, and use our wits well as they can their tongues ill, then never would any of them complain of surfeiting’ (35). Anger reverses the ‘conventional gendering of commonplaces’65 by characterizing men’s tongues as unruly: ‘men’s tongues sting against nature and therefore they are unnatural’ (41). With spirit and precision, she attacks the defaming etymologies which attribute weakness, softness, incompleteness, or deformity to womankind. She contends, ‘Of our true meaning they make mocks, rewarding our loving follies with disdainful flouts’ (35). Wasting no time, she catalogues how this true meaning gets translated into action for the very benefit of the men who malign them. ‘A woman was the first that believed, a woman likewise the first that repented of sin. In women is only true fidelity: except in her, there be [no] constancy, and without her no huswifery. In the time of their sickness we cannot be wanted, and when they are in health we for them are most necessary. They are comforted by our means; they nourished by the meats we dress; their bodies freed from diseases by our cleanliness, which otherwise would surfeit unreasonably through their own noisomeness’ (39). Notice the adroitness of her articulate anger, as she stands on their heads all the clichéd charges about women’s pride of appearance, laziness, and dependency. One of her two concluding poems closes with the command vivendo disce (learn through living). Jane Anger her Protection for Women shows how thoughtfully Anger had internalized this motto. In the early Jacobean period, while the king clearly preferred the company of Esmé Stuart, or Philip Herbert, or Robert Carr to that of Queen Anne, the controversy was quiescent and its participants were unexceptional.66 Richard Johnson’s ironic rehash of the main topics in his tune ‘In praise and dispraise of women’ caught the sense of the half-hearted, desultory joke:

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Women in Early Modern England Good wives a iudgement I you pray: your verdit let me heere: Where all be falce or all be true, by you it must appeare: How ever that the matter goeth, the trueth you must descry: Or else it is not possible, to know if that I lye.67

But all smiles stopped with the next major flashpoint, Joseph Swetnam’s coarse, muddled, and immensely popular (ten editions to 1637) invective, The Araignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women: or the vanitie of them, choose you whether (1615). A fencing instructor who was ‘in a great chollor against some women’ (A2), he lashed out at degenerate, proud, lazy women, who are ‘a good purgation for thy purse’ (7) and who ‘devour [men] alive’ (16). As Swetnam pictures them, women are caught in a real bind: if they are beautiful, they are costly and poor housewives; if good housewives, then terrors to their servants; if chaste and honest, then figures of jealousy. The teenaged Rachel Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus, The Cynicall Bayter of, and foule mouthed Barker against Evahs Sex. Or an Apologeticall Answere to that Irreligious and Illiterate Pamphlet made by Io. Sw. (1617)68 was the first direct response to Swetnam, here characterized as ‘Melastomus’ or ‘black mouth.’ Her voice is controlled yet passionate, learned yet colourfully inflected. ‘In Dedicating this my Chirograph [handwritten document] unto personages of so high ranke,’ she informs ‘all vertuous Ladies Honourable or Worshipfull, and ... all others of Hevahs sex fearing God, and loving their just reputation’ of ‘our pestiferous enemy’ and his ‘illeterate Pamphlet,’ his ‘contagious obtectration’ [slander]. Speght composes an acrostic belittling the ‘raving quill’ and ‘venime fowle’ of this ‘seducer’; ‘Sathan crept into thy filthie Pen,’ she charges. She addresses him personally, her indirectness carrying a sting: ‘Not unto the veriest Ideot that ever set Pen to Paper, but to the Cynicall Bayter of Women, or metamorphosed Misogunes, Joseph Swetnam’ (7). Observing that the excrement, the ‘mingle-mangle invective,’ is without ‘so much as a Grammer sense’ (7), she employs logic and rigour that put Swetnam to shame and marshals biblical citations to illustrate women’s excellency. Her appended Certaine Quaeres to the bayter of Women. With Confutation of some part of his Diabolicall Discipline (1617) builds on the distinction between blowhard attacker and youthful defender. Modifying the admission that she is ‘young in yeares, and more defective in knowledge’ with the defensive, possibly embittered, qualification that she has been busy with ‘affaires befitting [her] Sex,’ she declares and proves in this point-for-point refutation that she is ‘not

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altogether ignorant of that Analogie which ought to be used in a literate Responsarie’ (31). Each of the two subsequent responses, Ester Sowernam’s Ester hath hang’d Haman: or An Answere to a lewd Pamphlet, entituled The Arraignement of Women with the arraignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant men, and Husbands (1617) and Constantia Munda’s The Worming of a mad Dogge: or, A Soppe for Cerberus the Jaylor of Hell (1617) undertakes to address some oversight in or extend the argument of the foregoing. Although this strategy, the product of strong women-centred convictions or printers’ canny marketing – or a bit of both – kept the controversy alive, none of the replies was printed more than once. Ester Sowernam enters the fray with linguistic manoeuvres. The title highlights the Jewish queen whose exposure of the extermination plans of the vizier Haman resulted in his hanging and the author’s name inverts the arraigner’s surname from ‘sweet’ to ‘sour.’ ‘She’ styles herself cunningly – in distinction to Speght’s youth – as ‘neither Maide, Wife nor Widdowe, yet really all, and therefore experienced to defend all.’ This ambivalence about status is not only conventional (compare the Duke’s interrogation of Mariana in Measure for Measure, 5.1.179), it also furthers Sowernam’s questioning of ‘the slippage between wife and maid, between widow and wife.’ In her recent study of this pamphlet Megan Matchinske argues persuasively that Sowernam’s aim is to force men to honour their obligations to maids, wives, and widows, placing ‘the “business” of regulating men’s minds in women’s hands.’69 Ester hath hang’d Haman could have been written by a man or a woman. Sowernam’s allusion to reading Swetnam’s pamphlet while in London ‘this last Michaelmas term’ (87), associated with the fall session of the High Court or Oxford and Cambridge school terms, the legal language of the indictment of Joseph Swetnam, and the ‘weight of business’ (114) that calls ‘her’ away could argue as much for a male as for a female author. While the gender of the author is not an insignificant detail, it should not be absolutely determining. It is just as telling – perhaps more so – that Swetnam and his ilk are trounced by men as by women. Moreover, it is equally sobering to factor into any speculation the sales appeal of sex battles and misogyny. An element of reproof exists in all these refutations, an element most fully though meanderingly developed in Constantia Munda’s ‘sharpe redargution.’ Tessellated with Latin, Greek, and Italian citations, this reply also has the most ungirdled colloquial vigour. Munda berates Swetnam’s ‘shameless muse so fledged in sin, / So cockered up in mischief,’ his ‘barren, idle, dunghill brain,’ his propensity to ‘squeeze / The glanders of abuses in the face,’ and his ‘turbulent mind ... defecated’ (128, 133). In retaliation for Swetnam’s throwing ‘dirt in the face of half human-kind’ (132), Munda resorts not only to excerpts from Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, and the Bible, but to vivid references to pustules and scatology. Promising not to be dissuaded with 42

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threats of cucking stools (chairs for ducking scolds in water) but vowing that ‘our pens shall throttle you’ (138), Munda devises a syllogism to turn the tables on mad-dog Swetnam: A man that is accounted a scold hath great discredit; Joseph Swetnam is accounted a scold; Ergo, Joseph hath a great discredit. (143)

The tenth edition of Swetnam’s Arraignment in 1637 prompted the last gasps of the controversy, in which so-called attacks and defences of women were all composed by hack poet John Taylor. His attack on scolds, A Juniper Lecture (1639), spawned Divers Crabtree Lectures by ‘Mary Makepeace,’ which in turn begat The Women’s Sharpe Revenge (1640) by ‘Mary Tattle-well’ and ‘Joan Hit-him-home.’ Two decades later the rehash of Swetnam’s vituperation and the refuting replies are tedious and stale. Elements of a debate – at the very least a series of oscillating views – about the nature of women hovered in the published discourse during the period when Swetnam’s pamphlet was being printed and reprinted. Daniel Tuvil keeps alive a critical doubleness about women’s actions in Asylum Veneris, or A Sancutary for Ladies. Iustly Protecting Them, their Virtues, and Sufficiencie from the Foule Aspersions and Forged Imputations of Traducing Spirits (1616). Since ‘the purest gold is not without some drosse’ (11), he is as much at ease, in the summary of ten attributes, cataloguing the ‘unmatchable perfection’ of the chastity of Sarah, Susannah, Lucrece, and Penelope as in recounting the ‘disastrous accidents’ (12) caused by the beauty of Hero, Bershabe, Omphale, and Venus. Tuvil supplies the protection of male condescension since he privileges male primacy, initiative, and pleasure. Matrons ‘must’ be ‘inferiour’ (161), while women are either playmates or nurses. Barnabe Rich’s gaze is more openly satirical. My Ladies Looking Glasse. Wherein May be Discerned a Wise man from a Foole, A Good Woman from a Bad, and the True Resemblance of Vice Masked Under the Vizard of Vertue (1616), avowedly ‘composed of a contrarie constitution,’ aims, as he informs the dedicatee Lady Saint Jones, wife of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, ‘to reprehend the idle follies of this madding age’ (A2). Fulminating against the insolent pride of ‘Lady New fashions’ (11), he carps at the increased expectations and the threat to social order of sartorial extravagance: ‘It was a merry world, when seaven or eight yeards of velvet would have made a gowne for a Lady of honour; now eighteen will not suffice for her that is scarce worthy to be a good Ladies laundresse’ (19). All is for sale and on display in the Jacobean imaginary of pleasure and consumption. If he had a daughter, Rich remarks, surveying the marriage market and the venality of parents, he would gladly ‘buy her a husband that had a little wit, then to buy her a lump of flesh, that is 43

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but lapt together in a Fooles skin’ (56). The Old Testament prohibition of cross-dressing (Deuteronomy 22:5) fortifies his admonishment of ‘strumpet like attired’ young men and the ‘ruffian like’ behaviour and apparel ‘accounted the most gallant wench’ (21). The connection between transvestism and transgression is an axiomatic pairing, exploited in the anonymous pamphlets Hic Mulier: or, The ManWoman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease of the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines of our Times. Exprest in a briefe Declamation (1620) and Haec-Vir: or The Womanish Man: Being an Answere to a late Booke intituled HicMulier. Exprest in a briefe Dialogue betweene Haec Vir the Womanish-Man, and HicMulier the Man-Woman (1620). Their transposed demonstrative adjectives, with the masculine form hic modifying the feminine noun mulier and the feminine haec before the masculine noun vir, cue the reader for the depiction of clothing as a code for non-heteronormative behaviour. Roving bands of short-haired women are spied in doublets, jerkins, and breeches with side daggers, while men sport frizzled hair, ruffs, earrings, fans, feathers, hoods, and bodices. Implicitly gendered patriarchal norms underlie both pamphlets. Hic mulier demonstrates the ‘Impostume’ of the ‘new Hermaphrodites, ... Monsters in their disguises’ (C2). The womanish man, carrying a shuttlecock, has abandoned armour for ornament to such a degree that facial hair is his only weaponry – ‘the sharp pointed dagger that hangs at [his] chin and the crosse hilt which gards [his] upper lip’ (Cv). A favourite label for such topsyturvydom is deformity. Although the mannish woman defends liberty and equality (‘We are as free-borne as Men, have as free election, and as free spirits, we are compounded of like parts and may with like liberty make benefit of our Creations’ [B3]), she does so while dressed as a man. The conclusion of this declaration and dialogue is a return to supposed normativity in clothing, conduct, and grammar. Packing ‘deformitie ... to Hell,’ Hic vir and Haec mulier vow, ‘henceforth, we will live nobly like ourselves, ever sober, ever discreet, ever worthy; true men and true women, ... like well-coupled Doves, full of industry, full of love’ (C4). Such anxiety about gender construction and identity is an inheritance of the anti-theatricalist pamphlets of Stephen Gosson and Phillip Stubbes. Their pamphlets exposed ‘the fear that costume could actually alter the gender of the male body’ and ‘deep-seated anxieties about the possibility that identity was not fixed.’70 In The School of Abuse (1579) Gosson pointed to the theatre’s emasculating power, with the charge that playwrights use ‘costly apparrell to flatter the sight, effeminate gesture to ravish the sence, and wanton speache to whette desire to inordinate luste’ (22). Stubbes’s The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) maintained that cross-dressing adulterated gender. Women wearing doublets and jerkins ‘made with wings, welts and pinions on the shoulder points’ are ‘monsters of bothe kindes, half women, half men’ since ‘our Apparell was 44

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given to us as a signe distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, and therefore one to wear the Apparel of another sex, is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the veritie of his owne kinde’ (sig. FVv). The most extensive and vituperative defence of gender fixity against the threat of dissolution, William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix: The Player’s Scourge or Actor’s Tragedy (1633) enveighed against ‘our shorne English Viragoes’ (184) and actors in women’s clothing, which ‘abominable wickednesse ... [his] Inke is not blacke enough to discypher’ (211). The charges of debasement and loss of manhood spool together: ‘Is this a light, a despicable effeminacie for men, for Christians, thus to adulterate, emasculate, metamorphose, and debase their noble sexe, thus purposely yea affectedly to unman, unchristian, uncreate themselves?’ (172). A forceful challenge to anti-transvestism was Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611) that featured an actor playing a crossdressing woman, who was herself in the audience. A theatrical depiction of the actual Mary Frith (1584–1659), a London prankster, pickpocket, forger, and tavern keeper, this city comedy presents an unmarried transvestite heroine, ‘Venus ... in doublet and breeches,’ according to Middleton’s introductory greeting, who emerges as a rehabilitated thief; in her testimony before the Consistory Court of London (27 January 1612) ‘the said Mary ... confessed she hath associated herself with ruffinly, swaggering, & lewd company as namely with cut-purses, blasphemous drunkards & others of bad note ... & giveth her earnest promise to carry & behave herself ever from hence forward honestly, soberly, & womanly.’71 The contrast between the androgyne of the text and the real Moll Frith who, after a performance of the play, appeared on the stage of the Fortune ‘in mans apparell & in her boote & with a sword by her side,’ likely resembling the muscular, pipe-smoking Moll attired in French slops in the frontispiece of the 1611 folio, demonstrates the vitality and genuineness of Frith/Cutpurse’s ‘transgressive aesthetic.’ Apprehensions of threats to gender stability, like debates over the praise or censure of womankind, rely on male-defined norms and the subtle or overt presence of dread and fear. The coin of praise is never without its obverse of blame. Richard Ferrers’s roll call of honour cataloguing biblical, mythical, and historical heroines, The Worth of Women (1622), prefaces its exposition of Adam and Eve’s ‘even’ fault (A4v) with an enumeration – admittedly dismissive – of the charges against women: One cries, a woman is composde of feather; Another sweares, their faith is like the winde; A third, their zeale is made of frostie weather; The fourth, a chaste one never yet could finde. A fig for these, since better spirits know, Save ignorance, true knowledge hath no fo. (A4)

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Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion: or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerning Women (1624) aims for equanimity and a ‘iudiciall view’ in discoursing ‘of all degrees, ... of all Times, ... of all knowne Nations, ... of all Faiths ..., of all Callings, ... of all Estates, Conditions, and Qualities whatsoever’ (‘To the Reader’). However, he treats warlike Amazons as ‘untaught Barbarians,’ in contrast to ‘the wise men of Greece’ (219), and clamorous women as ‘a just cause for [husbands’] impatience’ (362). William Austin’s Haec Homo, wherein the Excellency of the Creation of Woman is described, by way of an Essaie (1637), derived in large measure from Cornelius Agrippa’s defence, twines its elevation of woman around the standard of man. Woman is an idealized male construct, the ultimate object of the male gaze: the perfection of creation, made of the firm part of man to be a fitter helpmeet. Austin aims all his directives about behaviours and activities at the male reader, who must acknowledge that ‘when man basely esteems her he touches himself ’ (6), and that if woman is struck violently, ‘if with rudenesse handled, not onely her body, but her obedience; yea, and her very heart is broken’ (39). As we will see in the related treatises, dialogues, and sermons on marriage, concerns for the wife’s obedience and her heart, for a devotional and emotional unity, are intricately braided. When we consider the range and longevity of early modern discourses expressing fear of women’s independence in dress and social mobility, we should note the formidable impediments women faced. Moreover, even socalled defences, all privileging male pre-eminence, prevaricated on the almost unthinkable issue of gender equality. In light of these curtailments the fact that Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, and Mary Frith mounted forceful acts of defiance to puncture illogical arguments, expose pusillanimity, and demonstrate abilities is an accomplishment that deserves to be acknowledged. As well as spotlighting different modes of subversion, their work indicates the restiveness of women encircled and bombarded with patriarchal dictates. Of course the locales where these prescriptions and proscriptions were most strenuously or feelingly enforced was the household, the area in which patterns of life were enacted, inculcated, and occasionally transformed. The household was the stage on which discourses of marriage, gender, sexuality, and the family – all of which implicated women as citizens, wives, mothers, daughters, writers, readers – were played out. As we will see in the next section, the balances struck in this formative, primary locale between practical continuity and significant change affected the outlook and attitude of early modern women writers. Wiving and Thriving [L]et me tell you that now in your single estate must be the time for you to store up knowledge and experience of the corruption or grace that is in you, & so

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Women in Early Modern England also it is your best time to get an acquentance with God & assurance of his love to you, for when you come to have a family to care for your hart will be much taken up with these things, I & two much two if you have not stored up better cares in your hart to take you sometimes of these, I speake by two much experience, that makes me warne you on it betimes, for the proverb is forewarned forearmed. Frances Widdrington, Letter to her sister Mary Fairfax, 10 February 1636 (MS Bodl. Add. A 119, fol 22)

As The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights (1632) defined its subject, ‘all women are thought of as either married or to be married’ (6). Women in early modern England were raised to be wives and mothers. Usually married as adolescents, aristocratic women, who did not breastfeed, had large families; they often carried a child every twelve or fifteen months. Marrying in their mid-twenties, plebeian women had smaller families; with lactation interrupting ovulation, they bore children every twenty-four or thirty months. The families that early modern women were part of and reared belonged in some degree to one of the categories Lawrence Stone delineated: that is, to the ‘low-keyed, unemotional, authoritarian institution,’ the Open Lineage Family; to the more prominent Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family, with the husband as ‘a legalized petty tyrant’; or, with the rise of affective individualism and a greater autonomy in choosing a spouse, to the Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family. However, evidence inside early modern families themselves suggests that these distinctions were neither clear-cut nor discrete. Marriage in the nuclear family, as Diarmaid MacCulloch observes, was often ‘open to constant negotiation between patriarch and supposedly deferential wife.’ In artisan and plebeian ranks, wives who were only twelve or eighteen months younger than their husbands and who had lived away from the parental home for about ten years before marriage were not easily convinced that their husbands ‘had a God-given right to rule.’ Because of the frequency of widowhood, another impediment to so-called patriarchal hegemony was the fact that ‘up to one third of marriages in Stuart England were second or later marriages.’ Moreover, elderly women – nuns or widows – accumulated and used ‘a lifetime’s experience of manipulating the rhetoric of the patriarchal system to their advantage.’ What is especially pertinent for this study is the importance of the household as a literary site. Barbara Lewalksi notes that ‘in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, households of various kinds – from noble estates headed by literary patrons to the private dwellings of the “middling sort” – emerged as a prominent site of literary production for male as well as female authors, offering an alternative to the court or the church.’72 The early modern household was not necessarily oppressive or unsatisfying. Arranged or self-selected, marriage signalled the official end of childhood 47

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and, for some, of apprenticeship and parental dependence. For most women, though, marriage – whether Catholic sacrament or Protestant contract – meant exchanging one form of dependence for another. Through individual study, parental advice, or more general cultural conditioning, early modern women were familiar with directives to wives, customarily delivered in crisp triads. The translation of Agrippa’s The Commendation of Matrimony (1540) commanded them to serve ‘for an helpe, for propagation, and to avoyde fornication’ (B3). Richard Cleaver and John Dod’s A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (1598) enunciated the wife’s threefold duty: ‘First, that she reverence her husband. Secondly, that she submit her selfe, and bee obedient unto him. And lastly, that she doo not weare gorgeous apparell, beyond her degree and place’ (218). Cleaver and Dod underscored the primacy of the husband as combined parent-sibling-spouse: Thou art unto me both father and mother, Mine owne deare husband, and well beloved brother. (221)

Reversing this instructional train or inverting the hierarchy was respectfully tentative. When the seasoned good wife, Abigail, accepts the challenge of tutoring the frustrated young husband of the spirited Xantippe, in Robert Snawsel’s A Looking Glasse for Maried Folkes (1610), a Puritan adaptation of Erasmus’s dialogue on marriage, she begins diffidently: ‘We are but women, & therefore something bashfull, as it beseemes us, to speake unto you beeing a man, of these matters; yet under leave and correction, we will do our good wil to declare those things which wee have learned and partly know by experience’ (F4). Experience taught early modern women that marriage or serial marriages required a tempering of the ideals of partnership with the realities of obedience. In Henry Peacham’s emblem book Minerva Britanna (1612) the icon of amor coniugalis aeternus, dedicated to his friends ‘Mr Christopher Collarde and Mrs Mabell Collarde his wife,’ depicts a turtle dove and a golden ring on a fruitful olive branch to celebrate their ‘loves invaluable price’ (O2). The unmarried Patrick Hannay fashioned rhyming couplets to describe the considerations and requirements for happiness of both husband and wife. A Happy Husband; or, Directions for a Maide to choose her Mate (1619) presents the husband as a person of few words and general learning, no ‘womaniz’d Carpet Knight’ (B8v) but the essence of flexible bonhommie: ‘able/ To change condition with the times, and place’ (B8v). By contrast, the wife, who is the husband’s ‘booke’ (B8), is a figure of fixity: obedient, mild, industrious, preoccupied with ‘domestic charge’ (C3v). Neither a ‘liquourish gossip’ nor a ‘coy precisian’ (B3), she is happy to be ‘a mirror, to reflect / [her] Husbands mind’ (C2v) and ‘a Snaile, / Who (house wifelike) still in her house we see’ 48

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(B2v). Although Anthony Ascham’s treatise ‘Of Marriage’ (1647–8) maintains that womankind is ‘that sex which is infirmest to bear the heaviest weight’ (fol. 43), it also elevates marriage as ‘the utmost degree of amity and ffriendship’ (fol. 7) and ‘coniugall ffidelity’ as ‘the soveraigne plaister applyed to all those wounds with which marriage afflicts our Liberty’ (fol. 34). Did women quietly internalize or chafe against the patriarchy of seventeenth-century marriage? Were there companionate partnerships? The posthumously discovered loose papers of Elizabeth Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1626–1663), hint at subterfuge and compensation. In her ‘considerations concerning Marriage’ glimpses of smothered lives appear between the lines. Egerton advises the wife ‘to have an affection, and love to him, as to a friend, and so to speake their [sic] mind, and opinion freely to him’; she warns that ‘if she be over awed by her own Fancyes, ’tis a sad life to her selfe, and a troble to her Husband’ and counsels with sage pessimism, ‘if he be hasty, ’tis fitt she should be silent, giving him no cause to be angry ... , if he be fickle and various, not caring much to be with his wife at home, then thus may the wife make her own happiness.’73 Discovering or making outlets for this happiness required some ingenuity. Male supremacy enjoyed the privilege of divine and regal sanctions. Husbands stood ‘in Gods stead’ loving ‘their wives as themselves, of which love, the love of Christ toward his Church is a lively paterne’ (Cleaver and Dod, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government, 165). Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha drew a determined parallel between paternal and royal power: ‘As the father over the family, so the King, as Father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct and defend the whole commonwealth’ (63). In five books and over four hundred pages, The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights; or, The Lawes Provisions for Woemen (1632), also known as The Womans Lawier, distilled widely held views about womankind. Under the rubric of ‘the punishment of Adams sinne,’ the author, identified only as T.E., declared ‘that Women have no voyce in Parliament, they make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none ... [T]heir desires are subject to their husband’ (6). Though ostensibly ‘yoke-fellowes’ (116), the couple did not share equal fortunes. As a ‘feme covert’ under the ‘coverture’ of ‘her husbands protection and supereminency,’ the wife was ‘at [her] husbands commandement’ (118); her marriage ‘is no more but a sconsing or hiding of the servitude’ (126). Since ‘dignitie hangeth merely on the male side’ (126), the husband laid claim to his wife’s goods (money, jewels, plate, house[s], cattle) and, in fact, claims her as his property. Petruchio’s estimate that a wife was ‘my goods, my chattels; she is my house, / My household stuff, my field, my barn, / My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything’ (The Taming of the Shrew, 3.2.232–4) was more than metaphorically accurate. The husband was entitled to beat his wife, as he would an outlaw, a traitor, or a pagan, without fear of reprisals, for the wife 49

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could bring no civil action, although she might retaliate by beating him ‘if she dare’ (The Womans Lawier, 129). However, such daring was uncommon; with the danger of rape facing women ‘above twelve yeares of age and under an hundred, being either faire or rich,’ ‘warning to take heed’ (377) was more habitual. The Womans Lawier was merely cataloguing the commonplaces of women’s reification. Consider Robert Wilkinson’s sermon, The Merchant Royall, preached at the nuptials of Lord and Lady Hay in 1607. Although it divagates on the biblical simile of woman as a ship (Proverbs 31:14), the sermon also endorses the image of ‘a good woman’ as ‘a snaile, not onely for her silence and continuall keeping of her house, but also for a certaine comendable timorousnes of her nature, which at the least shaking of the aire shrinks back into her shell’ (23). The wife is the focus of much gazing and so-called praising, but she is ultimately the product of breeding and the possession of her husband. In Wilkinson’s version, ‘every man shall say, Blessed be he that made her, happie is he that begat her, renowned is shee that bare her, but most happie, renowned, and rich is he that hath her’ (32). Women’s subordinate status, her embrace of what Francis Dillingham’s Christian Oeconomy (1609) called ‘politique subiection’ (4), was the cornerstone of marriage theory. Gervase Markham’s indexing of her talents in The English Housewife (1615), as pharmacist, herbalist, gardener, cook, distiller, vintner, maltster, dyer, and dairy superintendent, among others, never recognizes or, in fact, ventures to consider this economic paragon and partner as the husband’s equal. Addressing ‘the wives peculiar duties’ in only one of fifteen chapters of A Bride-Bush; or, A Direction for Married Persons Plainely Describing the Duties Common to Both and Peculiar to Each of Them (1619), William Whately minces no words: a wife ‘must acknowledge her inferioritie’ and ‘carry herself as an inferior’ (189). The husband is ‘the Prince of the household, the domesticall King,’ whom the wife accounts as ‘her governour and better’ (204). Denunciations of wives whose forcefulness, conduct, and demeanour disregarded such dictates are full of withering scorn, forcefully conveyed in the aesthetic-moral condemnation of anti-cosmetic treatises. Privileging nature and an assumed social order and reviling art as allied to artifice, such works as Roger Edgeworth’s sermon preached during Henry’s reign (and published later) on the ‘adulteration’ of painting, Pleasant Quippes for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen (1595), Richard Haydocke’s translation of Giovanni Lomazzo as A Discourse of the Artificiall Beauty of Women (1598), and Thomas Tuke’s A Treatise against Painting and Tincturing (1616) fasten on the threat that the painting woman poses to others. Edgeworth’s sermon warns against the arrogance of both man or woman in using cosmetics to alter divine creation. The misogynous emphasis of the anti-cosmetic literature is simply over50

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whelming.74 Tuke’s Treatise against Painting and Tincturing points a finger at the painted and therefore negligent woman as the source of murder and poisoning, pride and ambition, adultery and witchcraft. Her brazenness is the quality that unleashes this alliterative attack: ‘Teares and mourning would marre her making: and she spends more time in powdring, pranking and painting, then in praying. Shee’s more in her oyntments a great deale, then in her orizons. Her religion is not to live wel, but to die well’ (58). Richard Brathwait’s Ar’t Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture (1640) is a loose gallimaufry of jests and tales belittling women, especially talkative, assertive ones and those who ornament themselves. Although he styles himself ‘Philogenes Panedonius’ (the all-pleasing lover of women), and allows that ‘poore Girles’ might paint to cover blemishes or ‘if the husband commanded it,’ Brathwait thunders: ‘If she would suffer her face to be washt, thou wouldst know her no more, she would be so hideous unto thee; rivels and ridges would eachwhere encounter thee: And were it not for the confections she eates and the Perfumes she weares, her mouth and feet would quickly make thee stop thy nose; if thou shouldst kisse her, all thy lips would be stuck with oyle and grease; embrace her, and she is not but past-boord, canvas, & whale-bone, with which all the body of her gowne (the better body of the too) is stuft, to repaire the faults of her proportion; and when she goes to bed, she leaves upon the table (at her beds-feet) halfe of her person in putting of her Cloths’ (314). A comforting counterpoint to the image of the painted woman was the cheerful, unflagging workhorse. Master Fitzherbert’s The Book of Husbandry (1534) actually drew the parallels between women and horses, in ten shared properties; like women, horses should be well-paced, with broad forehead and buttocks, ‘harde of warde,’ ‘easye to lepe uppon,’ ‘well sturrynge under a man,’ ‘always besye with the mouthe’ (65). Though allowing the wife ‘honest mirth,’ Thomas Becon, who presented himself as ‘Theodore Basille’ in The Golden Booke of Christen Matrimonye (1542), which was actually an expurgated version of Miles Coverdale’s translation of Heinrich Bullinger, observed that ‘all olde wyse and prudent men would have women & horses kepte in good nourtour and governaunce’ (64v). Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1580) doubtless understated the case in noting that ‘the good housewife drudges & refuses no pains’ (17). Entries in The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 for 1599 indicate the rigour with which she ‘examened [her] selfe with what Integretie [she] had spent the day’ (18 November). In addition to attending to prayers, writing letters to her family, and catechizing the servants, her unsparing examination of conscience includes frequent mentions of the recording of sermons, annotating of the Bible, and instructive readings in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and various herbals. She also finds time to inspect the granary (6 October), preserve sweetmeats (10 October), spend a day ‘busie in the kitchin’ (13 October), dye wool 51

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(30 October), make gingerbread all afternoon (18 December), talk with her tenants (30 December), and keep ‘companie with neighbours’ (31 December). The evidence of the widowed Mrs Magdalen Herbert’s Kitchin Booke (1601), covering twenty-one weeks and itemizing explicit provisions and expenses for daily dinners and suppers for a large ‘household of twenty-six at every meal’ (including eight of her ten children), testifies to the excellent precision of her housekeeping. Magdalen Herbert’s Booke and Margaret Hoby’s Diary actually underscore what, in another context, Lisa Heldke identifies as the ‘“mentally manual” activity, [the] theoretical practical activity’ of foodmaking; these so-called non-literary accounts also draw attention to the creative power of the female cook and housekeeper who, when addressing recipes, as ‘reader / cook / bricoleur can follow the exact measurements and directions to reproduce an invariant, unchanging product, or working within dimensions of previously learned structures, produce something new.’75 Throughout the marital ferment of the early modern period there were unhappy, tension-filled mismatches as well as unions with uncomplaining workhorses or creative managers and marriages of true minds. Robert Copland’s The seven sorrowes that women have when theyr husbandes be deade (1568) indicates that the sorrows could be quite attractive; the widow, who, like the unmarried woman, could inherit property, hold land, establish a contract, and write a will, frankly enjoys her liberty: I commaunde other but none commandeth me And eke I stande at myne owne liberte. (Ciiiv)

The tragedies whose action turns on the discontent of a wife – John Pikeryng’s Horestes (ca. 1567), Arden of Faversham (1592), Marlowe’s Edward II (1593), Dekker’s The Honest Whore (1604–5), Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), Webster’s The White Devil (1612), Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Double Marriage (1620), and Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust (1622) being among the best-known nonShakespearean dramas of this type – identify marriage as a recognized ‘site of cultural instability.’76 The 1351 Statute of Treasons (25 Edward III, st. v. c. 2) remained in force in early modern England; outlining the ‘petty treason’ when a wife ‘slayeth’ her husband, the law ‘carried to its ultimate conclusion the plight of the feme covert who, for husband-murder, would be subject to harsher punishment than for mere felony murder, while the reverse was not true for a man who had murdered his wife.’77 In her dramatized crime, Alice Arden negotiates with the murderers of her husband and baulks at the control of sexuality by marriage. As Alice argues,

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Women in Early Modern England ... nothing could enforce me to the deed But Mosby’s love. Might I without control Enjoy thee still, then Arden should not die; But, seeing I cannot, therefore let him die. (I. 273–6)

There are resonances with actual case histories, too. The recorded notorious deeds of socially marginalized seventeenth-century wives brought to trial for murder or botched attempts situate the domestic tragedy of Alice Arden in a larger context and a commercially successful marketplace – one appealing to both elite and plebeian readers. Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, Lately Committed (1591) relates the strangling of Page of Plymouth by his wife and her lover, who reposition the corpse in bed. A True Relation of the Most Inhumane and Bloody Murther, of Master James ... Committed by One Lowe His Curate, and Consented unto by His Wife (1609) tells of the seduction of a minister’s wife, who looks on while her inamorato smothers her husband in bed. The matter of fidelity often gets filtered through the characterization of women’s credulity. Margaret Ferneseed was tried, convicted, and burned in February 1608 for having arranged the murder of her husband, ‘found deade in Peckham field neere Lambeth.’ The Araignement and Burning of Margaret Ferne-seede (1608) concludes with her ‘confession and repentance,’ in which she admits keeping ten women in a bawdy house and discloses the ways she convinced these wives to participate. She would ‘tempt to their fall, some, by perswading them that they were not beloved of their husbands, especially if [she] could at any time have note of any breach or discontent betweene them: others, that their husbands maintained them not sufficiently to express their beauty’ (B3). Contemporary feminist reading of early modern accounts of women as perpetrators of domestic crime draws attention to what Frances Dolan labels ‘the possibilities, however contingent and circumscribed, for human agency in historical process’ and to what Susan Staub perceives as ‘a new consciousness of women as individuals.’78 Unlike such convicted poisoners as Anne Welles, who serves a deadly dessert (in The Trueth of the Most Wicked and Secret Murthering of John Brewen Committed by His Own Wife [1592]), and Anne Hamton, whose poison causes her husband to burst (in Murther, Murther. Or, A Bloody Relation how Anne Hamton by Poyson Murthered Her Deare Husband [1641]), some poignant narratives betray the reporter’s sympathy with the abused or neglected wife. Gilbert Dugdale’s A true Discourse of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell (1604) is an account of an arranged marriage between a genteel young woman in Chester and a callow husband, who squanders her annuity and neglects her. She falls in love with a rich neighbour and, with the help of a mercenary widow, they plan the poisoning of Thomas Caldwell. When the scheme backfires, she proves a model and, it is discovered, pregnant

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prisoner, all the more pathetic because her execution, on 18 June 1603, is delayed until she carries the child to term. Elizabeth Caldwell’s nine-page ‘Letter to her Husband, during the time of her imprisonment’ entwines penitence around a shrewd admonition of his profligacy. The condemned wife is also the compelling teacher who has the advantage of irrefutable honesty, as she writes: ‘O husband, be not deceived with the world, & thinke that it is in your power to repent when you will, or that to say a few prayers from the mouth outward a little before death, or to cry God mercie for fashion sake, is true repentance ... Call to remembrance the dissoluteness of your life, I speake it not to lay anything to your charge, for I doe love you more deerely then I doe my selfe, but remember in what case you have lived, howe poore you have many times left me, how long you have beene absent from mee, all which advantage the devill tooke to subvert mee’ (B4v-C2). In narrating The Adultresses Funeral Day: in flaming, scorching, and consuming fire; or, The burning downe to ashes of Alice Clarke late of Vxbridge in the county of Middlesex, in Westsmith-field, on Wensday the 20, of May, 1635 for the unnaturall poisoning of Fortune Clarke her husband (1635), Newgate chaplain Henry Goodcole shows an understanding of Alice Clarke as a victim: raped and left pregnant by her employer, abused in an arranged and loveless marriage, and systematically betrayed by men. Margaret Vincent of Acton is a more histrionic teacher; she strangles her two infants because she has not been able to convert her husband to papistry. The unknown author of A Pitilesse Mother (1616) fashions the tract as much to expose ‘the subtle sophistry of some close Papists’ who set his wife’s ‘discontent at liberty’ (A2v) as to condemn in lurid detail the Newgate prisoner, a ‘Tygerous Mother’ and ‘bloudy Medea’ (A3r-v), who ‘earnestly repented the deed’ before her execution. Unlike sensationalized or tendentious pamphlets, manuscript letters between husband and wife appear to provide a more direct and candid view of the early modern sexual politics of marriage. The few surviving examples of the correspondence between Sir Francis Willoughby and his wife Lady Elizabeth Willoughby (d. 1594) reveal, albeit in coded formulae, the tensions of their marriage and especially of their ten-year separation. Incurring debts in London, Lady Elizabeth expresses the wish that her letter, sent to her husband at Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire, will be ‘a happy entrance, I hope, to a full & perfett reconciliation betwixt us’ and ‘that if it please yow to receyve me agayne into yor owne howse.’79 The letter itself documents a struggle between her fears about liberty of movement and a desire to negotiate both wifely duties and husbandly kindness. Howbeit if ther were no suche reasonable cause of my staye at London (as in truthe there is) yet there is no suche cause why I should make any greate haste to come to yow, if eithr it were true in dede, or els that I did but beleve yt were

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Women in Early Modern England true (wch my aforsayd good freind told me in great secrete), wch was that I should take hede & beware how I come to yow againe, for yow had determuned & vowed that if ever yow took me agayne, yow would kepe me shorter than ere I was kept, that yow lock and pynn me up in a chamber, & that I should not go so muche as into the garden to take the ayre, wthout yor leave & lycense ... But truly Sr F, as I can not be persuaded that yow have any suche manner of meani[n]ge, so neither meane I to give yow any suche cause, but rather study to conforme all my wordes as I may best become a loving & obedient wife towardes her husband. So on the other side my assured hope and truste is that yow, having buryed & blotted out of your remembrance all former unkyndnesses contryved against me, will both repute of me as of yor honest & lawfull wife, & requite me wth (all) like love & offices of a good & kynd husband. (BL Lansdowne 46, no. 31, fol. 61v)

Sir Francis’s response shows a similar tentativeness in the reconciliation, with a need to chastize his wife about her heeding secret friendly advice and to justify his supposed harshness as genuine leniency. The argument follows the pattern of the harried parent who tells his obstinate child that the punishment hurts him more than it does her: ‘I never did it but wth greif & endevored rather by persuasion then correction both by my selfe & others to recleyme yow’ (BL Lansdowne 46, no. 32, fol. 63). These able jousters were married for twenty-nine years (1565–94). Lady Elizabeth bore twelve children in the space of sixteen years, with six daughters living to adulthood; Sir Francis signed his only extant letter to his wife ‘Yors as yow knowe.’ General conclusions about marriage practices among the upper gentry cannot be extrapolated from the Willoughby letters. While the Willoughbys are a particular example of unresolved tension, the correspondence between Sir Ralph Verney and Lady Mary Verney in 1646–8 conveys the sense of intimately agreeable teamwork and an unwilling but strategic separation. In this period Lady Mary, during a pregnancy, pleads her husband’s case before the Committees for Compounding, attempting to settle his estates while he is in France to avoid imprisonment for debt. Although Miriam Slater concentrates on these letters to illustrate the consolidation of the patrimony as the gentry’s ‘primary responsibility,’ Sara Mendelson draws attention, by contrast, to the ‘volatile mixture of conflict and compromise at every stage’ of the courtship and marriage process.80 The site of aristocratic salons, godly partnerships, and unions of likeminded managers, the household, in which these stratagems, battles, and tendernesses were performed, was also the place where a small minority of wives, daughters, and widows wrote. Rarely did they have a closet of their own. Without offices, library study carrels, or rented studios outside the home, early modern women writers produced their work inside households, where 55

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the experiences of courtships, births, and deaths coloured their temperaments and expectations. Childbearing I write not to the world, but to mine owne childe, who it may be, will more profit by a few weake instructions comming from a dead mother (who cannot every day praise or reprove it as it deserves) than by farr better from much more learned. These things considered, neither the true knowledge of mine owne weaknesse, nor the feare this may come to the worlds eie, and bring scorne upon my grave, can stay my hand from expressing how much I covet thy salvation. Elizabeth Joscelin, The Mothers Legacie to her Vnborne Childe (1624)

Whether entered for love or money or some combination, marriage usually meant maternity for women. The childless marriages of Mary Tudor, the thrice-married Lady Margaret Hoby, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and the devotional poet ‘Eliza,’ author of Eliza’s Babes (1652), who images literary work as her children, caution against assuming automatic linkages between being a wife and being a mother. But in most cases the link existed. ‘Without childbirth there could be no patriarchy,’ David Cressy observes, ‘without human procreation no social reproduction. The women’s work of child-bearing made mouths to feed and hands to work, new subjects, citizens, and Christians.’81 Christopher Hooke’s The Child-Birth or Women’s Lecture (1590) praises the ‘strong’ and ‘blessed’ man with his ‘quiver full of [children],’ noting that ‘sonnes are more pleasing than pleasant plants, and daughters are more lovely and glorious in parents eyes, than are the polished corners of a temple’ (B4). Although Hooke pities those who consider generation ‘an ordinarie thing, proceeding onely from the mutuall coniunction of man and woman’ (D1), his scriptural language – more concerned with godliness than gynaecology – glosses over the real hazards of pregnancy and delivery. Studies of early modern parish registers and rates of maternal mortality (that is, death within forty-two days of childbirth) reveal figures of twenty-six to twenty-nine per thousand baptisms. These statistics require additional adjustment to allow for unrecorded abortions and ectopic gestations, for ‘careless’ clergy and ‘barely literate’ parish clerks, for the increased vulnerability of pregnant women to smallpox, and for the sometimes longer periods from birth for the effects of puerperal sepsis and chronic suppuration. Twin births were especially risky for malpresentations and post-partum haemorrhage.82 Women’s prayers for a safe delivery and grieving husbands’ laments are both common occurrences, with recorded instances providing only a glimpse 56

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of the larger realities that attach real people and emotions to Lawrence Stone’s somewhat clinical designation of the Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family. The Honour of Virtue (1620) consists of poems and epitaphs in English and Latin commemorating Elizabeth Crashawe, who died at the age of twentyfour giving birth to her first child, a son. She was the step-mother of the poet Richard, a child of eight at the time. A divine instituted to the living of St Mary Matfellon,Whitechapel,William Crashawe, who was also twice Elizabeth’s age, signs himself ‘Unworthy Husband of such a wife’ (A3). R. Boothe’s memorial rehearses the mystery of this young woman’s choice of spouse: Young, faire, wise, comely, yet refus’d, Both youth, and braveries golden Rayes: And dubble her owne age she chus’d With a Divine to spend her dayes. (B3)

Crashawe’s expression of grief, though formulaic and liturgically precise (alluding to the baptism of the surviving infant), is also affecting. Postmodern readers may wonder if seventeenth-century husbands’ stylized bereavement could be a code to disguise frustrations at interruptions and inconveniences. Consider the husbandly grief and fear of Sir Thomas Widdrington and Ralph Josselin. Widdrington, Speaker of the House of Commons and MP for Berwick, married Frances Fairfax in 1634; after a number of successful deliveries, alluded to in the physiological and spiritual advice of the correspondence with her younger sister Mary, Frances Widdrington died in childbirth in May 1649. Widdrington’s letter to Mary Fairfax Arthington is an attempt to come to terms with his ‘sudden unexpected loss’ by continuing to remind himself and his sister-in-law of the larger eschatological reality: ‘... I hope you & I shall both be comforted in this that she is now in eternall ioyes which can not be taken from her, you have lost a loving sister, my selfe a holy kinde & gracious wife & my poore children a tender & carefull mother, I beseech God inable us to looke upon her gaines not our loss, tt is to her life and death an advantage, The child she was with all died a little before the birth of it & the gracious mother died as soone as it was borne, having onely spoken these (which were her last words) am I delivered, or, is the childe borne, happy woman she is delivered from the miseries of this world & is now with Christ her redeemer’ (MS. Bodl. Add. A 119, fols. 29r-v). Ralph Josselin’s wife, Jane, survived ten pregnancies to term and five miscarriages and saw five of her children buried. But the Puritan vicar of Earls Colne, Essex – clergyman, parent, villager, student of Hebrew, and chaplain of the Parliamentary Army – was never complacent about the health of his family. The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1613–168383 testifies to the imbrication of medicine, politics, and religion in seventeenth-century life. While reporting 57

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on a range of ailments – from worms, boils, toothaches, and gum sores to suppurations, distemper, and catarrh – and cataloguing such mishaps as children falling from parlour windows and being kicked by horses, Josselin also charts his anxieties about each of Jane’s pregnancies. On 20 March 1647, he starts the account of one gestation: ‘My wife concluded shee was with child now gon 7 weekes with a boy. shee useth not to be mistaken, lord give her strength, and cheerfulnes, and a heart to trust in thee at all times, and give mee more then ordinary tendernes of spirit over her’ (89). He records her state as ‘indifferently well, yett weakely and fearefull of ilnes’ (13 June), ‘somewhat faint’ (20 June) and ‘ill of this child’ (5 September). Josselin enunciates fear for his wife’s safety in a context of national gloom and risk. ‘The Lord in mercy preserve my dearer then Rachel, the season was very faire and wholesome, the plague abated in London and Chester blessed bee god, the kingdome in a strange unsetled frame’ (17 October). Though still tinged with dread, the birth itself is related as a straightforward, problem-free event: ‘on Friday morning, one houre and halfe before day my wife was delivered of her second sonne, the midwife not with her, onely foure women and Mrs. Mary: her speed was great, and I thinke the easiest and speediest labour that ever shee has, and shee was under great feares, oh how is the lord to be noted and observed in this mercy’ (111). Women’s anxieties about childbirth were scarcely exaggerated, however. It is difficult to think of obstetrical accounts more chilling than the 150 case histories in Percivall Willoughby’s Observations in Midwifery. As also the Countrey Midwife’s Opusculum or Vade Mecum, Shewing the Wayes How to Deliver Any Difficult Birth Bee It Naturall or Unnaturall, written, as he explains, ‘experimentally, de facto, as it was performed by mee in the travailing woman’s chamber.’84 Grandson of the tempestuous Sir Francis and Lady Elizabeth Willoughby of Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire, Willoughby (1596–1685) proceeded through Rugby, Eton, and Oxford, served an apprenticeship with a barber surgeon and, from the 1620s, practised as a midwife in Derby, Stafford, and London for over five decades. His daughter, who set up her own practice in Staffordshire and London, and later his son, assisted Willoughby from the 1650s. Though remaining in manuscript throughout the seventeenth century and only published in 1863, Willoughby’s careful record of difficult births is studded with Latin terms, biblical allusions, and references to William Harvey’s De generatione animalium (1651) and translations of the De generatione hominis of Ambroise Paré (1510–1590) – often in disagreement based on his own detailed experience – and, more approvingly, to William Sermon’s The Ladies Companion or the English Midwife (1671) and Jane Sharp’s The Midwifes Booke or the Whole Art of Midwifery discovered (1671). Critical of ‘ignorant, robustious midwives’ (157) who bullied, hurried, or over-manipulated exhausted women in labour, Willoughby did not prescribe a single birthing position or proce58

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dure. In the many recorded cases of podalic (feet-first) versions and breech presentations, Willoughby did not support forceful attempts to turn the child, favouring instead artful and slow exploration of the womb by buttermoistened hands. Despite the art, most of these deliveries involved dead children and often dying mothers. The most grisly accounts concern the removal of the dead child with a crochet, a hooked needle, especially gruesome when the child’s body, having already been partially dismembered, is starting to decompose. Advising midwives to ‘observe the wayes and proceedings of nature for the production of their fruits in trees,’ he cautions about the appropriate ripening: ‘The womb is a place locked up. Let midwives so deale with their travailing women, so will the birth be more easy, and the child not pulled to pieces, or destroyed, nor the woman torn, or ruinated by the midwife’s struglings, or stretching of their bodies. In fitting time nature will open the womb’ (276). Obstetrical experiences recorded by early modern women themselves, though not extensive, convey an understanding of ripeness and readiness based on more than gynaecological indicators. The uncertainties of pregnancies prompt Elizabeth Grymeston (d. 1603) and Elizabeth Joscelin (1596– 1622) to compose manuals of spiritual advice for their unborn children, in the hope that the maternal voice may, if necessary, be heard from the grave. The fears of both women were prophetic: Grymeston’s Miscelanae, Meditations, Memoratives (1604) and Joscelin’s The Mothers Legacie (1624) were posthumous publications arranged by grieving husbands. The prayers of Lady Frances Abergavenny (d. 1576) ‘to be said of everie Christian and faithfull woman, in the time of hir travell or child-birth’ and ‘to be said of everie faithfull woman in child-bed, after the time of hir deliverance’85 construe the ripeness of a safe delivery as the work of divine justice. For Lady Abergavenny, the pains of labour are the ‘promised punishment ... for the gilt and transgression of my progenitors ... iustlie pronounced against me’ (III: 106). Early modern women showed a prismatic understanding of the ordained ‘sorrow’ (Genesis 3:16) in bringing forth children. Mrs Alice Thornton (1626–1707) of East Newton,Yorkshire, declared in her Autobiography that she ‘had the principles of grace and religion instilled into [her] with [her] milke’ (2). However, her narrative chronicling nine births and the subsequent deaths of six of these children does not concentrate on her labours as corrections for sin but describes them as grim, intensely physiological realities. Her labours, about which she spares no obstetric detail, were protracted and frightful. The birth of her first child, ‘a goodly daughter, who lived not soe long as that we could gett a minister to baptize it,’ begins a nine-month sickness, during which Thornton loses her hair and nails and suffers ‘a most tirrible shakeing ague’ (87). Her first son’s birth, in December 1657, climaxes a three-day labour and podalic delivery; being speechless and breathless in the final stages, 59

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Thornton recounts, ‘I was upon the racke in bearing my childe with such exquisitt torment, as if each lime weare divided from other, for the space of two houers’ (95). The ‘allmost strangled’ child lives only a half an hour. Bleeding ‘hemorides’ cause the aenemic Thornton to faint daily and lose ‘about four or five ounces of blood’ (97). The death of her last child in 1667 leaves her suffering with cracked and gangrenous nipples, fever, toothache, and headache. Women were usually the first line of assistance to other women. The role of the female midwife in the lying-in room was pivotal. Since the act to regulate physicians and surgeons in 1512 and the establishment of the College of Physicians in 1518, midwives, along with surgeons, schoolmasters, curates, and clerks, were licensed by the bishops, who looked for maturity and good character. Usually having borne children themselves, midwives took ‘a solemn oath swearing to obey the rules of conduct which the Church laid down for their practice.’86 Licensed English midwives had to swear that they would use no sorcery or witchcraft and that they would baptize a dying infant. The relationship between female midwives who, in the words of The Midwives Just Petition (1642), knew ‘the cases of women better than any other’ (A2) and the physicians and surgeons was uneasy. The physicians, who were rarely involved in actual deliveries, continued to issue manuals of directives and improvements to midwives, who delivered most of the babies. Beatrice Gottlieb notes the doctors’ increasingly strident tone ‘as they came to identify themselves with new scientific learning and the midwives with benighted ignorance and superstition.’87 When Elizabeth Celeor (or Cellier) argued for a College of Midwives, in 1688, she reflected debates over midwives’ self-governing incorporation throughout the seventeenth century. In the period between 1642 and 1662, she noted, a panel of ‘six skilful midwives and as many Chirurgeons expert in the Art of Midwifery’ examined female candidates. The practice since then involved a return to paying money and taking an oath ‘which is impossible for them to keep.’ Cellier lets the statistics make the case for women’s regulation and licensing of midwives: ‘I make no Reflections on those learned Gentlemen the Licensers, but refer the curious for their further satisfaction, to the Yearly Bills of Mortality, from 42 to 62: Collections of which they may find at Clerks-Hall: Which if they please to compare with these of late Years, they will find there did not then happen the eight part of the Casualties, either to Women or Children, as do now’ (6). The appearance of the surgeon or male midwife in the lying-in room normally meant serious, if not fatal, complications for the woman and infant: a Caesarian section, podalic presentation, or the extraction of a dead infant from the womb. The short midwifery forceps, whose two blades could cup the foetal head without the use of dangerous force, was developed by or attributed to the Chamberlen family, French Protestant émigrés who flour60

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ished as celebrated royal accoucheurs and frequently notorious members of the Barber Surgeons’ Company in the seventeenth century. The Chamberlen forceps were not made available in general practice until a century later. Moreover, as the forceps-brandishing Dr Slop in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy illustrates, the new devices did not always mean a problem-free delivery. The information circulated in predominantly male-authored texts on childbirth, conception, and menstruation scarcely concealed misogynous attitudes. The received ideas about menstruation in the translation of a sixteenthcentury poem, Callipaedia; or, The Art of Getting Beautiful Children, depicted ‘malignant Female Filth.’88 The physician to James I, Helkiah Crooke, reiterated in his Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (1615) the Hippocratic belief ‘that milke is German Cousen to the menstruous blood’ (158). Menstrual blood, as Crooke explained, turned to milk in the womb to nourish the foetus and later the child at the breast. Superstitious folklore enjoyed considerable currency. What is most apparent in ‘the almost exclusively male-written reproductive discourses,’ as Gail Kern Paster has demonstrated, is ‘that misogyny is legible as discomfort with the fluids and processes of female physiology and ... with the technical events of birth.’89 Although the discovery of the ova and spermatozoa did not occur until the end of the seventeenth century, theories of conception and infertility nonetheless abounded. As early as 1540, with the first of two translations of Eucharius Rösslin’s Der swangern Frauern und Hebammen Roszgarten (1513) by Richard Jonas (the second translation by Thomas Raynalde, The Byrth of Mankynde, went through thirteen editions from 1545 to 1654), a chapter was devoted to ‘howe to know whether lacke of conception be of the woman or of the man’ through the ‘farfet experiment’ (fol. 141) of observing the effects of male and female urine in germinating separate containers of wheat, barley, and bean seeds. Theories of the humours, sympathetic magic, and superstition intersected in advice about safe delivery, which was heeded in elite and plebeian circles alike. Anne Boleyn wore an eaglestone on her wrist to ensure the delivery of a healthy child. Advice about promoting pregnancy included the suggestion in Markham’s The English House-wife (1631) that the woman drink mugwort steeped in wine (40). Nicholas Culpeper’s proposals in the third enlarged edition of The Compleat Midwife’s Practice (1663) advised the pregnant woman to wear a magnet as an amulet, carry the heart of a female quail, or have resin spread on leather applied to the womb (section 2, chapters 15–16). As daughters, wives, mothers, and physiologically distinct sexual partners, early modern women often bore the brunt of censure for their differences. Commodified in every social stratum, they could not be oblivious to the 61

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controls and misogynous dictates impinging on all aspects of their private and public life. Educated for dependence, praised for tractability, blamed for initiative, women in early modern England were, however, much more than culturally conditioned ciphers. They did react – with vehemence, wit, subtlety, creative intelligence, poised self-awareness, and shrewd determination. The strongest corroboration of this claim lies in their writing, which the next chapter will examine in detail. Early modern women’s work as translators, poets, playwrights, romance writers, diarists, and letter writers and their public-sphere activities as martyrs, petitioners, judges, visionaries, prophets, and hermeneuts are intimate responses to the realities of their lives. Reflecting on and refashioning discourses of sexuality, state organization, and ecclesiastical authority, their writing shows how they carved out roles for themselves as commentators on the domestic and political realities that encircled them.

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CHAPTER 3

The Genres of Early Modern Women’s Writing

The following overview is arranged first by genre, and then chronologically within each genre. The genre divisions allow not only for some crossreferencing but also for close concentration on individual genres; the chronological approach is intended to alert readers to the network of influences in which early modern women lived and wrote. I am not, however, proposing a grand teleological design or a meliorist march to seventeenth-century expressivity or liberation. On the contrary, close examination of specific genres reveals intricately braided relationships of texts, families, and cultural conventions. The decision to structure this overview as one large unit with many generic subheadings was also deliberate. The overview allows individual genres to illustrate the complicating twists and ironies of early modern women’s selfhood and the cultural understanding of gendered subjectivity. The examination of women’s writing over approximately a century and a half conveys, I trust, a real sense of the amplitude, variety, and shifts of this literature. Such fullness can help us apprehend the continuing appeal of the multifarious genre of translation or the ways in which the writing of prayers relates intertextually to other forms of composition. Moreover, in consciously avoiding the taxonomy of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ to describe these genres I strive to accord them the respect they deserve. As vehicles of human expressivity, they should not be disfigured to fit a pre-existing or canonical grid. Giving the genres space to unfold and interrelate means that we can follow the traces of received or prevailing wisdom as well as evidence of contestatory or transgressive observations within a single genre. In this large enterprise we can appreciate the strategy of writers of polemics and petitions who borrow from the conventions of exegesis and prophecy. In addition to showcasing lesser-known figures (Jane Lumley, Elizabeth Tyrwhit, Anne Wheathill, Esther Inglis, Elizabeth Jane Weston, and Mary Cary, 63

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to name a few), the wholistic approach reveals the frequency with which the genres commingled. Translators could also be writers of letters and prayers; diarists could be assembling evidence to claim a rightful inheritance; poets could be interpreting religious persecution, figuring erotic betrayal, and recasting the Passion narrative; and polemicists could be offering cogent platforms for social reform. Despite the gulfs of class that separate them, early modern women writers and the genres in which they worked offer a stunning, shared array of devices for marking the penetrative links between private and public domains, household realities and statecraft, the quotidian and the eschatological. Translation Translation was a major genre for early modern women writers. Often providing their entry into the medium of manuscript or print circulation, it supplied an ostensible safety: presenting, representing, or interpreting in one’s own language someone else’s text. Such security also had consequences for the function and role of the translator and her immediate empirical focus. This sense of safety continues to affect our response to early modern translation, especially that undertaken by women. Part of the complex interaction linking the original and the translation to the observer, the postmodern reader becomes acutely aware of the range of questions and values nesting in the activity of translation understood as an inquiry into language in its grammatical, semantic, phonological complexity. For translation directs attention to the sites of interpretation, the contexts of understanding, the relation of the representation to its referent, and the possibility of originality. To the postmodern reader, already beset with concerns about the uncertainty of meaning and the self-destruction of the notion of authorial intention, early modern women’s translations foreground the issues of distance from the sources and the possibility of communication taking place across barriers. Embedded in a cultural moment, translations cannot really be replicated: they cannot be living at their hour and at our own moment of discovery. However, we must take the time to attempt to reconstruct the moment of vitality for early modern Englishwomen and the value in their work as translators. Looked at in one light, the act of translation as a circumvention of patriarchal prohibitions and cultural barriers could actually be seen to contribute to the obliteration of women from the literary landscape. The argument runs like this: translation did not count; the words were another’s; women dabbled in the enterprise and hence its feminization made it less important. This view of the activity of ‘unassailably chaste and compliant’ women translators may have prompted John Florio to refer to his influential translation of Montaigne’s essays as ‘defective ... since all translations are 64

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reputed femalls’ and ‘delivered at second hand.’1 Biology to the contrary, the birthing of original work was, according to Florio, a male prerogative. In dedicating the Essayes (1603) to the Countess of Bedford and her mother, Florio indicated that it was appropriate for translations to be dedicated to women and for women to engage in translation, since ‘any competence they displayed could be dismissed by denigrating the task of translation itself.’ Moreover, the very fluency in English-language translation, which was ‘a feature of aristocratic literary culture’ in the early modern period, may be interpreted as ‘a thoroughgoing domestication that masks the manifold conditions of the translated text.’2 In another light, through contributing to ‘the arc of communication which every successful speech-act closes within a given language,’ early modern women who were active in interlingual translation were entering literary discourse, confronting cultural presuppositions and, as Micheline White observes, acquiring ‘the skills and experience necessary to become participants in public religious life.’3 Although assessments of the work of Sir Thomas Hoby, translator of Castiglione; Sir Thomas North, translator of Plutarch; Philemon Holland, translator of Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, and Xenophon; and George Chapman, translator of Homer, never include mention of their female contemporaries, the importance of early modern translation itself has not been underestimated. By using ‘language more fully alive than it had ever been’ and by ensuring that ‘their translations were originals,’ early modern translators have been credited with making ‘the modern English character.’4 Instead of ghettoizing female co-workers in this influential genre, it is important to assess their relatively obscure work – ranging from the filial to the transgressive, the impersonal to the deeply revealing – within the context of the widely retailed claims for early modern English translations’ agility with language and capacity for originality. That is, it is necessary to treat their work with what the Old Testament scholar Alastair Hunter calls a lexicographical sensitivity, which he explains as being ‘developed bit by bit, through what could be described as a process of continuous feedback involving both the individual translator, the corpus of the language under scrutiny, the larger tradition of translation, and the contemporary societies of those carrying out the work of translation.’5 Moreover, as Micheline White’s forceful argument underscores, ‘translators of both sexes saw themselves as powerful cultural agents engaged in the difficult and invaluable task of importing foreign works or making domestic Latin works available to English readers.’ Margaret Beaufort, Margaret Roper, Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Basset In the first half of the sixteenth century, four Englishwomen made their mark as translators. Patron of printing pioneers William Caxton and Wynkyn de 65

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Worde, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, translated the fourth book of Thomas à Kempis’s devotional manual, De Imitatione Christi (ca. 1441), from French to English in a compilation acknowledging her contribution, first published by Richard Pynson in 1503 and by Wynkyn de Worde in 1504.6 The Lady Margaret helped to popularize another devotional manual, the Speculum Aureum attributed to the monk Dionysius Carthusianus, translating it too from French to English; The Mirroure of Golde for the Synfull Soule, first published by Pynson in 1506 and with several posthumous printings by de Worde, recognized the role of the mother of Henry VII as translator.7 The eldest, exceptionally capable child of Sir Thomas More, Margaret Roper, was the first non-royal early modern woman translator. Although much of her work is lost, the primary text associated with her name is the translation of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica (1523) as A deuout treatise upon the Pater noster (1524); a prefatory letter by a tutor in the More household, Richard Hyrde, identified the anonymous ‘gentlewoman which translated this lytell boke.’ Hyrde drew attention to her erudition and elegance ‘in eyther tong,’ paying particular tribute to the ways her skill surpassed that of supposedly scholarly men.8 In 1545 the twelve-year-old Princess Elizabeth presented a New Year’s gift to her fourth stepmother, Queen Kateryn Parr, a manuscript in her own italic hand of her translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Le Mirroir de l’âme pécheresse (1531) as The Glass of the Sinful Soul;9 highlighting the princess’s questions about lineage and filiation, the text explored the vagaries of sin and mysteries of forgiveness. Unlike the range of sources in her great grandmother’s instructive manual, Elizabeth’s similarly titled book relied on the Bible as the main source of allusion and corroboration. Another kind of family connection links the work of Margaret Roper to that of the fourth translator, her daughter, Mary Basset, who translated into English the Latin treatise, De Tristitia Christi (1534–5), a meditation on the Passion composed by her grandfather Sir Thomas More in the Tower before his execution; Basset’s translation was included in More’s English Workes (1557), which the publisher William Rastell dedicated to Queen Mary.10 Before judging that the mark these women made was small or significant, we must first look at the linguistic features of their work as translators. Living through the conclusion of the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses which pitted her family’s Lancastrian loyalties against those of the Yorkists, and the consequences of the defeat of Richard III by her son, Henry Tudor, at Bosworth Field, Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509) had an intimate knowledge of violent disarray and political intrigue. Four times married – as a child of seven to the boy Duke of Suffolk (the marriage was dissolved), as an adolescent to Edmund Tudor (d. 1456) and Henry Stafford (d. 1471), and in her late twenties to Thomas Stanley – the Lady Margaret also knew the perils 66

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of aristocratic widowhood. She was thirteen years old and six months pregnant when her second husband died. Her son, the future king, was born healthy and endowed with his mother’s quiet, introspective strength. Though Parliament issued a special attainder against her as a traitor, because of her suspected involvement in the Duke of Buckingham’s abortive rebellion against his former ally, Richard of Gloucester, who had become Richard III, the Lady Margaret continued in the dual roles which had likely kindled Richard’s suspicions in the first place: a strategist of shrewd intelligence and an observer of rigorous devotions. She contrived to have her son married to Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, and at the age of forty-two, saw him crowned king. In her fifties, having agreed to live celibately with Thomas Stanley, Margaret Beaufort met and befriended the ascetic Bishop of Rochester, Dr John Fisher. Together with this adviser and confessor, who was half her age, she devoted her considerable energies to the defeat of Lollardry through subventing the education of theologians; this support took the form of rebuilding and refunding Christ’s College, Cambridge, endowing two readerships in Divinity at the University, founding St John’s College, and establishing chantries required to pray daily for the king and his family. The portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort hanging in St John’s College presents a nunlike figure in a black habit and white wimple kneeling with her beringed fingers clasped in prayer before a tapestry-draped prie-dieu, on which a text, presumably the Bible or devotions, lies open. The coats of arms of France and England are in the background, with the Lancastrian red rose positioned above and the Beaufort portcullis underneath. In commemoration as in life, sovereign intrigue and religious affiliation – along with the geopolitical traumas they instigate – are inextricably entwined in the history of this virtuous matriarch.11 The fourth book of The Imitation of Christ concerns the Eucharist. The appeal of such a subject was readymade for Lady Margaret, who observed monastic hours, heard four or five masses daily, confessed every third day, and meditated regularly. Moreover, the purposeful obscurity of Thomas à Kempis’s long life (1380–1471), over fifty years of which were spent as an Augustinian Canon in the monastery of Mount Saint Agnes at Windesheim near Zwolle, must have exerted the attraction of a contrast for the woman whose family’s fortunes were so publicly related to the fate of the English nation.12 Although Lady Margaret probably worked from the French translation published in Toulouse in 1488, her version is remarkable for the prominence of Latinate words. In her ‘Prologus’ the voice of Christ offers ‘refeccyon’ (259), derived from Christ’s promise, ‘et ego reficiam vos dicit Dominus.’13 The Eucharist is ‘the sacryfyce of the prefyguratyue lawe that was to come’ (261), a description that preserves the original terms of ‘legalia illa sacrificia futurorum praefigurativa’ (94). Her fervent exposition of the mystery of a salvific sacrifice does not 67

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exaggerate notions of vileness and corruption. As in the original, Beaufort sustains the contrast between sinning humanity – ‘peccator indignus terra et cinis’ (104) becoming ‘pore vnworthy synner whiche am but erthe & ashes’ (266) – and humanly present redemption – ‘quia tu praesens es hic in sacramento Deus et homo’ (104) appearing in the confirmation ‘that thou arte here presente in this holy sacrament, very god and man’ (266). When she does amplify the Latin, Beaufort’s additions serve to underscore the sacramental benefits for doubtful, fearful sinners. Her speaker enjoins readers to eradicate more than ‘gravem torporem’ (118) in the directive, ‘as soone as thou mayst, take away this feblenesse of mynde and the spyce of sloweth’ (273). In general Beaufort’s renderings are clear and accurate, with memorable touches of poetic diction. Her statement of the penitent’s petition, derived from ‘refice esurietem mendicum tuum; accende frigiditatem meam igne amoris tui’ (132), employs distinctive metaphors for heat: ‘geue thy pore begger, that dyeth for hunger / some of thy heuenly refeccion, & chafe my colde herte with the brennynge flame of thy loue’ (280). In my reading Beaufort softens the emphasis of only two Latin terms: rendering ‘manducaris’ (99) from the verb to chew or masticate as ‘receive,’ in keeping with her belief in the reception of the body of Christ, in the phrase ‘thou arte hole receyued without consumynge of hym that so receyeth the’ (263) and presenting ‘gazophylacio’ (122), a grand and obscure term for a repository of precious articles,14 as ‘the tresourye’ (275) contained in the two tables of the altar and the Gospels. Mediated no doubt by her close association with Bishop John Fisher, the Lady Margaret’s translation sets high standards for readers lay and clerical. When addressing ‘the dygnite of the sacrement of the Aulter & of thordre of presthod,’ in the fifth of eighteen chapters, her insistence on the bonds of discipline and the greater perfection of holiness is forceful, as the example of her brilliant young confessor would confirm. In fact, the elevation of the Mass and the priest’s role in this sacrifice of the Cross indicates the strength of Margaret Beaufort’s pre-Dissolution faith.15 The opening page of Beaufort’s translation of the Carthusian manual The Mirroure of Golde for the sinfull soule explains not only that the Latin text was translated to French but that it was ‘seen and corrected at length of many clarkes, Doctours & maisters in diuinite’ (Aii). In moving from French to English, the Lady Margaret shows a remarkable ease in duplicating the tissue of quotations from biblical and patristic sources. The Mirroure displays a medieval heritage, in its digest of authorities and organizational grid around reflections for seven days of the week, but also creates a debatelike blend of the condemnatory and the celebratory, the fallible and the mystical. Here is a Janus text, looking back to a tradition of interpretive precedent yet acknowledging that spiritual health mystifies grammatical, rhetorical, and medicinal norms. 68

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Beaufort’s translation folds in the theme of preparation for death as a physical and spiritual reality. The description of the onset of rigor mortis – possibly influenced by her attendance at several deathbeds – is precise and detailed: ‘At that houre and that sorowfull contemplacyon the Iyen begynne to meruayle and for feare tourne in the hede. The breste begynneth to tremble and to beate. The throte is horse and the brethe shorte. The tethe become blacke. The lyppys & the mouthe dedly and pale and all the membres be shronke to gyther and the vaynes of the herte breketh for sorow. (Giiir ). The Mirroure’s treatment of heaven does not neglect ideas of corruption and penance; in fact, its view of the mystery of paradise is predicated on the distance between known and unknown realities. The rooting of all claims in biblical texts, which reflect the traditions of the available Vulgate, affirms the origins of Margaret Beaufort’s translation in pre-Dissolution England. Her allusion to the ‘Paralipomynone’ (Dii) underscores the Vulgate (later to become Rheims-Douay) tradition; clearly it is a term of familiarity for the Lady Margaret, however récherché it may seem today. In these translations the Book of Chronicles is referred to as Parlipomenon (‘things omitted’), meaning that the facts recorded in Chronicles were left out of the preceding two books of Kings. Moreover, the text cited (I Chronicles 29:14) encapsulates the sense of creaturely obeisance characteristic of the translator herself: ‘So my god and my lorde alle thinge be thyne and we haue noon othere thynges to geue the but oonly that that we haue receyuede and take of thy hande’ (Dii). Two types of graphic representation can introduce Margaret Roper (1505– 1544): the portraits by Hans Holbein of the Family of Sir Thomas More and of Margaret More Roper and the woodcut on the title page of the earliest surviving edition of A deuout treatise upon the Pater noster in 1525.16 In the family portrait, Margaret Roper occupies a prominent place in the right foreground with a book open on her lap; she is not reading, however. In moving from sketch to portrait, completed in 1529, Holbein deleted the figure of Margaret’s adopted sister Margaret Giggs, who, pointing out a passage in a book to More’s father in the sketch, was a more active embodiment of literacy. Margaret Roper is strategically placed. When Holbein unveiled for Erasmus his gift of this portrait of the More family, Erasmus wrote immediately to Margaret, ‘the glory of [her] British land’ (decus Britanniae tuae), assuring her that he recognized everyone, but no one more than her (omnes agnoui, sed neminem magis quam te), whose lovelier spirit shines through the exterior (per pulcherrimum domicilium relucentem animum multo pulchriorem).17 Holbein’s finely detailed painting of Margaret as an accomplished Tudor matron stresses the resemblance to her father. The woodcut is primitive and multipurpose, being used for The Gospel of Dystaves as well. Although Eliza69

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Frontispiece of Margaret Roper’s translation, A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster (1525). By permission of the British Library, C37.e.6(1).

beth McCutcheon sees it as visualizing ‘concrete proof of the fruit of the new learning for women,’18 it is at best a generic representation of the scholarly woman, with its own problems of intepretation. It is worth noting the ways the woodblock print attempts to define and encase the female subject; within the interlocking, enfoliated tracery of the border, suggestive of a cloister, this veiled woman, shrouded in metres of cloth and almost surrounded by volumes which are a quarter or a third her size, is actually looking away from the open folio in front of her. The issue of the position and perception of the learned woman as an individual is at the centre of each representation. 70

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Margaret Roper herself is an illustrative case of the debates between dependence and freedom, duplication and self-consciousness, as they are affected by the influences of family and culture. Only a portion of her writing has survived,19 a scattering of letters and the translation of Erasmus’s Precatio dominica (1523).20 With its hallmark doubling of meanings for adjectives, nouns and verbs, the treatise’s claim that ‘he is nat a naturall and proper chylde whosoeuer do nat labour all that he can to folowe and be like his father in wytte and condicions’ (108) encapsulates the prevailing view of this nineteen-year-old wife and mother, ‘the star product of More’s domestic school.’21 When writing to the eldest, best-known, and presumably most gifted of his children, Thomas More regularly used superlatives to address ‘puella iucundissima,’ ‘Margareta charissima,’ ‘dulcissima filia,’ and ‘dulcissima nata.’22 In Erasmus’s correspondence with Roper, whom he greeted as ‘optima Margareta,’ the humanist praised the letters of all the More sisters as ‘sensible, well-written, modest, forthright and friendly.’23 His Christmas gift to her in the year of the publication of Precatio dominica was his commentary on Prudentius’s hymns for Christmas and the Epiphany; the gift not only verifies his confidence in Margaret’s Latin but, as Charles Béné argues, also reveals Erasmus’s ‘attitude presque paternelle.’24 The following year Erasmus likely used Margaret as the model for Magdalia in the colloquy ‘The Abbot and the Learned Lady.’ By devoting a whole chapter of Tres Thomae to More’s eldest daughter, his early biographer, Thomas Stapleton, continued the two strands of Margaret’s reputation: her exceptionality (‘she attained a degree of excellence that would scarcely be believed in a woman’) and family likeness (‘she resembled her father, as well in stature, appearance, and voice, as in mind and in general character’).25 Morean family dynamics continue to be a topic of considerable interest. Contemporary playwrights, for example, have imagined vastly different Margarets. For his 1960 play, A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt took many liberties in introducing Meg as an unmarried woman in her mid-twenties; his Meg is filial, brilliant, and strong. By contrast, Paula Vogel’s 1977 play, Meg, tries so hard to demytholgize its central character that it trivializes her.Vogel’s Meg is a cynic, describing herself as ‘Margaret the Masochist’; surprisingly vapid and vain, she answers her own query about why her father decided to teach her Latin and Greek by explaining, ‘I am very likely the only woman in the world right now pouring [sic] over these words – there is no other woman. I am unique.’26 This Meg is also detached, refusing to wait for her father on his journey from Westminster to the Tower and leaving her husband to fabricate the story of her public embrace of her father, an action reportedly ‘so stunning that it was immediately recorded in at least three anonymous accounts of More’s last days.’27 Vogel’s Meg assesses her daughters as healthy, giggly gossips; in fact, Mary Roper Basset, the only woman whose work 71

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appeared in print during the reign of Mary Tudor, was, as we will examine, an accomplished scholar. The view of Margaret Roper as ‘ancilla rather than author’28 underestimates her accomplishment as a translator schooled in travelling back and forth between Latin and English. The two close readings of Roper’s translation by John Archer Gee in 1937 and Rita Verbrugge in 1985 emphasize its natural rhythms and maturity. Gee argues for the ‘scholarship and art’ of this ‘relatively unknown girl’ whose translation ‘rarely follows the Latin ordering and structure.’29 Claiming that ‘the translation is as much Margaret’s work as Precatio Dominica is Erasmus,” Verbrugge conducts a more substantiated examination of Roper’s building of ‘parallel structures of her own.’30 In a discourse addressing an ‘assigned ... way of praying’ (105) (precandi formulam [1219 C]), it makes sense that the translator strives to clarify and crystallize the catechetical intent. Accordingly Roper enumerates the seven parts, titles them ‘peticions,’ and adjusts sentence structure to underline didactic points. To maintain parallelism and focus attention Roper often simplifies. She reduces the description of the Holy Spirit which began, carried on, and perfected human health (1222 F) to ‘that was bothe the begynner and ender of all this in them’ (112). Among Roper’s most successful expansions are those which reinforce the scriptural foundations of Erasmus’s commentary. In discussing the obedient children who attempt to fulfil the divine will (quae tua dictat voluntas [1224 A]), Roper enlarges the sense of ‘those thynges / whiche they knowe shall content thy mynde and pleasure’ (115) to accent not just the divine dictate but the volitional, informed consent of the creature. When, in explaining the petition about daily bread, Erasmus alludes to the Johannine pericope (John 6:35–58) of bread from heaven, Roper makes it clear that the reference involves mental and physical sustenance, as she translates the next use of panem to contrast the inadequate provisions of the philosophers and pharisees: ‘for verily / the breed and teachynge of the proud philosophers and pharises / coude nat suffice and content our mynde’ (117). Roper’s English achieves its directness and immediacy through many, often surprising experiments. She shows a real ability to dramatize fairly static utterances. Although in his On Copia of Word and Ideas, a work designed to assist translators ‘in interpreting authors,’ Erasmus had warned against tautology,31 he had resorted to repetition to exhibit the vehement response of those who judged God through his followers (1221 D). Roper’s translation uses no repetition, but it catches the parallelism of mounting tension and frustration, the prophetic sense of misrule and disjointedness.’ What a god is he that hath such maner of worshippers. Fye on suche a mayster that hath so vnrewly seruantes: Out vpon such a father / whose children be so leude: Banished be suche a kyng / that hath suche maner of people and subiectes’ (109). Colour 72

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is a hallmark of her style; it resides in onomatopoeic coinages such as ‘the bublisshyng of ryuers’ (109) for fontium scatebrae (1221 E) and illustrative, though now archaic, words such as ‘ouerhippe’ for praetergrediamur (go beyond) in her version of neque in re divinae voluntatis tuae praescriptum praetergrediamur (1224 E) as ‘that in nothyng we ouerhippe or be agaynst that / which thy godly and divine wyll hath apoynted vs’ (116). Furthermore, she embellishes certain phrases to reflect Reformation realities. It is very possible that the texts, book-burnings, and ecclesiatical inspections of the anti-Lutheran campaign in the early 1520s32 were flashing though her mind when she expanded Audi vota concordiae. Non enim convenit, ut fratres, quos tua bonitas aequavit in honore gratioto, ambitione, contentione, odio, livore inter sese dissideant (1219 D) to ‘Here now the desyres of vntye and concorde / for it is nat fytting ne agreable / that bretherne whom thy goodnesse hath put in equall honoure / shulde disagre or varry among themselfe / by ambicious desyre of worldely promocion / by contencious debate / hatered or enuy’ (106). Roper’s moral intelligence quickly tracks the consequences of wayward attitudes. She does not shy away from stern indictments or grisly details to make the contrast between Christ and Satan as visual and immediate as possible. Unlike the ‘naturally good and gentyll’ (natura bonus ac beneficus) Lord, the devil is a ‘currysshe and vngentyll ... mayster’ (123) (immiti Domino [1228 A]); Jesus’s pastoral intervention, ‘thou curest and makest hole the sicke and scabbe shepe’ (123), a translation of morbidam sanas (1228 A), is a reclamation of possible casualties through the wounds inflicted by the devil, who was compared to ‘a rauenous lyon / lyeng in wayte / sekynge and huntyng about / whom he maye deuoure’ (123).33 Roper’s deuout treatise, a commentary on what is likely the most famous prayer, is itself a meditation. Not enslaved to the source language yet not capering freely in the target language either, Roper is much more than a faithful transporter (translatus meaning ‘carried across’) from Latin to English. Her additions and embellishments show how warmly she responded to the rhetorical exercise of preaching. The homiletic aspect of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse by Marguerite d’Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (1492–1549), subsequently translated by Elizabeth I, was less prominent than the complex relationship between fallible creature and merciful Creator. Investigating concerns of familial belonging as God’s sister, daughter, wife, and mother, Marguerite’s first-person narrator cites four biblical stories ‘to exemplify unfaithfulness in each of the four relationships.’34 Miriam’s criticism of Moses, the Prodigal’s neglect, the adultery of Hosea’s wife, and the demonizing of the bad mother who is brought before Solomon (1 Kings 3:28) because of her carelessness are all judged to be less sinful than the faults of the narrator. This is strong stuff for any translator and particularly 73

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a pre-adolescent girl. Le Miroir provided ‘a reflection of Elizabeth herself ’; according to David Starkey, Elizabeth’s Glass is ‘one of the foundation-texts for her biography.’35 Princess and monarch, translator and author, Elizabeth I was phenomenal in many ways. Although the editors of her polylingual speeches, poems, prayers, and letters, Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, have elected to exclude Elizabeth’s translations from their Collected Works, they acknowledge that ‘these often attracted as much attention during her lifetime as her own compositions’; Mueller and Marcus’s companion volume, Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals extends our awareness of ‘the fluid brilliance of Elizabeth’s own words.’36 During the fourth centenary of her death, Elizabeth has not lacked attention, with a magnificent exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and four published studies of her reign. The latest stage representation, Timothy Findley’s Elizabeth Rex, challenges both the imperious snarl of Glenda Jackson’s interpretation for Elizabeth R and the tantrum-prone Queenie of Blackadder. Findley’s play fabricates a night’s entertainment with Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men on the eve of the execution of the Earl of Essex. This postmodern conception of Elizabeth, as retrospective lover and intuitive monarch, concentrates on pithy aphorisms; the title character remarks to the pox-ridden principal actor that ‘Life is a pox. It leaves its scars on all of us’ and admits to the scribbling Shakespeare, ‘I killed the woman in my heart that England might survive.’37 Although this play, so concerned with the passageways between lived experience and literary depiction, curiously makes no mention of Elizabeth’s own writing, one of the most direct paths to apprehending her robust character is through her translation exercises, exceptional for their scope and lifelong passion for learning. The precocious princess – at ease, as Roger Ascham, William Camden, and Thomas North testified, in French, Latin, Greek and Italian – not only translated Le Miroir, a tragedy of Euripides, two orations of Isocrates from Greek to Latin, a dialogue of Xenophon from Greek to English, and Psalm XIII (Ps. XIV in the Authorized Version) from Latin; as queen she also returned to translation in her sixties, apparently for the sheer excitement of the mental exercise. In the thirty-fifth year of her reign, she produced a very rapid translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae in 1593, and five years later, a translation of Plutarch’s moral, stoic treatise De Curiositate and 178 lines of Horace’s 476-line Ars Poetica. In contrast to the precise work of her youth, the later translations are ‘anything but exact’; however, as the editor of these final Englishings, Caroline Pemberton, has observed, they show that ‘Elizabeth loved learning for its own sake.’38 I have decided to concentrate on Elizabeth’s earliest translation as the most accessible way to shed light on her brilliance and vulnerability. The appeal of 74

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Marguerite de Navarre’s intricate, theologically sophisticated examination of creaturely relations, which included incest and fornication, must have been very powerful for Henry’s shrewdly perceptive daughter, who had been declared a bastard by an Act of Parliament in 1536. The executions of her own mother, Anne Boleyn, whose motto ‘semper eadem’ [always the same] she retained, and of her third stepmother, Katherine Howard, on charges of incest and adultery, respectively, taught her searing lessons about sexual politics. Between the presentation of the manuscript translation to Kateryn Parr and John Bale’s presumably approved publication of The Glass as A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle in 1548, the young translator herself would have experienced the sexual advances of the dowager queen’s fourth husband, Thomas Seymour, the Lord Admiral.39 Another reason for the continuing attraction of Marguerite de Navarre’s meditation is its exposition of family-rooted sins and jealousies, a reality which Princess Elizabeth came to know firsthand. She would see the cavalier Seymour executed for treason, a charge brought by his brother, the Lord Protector (Edward Seymour), who soon after underwent the same fate. Later she would be confined to the Tower by her own stepsister. It is important to keep in mind that the period during which these royal and aristocratic women were translating prayers, meditations, and sermons was violent, faction-ridden, and tumultuous. In The Glass of the Sinful Soul Elizabeth produced an accurate translation of a text which resonated in compelling ways with her own life. Echoing the Queen of Navarre’s allusion to the fourth Penitential Psalm, the Miserere (Psalm 51 in the Authorized Version, Psalm 50 in the Vulgate), Elizabeth’s prose manuscript turns French rhyming couplets into an explicitly detailed picture of sinful bondage. ‘Now behold how in pain, crying, and weeping my poor soul, a slave and prisoner, doth lie without clarity or light, having both her feet bound by her concupiscence, and also both her arms through evil use’ (7v, 114). She adjusts the French syntax to introduce the subject, the soul, more directly and, to emphasize the predicament, extends the nouns ‘criz, et pleurs’ (cries and tears) into participles.40 The speaker assumes the strength of the true mother from the Wisdom tradition (‘Vous n’avez pas povoir par nul effort / De me faire recepvoir l’enfant mort’ [lines 481–2, 44]) in asserting, ‘Now come, my sensuality, with sins of all qualities, for thou hast not the power to make me receive the child which is dead’ (25v, 124). There is no hint that the young translator did not understand the full complexity of these biblical narratives, for her renderings are sure and complete. The medium of prose, however, relieves her of concerns about rhythm and occasionally lessens the strictness of the parallelism. The princess’s meditation closes with the speaker’s acknowledging ‘[her]self to be but mire and dust’ (62v, 144). But she does not imitate Marguerite’s signature line, in which she plays on the 75

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meaning of her name as ‘pearl’: ‘Qui luy plaist faire de moy sa Marguerite’ (line 1430). No doubt Elizabeth was familiar with Hebrew-based interpretations of her own name, from the original Elisheva (Eli: God; sheva: oath or seven), referring to a worshipper of God as ‘God of the seven’ or ‘God is her oath.’ But the young translator stays precise and demure; she omits the line, supplies no personal signature, and moves immediately to the doxology: ‘Unto the king of heaven, immortal, invisible, our mighty God only and incomprehensible, be all honor, praise, glory, and love forever’ (63r, 144). The devout princess was, however, intellectually ambitious. Shortly after her translation of Margeurite de Valois, she produced a French translation of Erasmus’s Dialogus fidei and, as a gift to her father, a polyglot rendering of Queen Kateryn Parr’s Prayers or Meditacions into French, Italian, and Latin. She also experimented with biblical verse. In her rhyming paraphrase ‘The xiii Psalme of David, called Dixit insipiens, touched afore of my lady Elizabeth,’41 which Bale appended to A Godly Medytacyion, the activity of creating rhyming couplets to catch the sense of the Vulgate text, as opposed to Englishing it in a word-for-word translation, afforded considerable liberties to the acute princess. A concern with the character and attitudes of ‘true faith’ (line 1), so volatile an issue in the late Henrician and Edwardian reigns, informs and in fact frames the twenty-five-line exercise. In contrast to her precision in representing the couplets of Marguerite de Navarre, Elizabeth here deletes many arresting details from the Latin to return repeatedly to the idea of faith as sustaining and delivering. Frequently she softens, simplifies, and de-emphasizes the corruption and abomination of the faithless. Elizabeth’s paraphrase represents them as blind, cruel, and without truth, which is less corrosive than the Psalmist’s depiction of their throats as open sepulchres (sepulchrum patens est guttur eorum) and their lips as poisoned with asps (venenum aspidum sub labiis eorum [13.3]). Eucharistic debates about the status of consecrated bread may have been swirling in Elizabeth’s mind when she opted to figure the predatoriness of the godless ‘which suck the blood ... of God’s dear flock’ (line 16), thereby avoiding the image of their devouring people as if they were bread (qui devorant plebem meam sicut escam panis [13.4]). With Mary Roper Basset (ca. 1522–72), one of the five children (three daughters, two sons) of Margaret and William Roper, the issue of the idiomatic liberties and expansions of the translator’s language becomes a major criterion. Identified on the title-page of her translation of Thomas More’s De Tristitia Christi, included in the first collection of More’s English works in 1557, as ‘one of the gentlewomen of the queen’s majesty’s privy chamber,’ Mary Basset was also, according to the claims of Nicholas Harpsfield’s contemporaneous Marian biography (or hagiography) of More, ‘very well experted in the Latin and Greek tongues.’42 As the wife of Stephen Clarke, 76

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she had dedicated her manuscript translations during the reign of Edward – the first five books of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History from Greek to English and the first book from Greek to Latin – to the Lady Mary. Widowed, she married James Basset, another staunch Catholic, and both secured positions in Queen Mary’s personal service. Although the exact timeframe for her translation of the De Tristitia is unknown (it was likely completed in the early 1550s), the contrast between Tudor and twentieth-century assessments of her work is remarkable. While Harpsfield judged that she ‘very aptly and fitly translated,’ Monsignor Hallett, Basset’s first twentieth-century editor, found her work ‘sometimes ... unnecessarily prolix.’43 Basset’s translation, for me, captures the deeply contemplative probing as well as the flashes of wit and surprising humour in her grandfather’s final writing. A Latin continuation of his Treatise Upon the Passion, the De Tristitia, concentrating on the ‘mental torment’ of the Garden of Olives, has a ‘distinctively literary character.’44 Although it is a public, not an intimate work, More positions himself personally and movingly. As Greenblatt observes, ‘More imagines that ... Christ has rehearsed the part that More must now play.’45 In the directness of her Tudor idiom and periodic extensions of her grandfather’s homiletic reflections, Mary Basset was acutely aware of the interface of Gethsemani and the Tower. Her down-to-earth, unpedantic translation is also often superior to a precise transliteration. In commenting on the weakness of the apostles who fell asleep, More disparages the diuini consilij curiosulus explorator who speculates about whether Christ wanted them awake or not; for Basset this description refers to ‘som busy body, more inquisitiue then nedeth of goddes hygh secretes’ as opposed to the exactly formal sense of ‘some meticulous fussy dissector of the divine plan.’46 She pinpoints the unflattering connection between our spiritual sluggishness and the apostles’ sleep by translating ut quos prosperitas frigidos ad orandum fecerat (215) as ‘prosperitie made vs so kaye colde and dull to praye’ (1105). When More alludes to the criticisms of those who question the efficacy of the intercession of the saints and angels (quae male teneant illos intemperiae [223]), Basset does not write calmly about ‘pernicious nonsense’ (223), but explodes: ‘What the deuill ayleth them, that let not to beare folke in hande, that foly it were for a man to desyre eyther anye angel, or any saint in heauen to pray vnto god for him?’ (1106). Basset does not delight in obscurity. The early period of women’s translations, with equal numbers of royal and non-royal women’s works extant, illustrates an increasing proficiency in more languages than French. Margaret Roper and her daughter were both at ease in Latin and Greek, while Princess Elizabeth added conversational fluency in Italian and Spanish. The field is also broader than this preliminary survey 77

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indicates. The Countess of Salisbury, who oversaw Princess Mary’s moral and academic education, especially ‘to intend to her learning of latin tongue or French’ (BL Cotton MA Vitellius, C.i.f. 23), and Richard Fetherstone, Mary’s schoolmaster, took justifiable pride in the twelve-year-old Princess of Wales’s translation of a prayer of St Thomas Aquinas from Latin to English (BL Royal MS 17 C.xvi) in 1527. As a woman in her twenties Mary responded with enthusiasm to her stepmother Kateryn Parr’s commission of a translation of Erasmus’s biblical Paraphrases, although Mary’s frail health caused her to relinquish her work on the Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John to Nicholas Udall. Moreover, Protector Somerset’s three eldest daughters, Ladies Anne, Margaret, and Jane Seymour, though barely adolescents, were so expertly schooled in Latin elegiac verse that even in the absence of their tutor they produced 104 Latin distichs to eulogize Marguerite de Navarre. Their Hecatodistichon was published in Paris in 1550, with a French adaptation by Joachim Du Bellay and others, Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois, which included Greek and Italian appendices, appearing in 1551.47 Jane Lumley, the Cooke sisters, Anne Vaughan Lock, Margaret Tyler, Mary Sidney Herbert While in the second half of the sixteenth century the activity of translating continued to be the major entrée for women into the network of print or manuscript circulation, the texts they made available to English readers – often in editions of unsurpassed accuracy and experimental novelty – ranged broadly over genres of drama, prose, and verse. Though the influence of family loyalties and social standing remained strong, as did privileged access to wellstocked libraries, the translations of early modern women in the mid- to latesixteenth century are more intricately connected to doctrinal debates. As well as witnessing the blend of humanist Latin discourse and imaginative vernacular literature, Lady Jane Lumley’s version of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon’s translations of Bernardino Ochino’s sermons and Bishop John Jewel’s monumental Apologia for Anglicanism, Anne Vaughan Lock’s translation of Jean Calvin’s sermons and adaptation of the Penitential Psalms, Margaret Tyler’s translation of a picaresque Spanish romance, and Lady Mary Sidney Herbert’s metrical paraphrase of the Psalter are not the safe exercises of dabbling dilettantes. Because the doctrinal debates inherent in their work were often matters of life and death, denominational membership or excommunication, we must be alert to the evidence of the translational counter-practice of these astutely learned women. Rather than testing for emulative transliteration, we need to approach their work as first of all audacious – however private or controlled the circulation. We also need to be willing to credit the ways they animated frozen texts, clarified obscurity, and loosened fixity. 78

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Lady Jane Lumley (1537–76) translated Iphigenia at Aulis between 1550 and 1553, producing the first English version of a Greek drama. The manuscript volume (BL MS Royal 15. A. IX Lumley), from which this text alone has been printed twice (at the beginning and end of the twentieth century), also contains four orations of Isocrates48 which Lady Lumley translated from Greek to Latin and dedicated to her father, Henry Fitzalan, fourteenth Earl of Arundel.49 Although it cannot be settled with absolute surety, the matter of the date of this play about a father’s sacrifice of a daughter to appease a goddess, move ships, and win a war is not insignificant. For any consideration of the turn of fortune’s wheel and the attempt to use daughters and young women to advance political power, major motifs in Euripides’ fifth-century BCE drama of virginal sacrifice, the three-year period of possible composition of Lumley’s translation was a cavalcade: the disgrace and trial for felony of Protector Somerset, who had worked hard to secure his sister Jane’s betrothal to Henry VIII the day after Anne Boleyn’s execution; the death of Somerset’s nephew, Edward VI; Northumberland’s foiled stratagems for the coronation of his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey; and the accession of Mary Tudor, the first, though periodically disinherited, daughter of Henry VIII. What would attract a young bride, between thirteen and fifteen years old, to Iphigenia at Aulis, ‘the most translated Greek tragedy in Europe in the sixteenth century’?50 One of the two tragedies Erasmus translated to Latin, it was available in the Arundel library, among the finest in Tudor England. Henry, Jane, and Mary Fitzalan and John Radcliffe (a stepson) all left manuscripts of their work in the Arundel library.51 Lady Lumley’s husband, Lord John, having matriculated at Cambridge in 1549, himself finished a manuscript translation of Erasmus’s Institution of a Christian Prince, also dedicated to Arundel, in 1550. Elaine Beilin proposes that, in response to Lord Lumley’s encouragement and the ‘implicitly Christian diction’ of Erasmus’s text, Lady Jane ‘produced ... a female version of the selfless prince,’ transforming Iphigenia into ‘a crypto-Christian.’52 The co-editors of a recent edition of the first original closet drama composed by a woman and published in English, Lady Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, underscore the claim that ‘Lumley’s Iphigenia partly succeeds in rhetorically transforming herself from a political victim to a Christlike martyr.’53 Lumley is following her Greek and Latin texts in presenting the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the appearance of the slaughtered white hart. Although Lord John and Lady Jane were both Catholics and the Arundel association with Catholicism was well known, the evidence of the text of Lumley’s Iphigenia does not fully support Beilin’s claim that it pays either particular or unprecedented ‘tribute to a woman’s Christian spirit, courage and eventual sanctification.’ The extent of Lady Lumley’s knowledge of Greek and her reliance or overreliance on Erasmus’s Latin54 concern the few extensive examinations of her 79

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work. Over half a century ago, to rebut David Greene’s claim that Lady Lumley ‘had a knowledge of her original and a feeling for its verse extraordinary and rare for one of her years and her period,’ Frank Crane excoriated the translation as ‘a childish performance, derived directly and carelessly from the Latin, when the text is followed at all’; Lady Lumley can do nothing right for Crane, who insists she shows ‘no knowledge of Greek, and none of poetry in any language.’55 This intemperate judgment does not accord with the reflections on Lady Lumley’s careful upbringing which her remaining manuscripts supply, nor with the explicit evidence of her prose Iphigenia as a simplified, abbreviated, domesticated version of Euripides’ verse tragedy. Although we have no knowledge of Lady Lumley’s specific tutors in Latin and Greek, the activities of such a formation in ‘the deep assimilation and transformation of classical texts’56 left their mark on this pupil, in her choice of authors and exercises. Her reputation for learning led to a friendship with the slightly older Lady Anne Bacon, a friendship which transcended differences in religion, and to the receipt of an exquisite gift from Sir Nicholas Bacon. Two decades after her translation, the lord keeper of the great seal sent Lady Lumley an exquisitely illuminated vellum manuscript of Latin sayings collected for his own gallery at Gorhambury and presented as a token of his high regard for the mistress of Nonsuch mansion, the Arundel home to which she had returned following the death of her three children in infancy. In any event the gift itself, the distillation of sententious nuggets,57 was entirely consonant with the principles, practices, and values of a humanist education. We should remember how bold an undertaking the solo translation of a Greek tragedy actually was, ‘at a time when there were no commentaries, when Greek grammars and dictionaries were few and crude.’58 And while as well-read an adolescent as Lady Lumley would not have missed the significance of the filial sacrifice, recalling the unhappy fate of Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11:32–40) more vividly than the last-minute substitution that saves Isaac (Genesis 22), the coils of sexual tension in this play about the human and political consequences of Helen’s extramarital affair with Paris, a play preoccupied with the intermingled concepts of marriage and death, love and sacrifice, must have presented real challenges to the young, relatively sheltered translator. In her version of the play Lumley clarifies the story line, getting the family connections straight for her own benefit. Her abridged translation emphasizes narrative, highlighting details that advance the action and deleting what must have seemed to the adolescent translator intensifying or decorative extras. There is a genuine abruptness about her Agamemnon and very little sense of the celebration of service for the public or national good. Rather, his unease, the grim commission he is resolved to carry out, and his emerging guilt or remorse make him a figure of contradictions. Lady Lumley probably found 80

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the complicity of this father in his daughter’s death painful yet, in the circles she inhabited, not impossible to fathom. She does not, and could not, shy away from the fact that Grecian victory is purchased with Iphigenia’s life. Her chief way of dealing with the architect of this filial sacrifice is to present Agamemnon as a king of blunt commands, conveying his first change of heart matter-of-factly but evasively: ‘Tell hir that she shall not nede at this time to sende my daughter hether: for her mariage shall be differred unto a nother time’ (104–5; 163–6). However, the directive lacks the evocativeness of the communiqué not to send Iphigenia ‘unto the waveless shore / Of Aulis, where the hand / Of that sea-pinion of Euoboea lies / Gulf-shapen’ (15), poetic language present in both Greek and Latin texts. Lumley’s prose paraphrase, excising the choruses and several speeches, reduces the length of the original. Some of the most poignant speeches she omits are puzzling exclusions, since they involve softening or explanatory details. For instance, she does not translate Iphigenia’s tear-filled plea to Agamemnon (Euripides, 1211–52; Erasmus, 1177 E-1178 D), in which she reminds her father of such touching scenes as playing on his knee and twining her fingers in his beard. Absent as well is Agamemnon’s justification, that he must sacrifice her to prevent the slaying of all his daughters (Euripides, 1267; Erasmus, 1178 F). This young translator does make some outright mistakes. She misconstrues the Old Man’s reply to Agamemnon’s change of heart not to send Iphigenia to Aulis. Lumley’s Old Man wonders, ‘Will not Achilles thinke you be angerie, for that under the color of him you haue determined the deathe of your doughter?’ (10708; 167–70), when, in fact, it is Achilles’ anger that is the real concern. For fifteen lines (264–76; 405–20) of short heated exchange between Agamemnon and Menelaus, following Agamemnon’s berating and goading of Menelaus and preceding the Messenger’s announcement of Iphigenia’s arrival, Lumley confuses the names of the two speakers, giving Menelaus’s lines to Agamemnon and Agamemnon’s to Menelaus. Lumley’s Clytemnestra also sadly misrepresents her own progeny: ‘I happened to haue thre sones at one birthe, and afterwarde one daughter’ (662–3; 974–5). Lumley’s text itself had already referred to Clytemnestra’s ‘other daughters’ (470; 700) while the Greek specifies three daughters and one son, and so does the Latin: Porro puellis editis nixu tribus, / Hunc insuper peperi tibi puellelum (1176 E). Lumley’s reading of three sons at one birth could be a construal of ‘puellis tribus.’ Lumley, however, also crafts several trenchant, illuminating interpretations. On an opening philosophical note, her Agamemnon observes that the ‘renowne’ of ruling in glory and honour ‘is uerye brickle’ (24; 32), which nicely distils the sense of Euripides’ το καλÎν σφαλ,ρον (21) and Erasmus’s lubrica res est (1155 C). An obsolete word meaning ‘brittle, fragile, frail or weak,’ ‘brickle’ 81

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supplies a pithy, possibly biblically inspired,59 comment on the topsy-turvydom of mid-Tudor politics. When Agamemnon is sparring with Menelaus, he remarks to his brother, ‘Indeed you file your wordes well’ (193; 289), an observation whose verb captures with intuitive precision the meaning of subtle glozing in both γλäσσ’ ... σοφ¯ (333) and dicta phaleras (1160 E). However, sexual betrayals are difficult topics for Lumley. Her Clytemnestra labels Helen ‘a naughtie woman’ (668; 983) and one ‘who hathe neuer shewed her selfe faithefull to hir husbande’ (691–2; 1021–2), whereas Euripides and Erasmus minced no words about the wanton, κακ-H λLνακοH (1169) and feminae malae (1176 E), whose harlotry in breaking vows of the marriage contract (at contra soror / Quae casta pacti jura deseruit thori [1177 D]) made this sister such a contrast to the loyal Clytemnestra who must forfeit her daughter. The counterpoint to this sexual obliqueness is the domestic idiom Lumley adopts, often intensifying the poignancy of the sacrifice. In resisting Agamemnon’s command that she return to Greece ‘to be amongste [her] other daughters’ (469–70; 700–1), Lumley’s Clytemnestra ironically emphasizes protocol and readiness. Her argument that ‘the mother ought to be at the marriage of the daughter’ (468–9; 697–8) and ‘muste see all thinges made redie for the mariage’ (472–3; 703–4) repeatedly throws back to the king the sham of his daughter’s marriage. The resonating significance of being ‘redie’ and the shift from a marriage ceremony to human sacrifice underscore with moving simplicity the inevitable outcome of these ritual preparations. There are times, too, when Lumley merely resorts to her code word ‘troble’ to convey the boldness of the Greek or Latin. Agamemnon’s exposition, ‘I am in soche troble that I knowe not what to do’ (361–2; 553–4), scarcely plumbs the depths of Euripides’ character, ‘whelmed amidst despair’ (537); her Agamemnon is slightly more faithful to Erasmus’s king: miser, infelix, perplexus (1164 B). As Lumley’s Iphigenia approaches sacrifice, she generates her own apotheosis in ways different from the Greek and Latin texts. Using mainly subjunctive rather than indicative moods, Lumley’s heroine also emphasizes form, law, and authority. To her mother she cautions: ‘You ought rather to haue thanked Achilles, bicause he so gentelly hathe promised you his helpe, which maye happen to bring him into a grete mischefe. I wolde counsell you therfore to suffer this troble paciently, for I praie you mother, for wat a lawfull cause I shalbe slaine’ (797–802; 1166–74). Her explanatory, appeasing tone is unlike the steeliness of Euripides’ figure, who is ‘resolved to die’ (1375). Lumley’s Iphigenia sees her death as patient suffering for a lawful cause. Furthermore, an ambivalence about the value or disposability of a woman’s life is at the heart of this tragedy, in which the liberty of the heroine to offer her life and thereby be the only one to win the day subverts commonplaces about a woman’s negligible worth. At the time of the sacrifice itself, the difficulties of expressing the extraordi82

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nary concepts of human acceptance of and witness to death (‘martyr’ literally means ‘witness’) appear to be pressing heavily on the adolescent translator. Her strategy in staging the climax is to have recourse to plain unadorned facts. With a literalness devoid of poetry, Lumley’s Iphigenia bids farewell: ‘I shalbe compelled by and by to forsake you all and to chaunge my life’ (906–7; 1316– 18). Lumley’s details of the death are minimal, excluding Euripides’ mentions of the seer laying down ‘a keen knife which his hand had drawn / Out of its sheath’ (1566–7) and of the priest scanning ‘her throat for the fittest place to strike’ (1579). Lumley presents the miracle of Iphigenia’s disappearance, the crowd’s echoing cry, and the sighting of the gasping hind, in factual rapportage. One adjustment in Lumley’s translating of her originals is worth noting. On hearing Iphigenia’s last words of renunciation for national glory, the crowd, in Lumley’s version, ‘were wonderfullye astonied at the stoutnes of her minde’ (932; 1354–5). Euripides’ crowd marvelled at the virgin’s courage and heroism (,bψLχ\αν τ, κ•ρ,τ¬ν τ-H παρθ©νοL [1562]), and Erasmus’s crowd at her lofty soul (virginalis animi celsitudinem [1185 A]), but Lumley draws special attention to the fullness and tenacity of her heroine’s intellect. Another influential father figure is a pivot in the story of the prodigious accomplishments of Ladies Mildred Cooke Cecil (later Burghley), Anne Cooke Bacon, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, and Katherine Cooke Killigrew. The youngest sister, Margaret, died shortly after her marriage in 1558. Lady Anne (Fitzwilliams) and Sir Anthony Cooke, the parents of nine children, five daughters and four sons who survived childhood, headed one of ‘the wealthiest ten or twelve families in Essex.’60 Though educated at the Inner Temple, Sir Anthony, who was largely self-taught in the classics, entered the royal service in 1539. At the family seat, or academy, of Gidea Hall in Essex, Sir Anthony supervised his children’s education. Justice of the peace for the Liberty of Havering-atte-Bower, member of Parliament for Lewes in 1547, and Knight of the Bath in 1548, Cooke was rewarded for his informal involvement in the education of Edward VI (the prince’s official tutors were Richard Cox and John Cheke) with a royal annuity. Settling in Strasbourg during Mary’s reign and with the financial support of his influential sons-inlaw, William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, he made his self-imposed exile an extended sabbatical in the principles of Protestantism. His daughters are definitely Sir Anthony’s finest work. Louise Schleiner treats the Cooke sisters’ accomplishments as developing from translation to prefaces and dedicatory verse which offer ‘a chance for the writer to express something of her own thinking.’61 Their highly original and agile translations, in my view, show the Cooke sisters successfully entering the arc of communication; they illuminate the ‘“feedback”’62 between education and opportunity, formation and cultural circumstance. 83

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In 1550, at the age of twenty-five, the eldest sister, Mildred Cecil (1526– 89), presented her translation of a sermon of Basil the Great, Archbishop of Caesaria, to the Duchess of Somerset, wife of the Protector (BL MS Royal 17 B. XVIII). Though little of her work has survived and what remains is either in manuscript or safely esoteric Greek verse, Mildred Cecil was known for her interest in the Greek fathers. ‘The memorial on her tombstone speaks of her study of Basil, Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen’;63 Roger Ascham considered her knowledge of Greek second only to that of Lady Jane Grey, while Richard Edwardes’ contemporary Praise of Eight Ladyes of Queene Elizabeth’s Court hailed Lady Burghley, who ‘in bookes setts all her care; / In learning with the Roman Dames / Of right she may compare.’64 Her dedication of ‘An Homilie or Sermon of Basile the great, Archebishopp of Caesaria upon ye sayeng of Moyses in the fifteenth chapiter of Deuteronomie Take hede to thy selfe’ specifies her intention and mode as a translator to observe ‘the nature of the greke phrase not omittyng the congruiety of english speche’ (2v). While Cecil’s rendering of St Basil’s caution about traps and lures may take on the rhythms of the Greek text, its idiom of Tudor English vivifies the understanding of martial, politic alertness: ‘Take hede therfore to thy selfe, that is consider thy selfe round aboute on every side, haue the eye of thy minde wakyng for thine owen savegarde. thou goest in the middest snares. thine enemye hathe preuy galtropes layde for the on everi side’ (7v). ‘Galtrope,’ from Middle English (kalketrappe) and Old English (coltetraeppe) forms for ‘heel trap,’ refers to any gin or snare designed to catch the feet of beasts, horses, or men in war; an iron ball with four sharp prongs placed at angles so that when thrown on the ground it always had one spike projecting upward, the galtrope was an implement of Tudor warfare. Cecil’s colourful, idiosyncratic diction expertly conveys the homily’s sense of warning. Her expressivity also makes the idea of the church as a vigorous, productive house an engaging reality: ‘[F]or euery one of us that be scollers to this lesson, is a minister aboute some one certin worke of the things apointed to us in the gospell. for in this chirche which is as a large house be not onely vessels of all sortes, as of goold, silver, wood & earthe, but also, all maner of craftes. For this house of god which is the chirche of the livμg god hath hugters, wayfaring meF, masters of workes, bylders, husbandmeF sheppards, wrastlers, souldiers, eveF to all theis dothe this shorte saying agree: ingeFdring in everi one bothe an ernestnes to worke & a study to performe there purpose. (10v -11r). Cecil displays an easy control of complex syntax and parallel constructions as well as an intuitive understanding of unity in diversity. The sister next to her in age, Anne (1527/8–1610), possessed similar aptitudes, as demonstrated in a wider range of extant work. At the age of twenty Anne Cooke translated fourteen sermons from the Italian by the spellbinding reformer Bernardino Ochino. As a mother of two young sons and 84

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stepmother of Sir Nicholas Bacon’s six children by his first marriage, Lady Bacon not only kept up her interest in doctrinal controversies but, unbidden, undertook and submitted a translation of Bishop John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae in 1564 that was recognized for its perception and accuracy, what C.S. Lewis labelled ‘quality without bulk.’65 Unsurpassed, it became the standard translation of Jewel and, by the early seventeenth century, was placed in all parish churches. Bernardino Ochino, a married ex-Capuchin friar who had fled Italy for Geneva and then settled in England for the Edwardian reign, developed and expressed a virulent anti-papism which sat very well with the disposition of the Cooke family. For Ochino the papacy enshrined hypocrisy, covetousness, venality, and ambition; the Mass was a pestilence; and priests were the Pope’s anointed, shaven, oiled agents. Anne Cooke’s translation of fourteen of Ochino’s sermons appeared in two undated collections printed by John Day and customarily assigned the approximate dates of 1550 and 1570. Richard Argentine was the other translator, responsible in different calculations for either six or eleven of the twenty-five published sermons.66 A prefatory address to the Christian reader from an unidentified G.B. explicates duty as a reflection of gentlewomanly station and privilege, in which modesty co-exists with a stringent catechetical mission. G.B.’s praise of the young translator is a curious alloy of condescension and surprise that a woman could have and actually has accomplished this work. ‘If ought be erred in the translacion,’ he justifies, ‘remember it is a womans yea, a Gentyl womans, who commonly are wonted to lyve idelly, a mayden that never gadded farder then hir Fathers house to learne the language’ (Aiii). A comparable blend of self-possession and negation informs Anne Cooke’s own dedicatory letter to her mother. This ‘humble daughter’ reminds ‘the Lady F.’ of the times she reproved her ‘vayne studye in the Italian tonge, accompting the sede thereof, to haue bene sowen in barayne, unfruitful grounde’ (Aiiii); but as a ‘most boundenly obedient’ daughter, she acknowledges that she has not tried to reach ‘the hygh style of thealogie’ or ‘the bryghtnes of hys eloquence’ due to fear that she ‘shuld manyfest [her] selfe unapte, to attaine unto the lowest degre therof ’ (Av). Her stance of public humility – ‘I descend therefore, to the understanding of myne own debility’ (Av) – can be read as filial modesty or a strategic licence to convey hard-hitting criticism and reform principles. The scope of the sermons is broad, touching on such perennial hot-button topics as ‘Whether the electe can be damned or not’ (sermon 10) and ‘If man haue libertie or not (& in what maner)’ (Sermon 13). Furthermore, Ochino’s skill in metaphor, to which Anne Cooke responded with eager sympathy, captures the sense of engaged commitment, as in the depiction of God entering the city of the Soul in Sermon 14, ‘sence from that as from a fort and strong municioned rocke he hath the great deuill to chase away’ (Ivi). 85

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Forceful, direct language, the hallmark of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, also attracted Lady Bacon to the unsolicited task of translating the Apologia (1562). Through his close friendship with Peter Martyr, who served as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1547, Jewel’s animus towards the Church of Rome was well known. Although he spent most of the Marian reign in Frankfurt and Zurich, Jewel never really forgot or forgave himself for the fact that he had signed the Roman articles in 1554 and served as notary at the trials of Cranmer and Ridley. No doubt his own sense of guilty betrayal fuelled the bitterness of his anti-Rome position, a position strategically useful to William Cecil and Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, at a time when the papal nuncio was applying for entry to England. Here was an opportunity to pin up Anglican colours. Here, too, was a project of consuming interest for Lady Anne Cooke Bacon. In the published prefatory letter of congratulations from M.C. (Matthew Cantuar, that is, Matthew of Canterbury) to Ladie A.B., Parker expressed high, unqualified praise for her ‘right commendable work’ that ‘hath singularly pleased [his] judgement.’67 So much did the translation pass judgment ‘without reproche’ that he had the whole manuscript printed ‘without alteration’ – and, apparently, without the translator’s knowledge. Parker elevates her as an instructive example for ‘all noble gentlewomen [who] shall ... hereby be alured from vain delights to doinges of more perfect glory.’ One way of realizing the pungent, direct vigour of Lady Bacon’s work is to compare it with the first and manifestly inferior translation by an unidentified author which was printed in 1562. Bacon’s translation reflects the zestiness of Elizabethan English. Unlike the 1562 text’s pacifying response to heresy – ‘we wyll demeane our selfe nother bitterly nor tantingly with many wordes, nor yet be caried into any chauffe with anger’ (Biii)68 – Bacon’s version seizes the sense of captious disputation and quibbling in her use of the onomatopeic verb ‘brabble’: ‘yet we will deal herein nether bitterly nor brablingly, nor yet be caried away with angre & heate, though he ought to be reckned neither bitter nor brabler that speaketh the truth’ (Biii). When talking of the material substance of the bread and wine, she minces no words in declaring that bread ‘goeth into the belly and is cast out into the privey’ (Dii), thus avoiding the earlier euphemism of being ‘cast into the withdrawing place’ (Diii). The Romish procession of relics was described in 1562 as ‘a solemne pompe ... to feede mens eies with foolyshe sightes and wanton boyes games’ (Diiii), whereas Bacon depicts such a procession as ‘a stage play ... to the end that mens eyes should be fedde with nothing els but mad gasinges and foolishe gaudes’ (Diiii). Repetition helps to drive home the forceful antipapist message: ‘that the Sacramentes maye be ministred not like a Maskary or a stage playe, but religiously and reuerently according to the rule prescribed unto us by Christ’ (Rv). Bacon never shies away from the colourful language of the 86

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Latin original; she likens the reformers to Hercules preparing for heroic labour, ‘for this same Stable, as one might rightly call it, of the Romish Augias, cannot so soone be thoroughlye cleansed and ridd from the long growen filth and mucke’ (Rv). Strong views continued to characterize Lady Bacon in widowhood and old age. Her opposition to Archbishop Whitgift and defence of nonconformist preachers, especially after what she perceived as their unfair treatment during the Lambeth Conference held over the Christmas recess in 1584–5, resulted in a pointedly worded letter to her brother-in-law, Lord Burghley. Although the preachers were forced either to submit to episcopal regulation or to face exile, Lady Bacon supported their ‘sincere and sound opening of Scriptures’ as superior to ‘hearing odd sermons at Paul’s wellnigh twenty years together.’69 Lack of success in this campaign did not deter Lady Bacon’s uncompromising opposition to Whitgift, which remained as vehement as her antipapistry. When this ‘long-grieved mother’ wrote warning letters to her son, Lord Anthony Bacon, who had been abroad for ten years, about the untrustworthiness of his Catholic confidential servant, whom she called ‘that fox,’ she not only addressed bluntly her perceived neglect (‘you have little enough, if not too little, regarded your kind and no simple mother’s wholesome advice from time to time’) but also folded in Latin and Greek phrases to intensify the warning. One of her cautionary examples was a Greek description of Whitgift as a councillor bent on destroying the church, φιλ,Ã γαρ τ¬ν ,αLτοL δοξαν πλ,ον τ-H δοξηH τοL Χριστου: ‘for he loves his own glory more than the glory of Christ.’ Lady Elizabeth Hoby Russell (1528–1609) shared her sisters’ zeal for doctrinal debate; through the amount of elegiac verse she composed in Latin, Greek, and English, she also became ‘a specialist of the graveside.’70 Her translation of John Ponet’s Diallecticon viri boni et literati, de veritate [natura atque substantia] corporis [et sanguinis] Christi in eucharistia as A Way of Reconciliation of a Good and learned man, touching the Trueth, Nature, and Substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament (1605)71 confirms through its iteration of the Anglican doctrine of the spiritual, as opposed to the real, presence of Christ in the Eucharist the Cooke family’s allegiance to the principles of Protestantism. For Lady Russell’s work is the most measured of the sisters’ translations, striving as the title indicates to conciliate through the temperateness and learned breadth of the argument. Such restraint did not always characterize the work of John Ponet (sometimes Poynet), bishop of Winchester (1514–56). Deprived during Mary’s reign, Ponet had settled in Strasbourg, where he associated with Sir Anthony Cooke. Cooke’s purchase of Ponet’s library from his widow led to Cooke’s publishing Ponet’s Latin manuscript in Strasbourg in 1557. In dedicating A Way of Reconciliation to her only surviving daughter, Lady Anne Herbert (three daughters had died in youth), the seventy-six-year87

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old Lady Russell makes clear that the text was ‘made aboue fifty yeeres since in Germanie’ (A2v) and that her translation was also completed when she was a young woman and ‘approued’ by either Ponet or, more likely, her father. Family connections abound and echo in this dedicatory epistle, as Russell bequeaths what she calls ‘my last Legacie’ and, possibly alluding to her older sister’s canonical work, ‘a most precious Iewell to the comfort of your Soule’ (A2). Russell’s translation clarifies how Ponet’s woven fabric of allusions to the Bible and the Greek and Latin fathers forcefully presents the distinctions between corporal, physical, fleshly reality and spiritual, sacramental, mystical truth. One of Ponet and Russell’s most arresting comparisons is borrowed from Chrysostom, who connected infants ‘snatch[ing] the breast’ and ‘fasten[ing] their lips to the nipples’ to our desire to ‘come also to this Table and spirituall nipple of this cup’ (83). All four Cooke sisters – Mildred Burghley, Anne Bacon, Elizabeth Hoby, and Katherine Killigrew (1530–83), who composed occasional and elegiac verse including her own epitaph – contributed to the Giardino cosmographico coltivato, an Italian manuscript digest of current scientific thought by Dr Bartholo Sylva, physician and surgeon in Turin (C.U.L. MS Ii. 5. 37). Dedicated to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, this visually stunning illustrated manuscript featured Greek epigrams by Mildred Burghley and Elizabeth Hoby and Latin verses by Anne Bacon and Katherine Killigrew in praise of Sylva, a Protestant convert and purported polymath seeking favour in England. Another contributor to this strategically designed volume was the preacher Edward Dering, Anne Vaughan Lock’s second husband, who was attempting – unsuccessfully, as it turned out – to return to the queen’s good graces through this display of erudition and support for the Italian doctor. Dering had offended Elizabeth by his remarks in a 1570 sermon about poorly educated clergy, and the shadow of her displeasure never left him; the queen silenced him in 1573. His wife, the poet and translator Anne Vaughan Lock Dering, had secured powerful, like-minded allies in the Cooke family. Anne Vaughan Lock (ca. 1534–after 1590) produced two texts of translation from French Protestant sources: Sermons of John Calvin, Upon the Songe that Ezechias made after he had bene sicke, and afflicted by the hand of God, conteyned in the 38 Chapiter of Esay (1560) which she dedicated to the Duchess of Suffolk and to which she added a sonnet sequence on Psalm 51 and, during her third marriage, as Anne Prowse, Of the Markes of the children of God, and of their comforts in afflictions by John Taffin (1590) dedicated to the Countess of Warwick and followed by her own verse meditation, ‘The necessitie and benefite of affliction.’72 These texts share many characteristics: French prose originals exploring spiritual diseases and remedies, dedications to influential aristocratic women, and concluding verse compositions underscoring the motifs of 88

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sinfulness and attentiveness to the rod of correction. Denouncing the ‘superfluous workes’ and ‘unholsome stuffe’ of ‘papisticall soulesleaers’ (A5r; 6), her dedication to Katherine Brandon, who had been part of the reform-oriented circle of Queen Kateryn Parr, sets out the relationship linking the physician who prescribes, the pharmacist who makes the remedy, and the agent, Lock herself, who packages and delivers it: ‘This receipte God the heavenly Physitian hath taught, his most excellent Apothecarie master John Calvin hath compounded, and I your graces most bounden and humble have put into an Englishe box, and do present unto you’ (A3; 5). King Hezekiah (‘Ezechias’), who reformed the temple cult and negotiated with and ultimately surrendered Jerusalem to the Assyrian Sennacherib, supplies a key example of the effects of pride and repentance, illness and cure. Isaiah 38 recounts how he was cured of a boil by prayer and the application of a fig poultice. Calvin’s sermons focus on Hezekiah as an instructive example of self-incrimination. The world of these sermons, in which Lock felt so at ease, is punitive and obsessed with culpability. Punitive gloom and religious instruction are very far removed from Margaret Tyler’s (fl. 1578–95) translation of the first part of the nine books of Diego Ortunez de Calahorra’s The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (1578).73 Deliberately eschewing the task of translating ‘matters of great weight and sadnesse in divinitie or other studies’ (Aiiiv), Tyler devotes the preface to the reader to justifying her choice of a secular, martial romance as both appropriate for women to read and suggestive as an encouragement for women themselves to write. She issues an early modern challenge to prevailing patriarchal restrictions; pursuing the connections between dedications and creative texts, she argues that ‘it is all one for a woman to pen a story as for a man to addresse his story to a woman’ (Aiiiiv). Curiously, Tyler makes no extraordinary claims for her role as translator, offering hospitality and entertainment to a Spanish stranger: ‘The invention, disposition, trimming, and what els in this story is wholly another mans, my part none therein but the translation’ (Aiiiv). Yet her choice and defence of the text itself and adroit championing of the rarity of women as authors in their own right render Tyler’s accomplishment both audacious and prescient. A middle-aged waiting woman, who from approximately 1559 to 1564 had been employed in the household of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and his second wife, Margaret Audley Howard, Tyler dedicates her translation, with which she could have regaled the Duchess of Norfolk, to their son, Lord Thomas Howard. Louise Schleiner has uncovered a 1595 will which could be the translator’s and has speculated about her possible service ‘in households of Norfolk gentry including the Woodhouses and Bacons in the 1570s.’74 Although Tyler’s own background is obscure, the figure of the serving woman 89

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or chambermaid who reads to her mistress is well – but not always laudably – established in early modern portraits. Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho (1605) presents the apprentice Quicksilver’s scheme to insinuate his mistress Sindefy as ‘a gentlewoman of the country’ prepared to ‘buzz pretty devices unto her lady’s ear’ and quick to respond to her mistress’s order to ‘tell me tales, and put me riddles, and read in a book sometimes when I am busy.’ Sir Thomas Overbury’s bawdy character of ‘A Chamber-Mayde,’ ‘so carried away with the Myrrour of Knighthood, ... is many times resolv’d to run out of her selfe, and become a Ladie Errant.’75 The argument of Tyler’s preface to the reader clearly distinguishes her accomplishment from such unsavoury or demeaning representations. Here is a translator speaking to a largely female readership about a woman’s right to choose a ‘prophane’ and ‘manlike’ story (Aiii), to use translation as a vehicle to ‘farther wade ... to ye serch of a truth’ (Aiiii), and to enjoy this story preferred by its translator ‘before matter of more importance’ (Aiiiv) as not unseemly for any sex or age. With relish Tyler contests the anomaly that women may have books dedicated to them which they would not be allowed to read. Although Tina Krontiris’s detailed treatment of The Mirrour introduces the text as ‘not radical,’ she does explain how this chivalric romance pushes against boundaries: the commodification of women, the inhibitions of a rigid class system, and the double standard dictating female modesty and conniving at male adultery. Moreover, Josephine Roberts, the editor of a later romance, Lady Wroth’s Urania (1621), acknowledges the path-breaking importance of Tyler’s distinctive translation, in its omission of references to female weakness, promotion of social mobility, and elaboration of classical allusions.76 In Tyler’s narrative, the union of the emperor of Greece, Trebatio, and the princess of Hungary, Briana, from which emerge the two questing heroes, Rosicleer and Donzel del Febo, only comes about because Trebatio, smitten with Briana’s beauty, kills and assumes the identity of the dowry-hunting British prince, Edward. The emphasis throughout is on love and the fulfilment of desire rather than the use of women to cement alliances. Sexual initiative, however, remains a male prerogative. The British princess Olivia falls in love with and agrees to be the partner of the apparently low-born Rosicleer, while Donzel del Febo, the Knight of the Sun, defends a virtuous but childless wife, wrongly accused of adultery, by killing her accuser and exposing the complicity of her husband. The publication history of English translations of The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood, which became a remarkable success story, serves ironically to eclipse Margaret Tyler, the translator who initiated the Ortunez craze. Until the end of the sixteenth century, the printer Thomas East (or Este) issued at least nine more editions of The Mirrour up to and including Book 5, with C. Burby (or Burbey, or Burbie) issuing Books 6–9. The 90

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identified, presumably male, translators were R. Parry and L.A. Despite the amazing interest and readership to which these additional thirteen editions attest, Margaret Tyler’s name and preface appeared only once, in 1578. The life, reputation, and accomplishment of Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), remain inextricably linked with those of her brother, Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86). Until recently, the Sidney legend, which Lady Mary herself promoted, consigned her to the role of grieving sister and votarist. Reformulators of the early modern canon, especially Michael Brennan, Beth Wynne Fisken, Jonathan Goldberg, Margaret Hannay, Noel Kinnamon, Mary Ellen Lamb, Steven May, Louise Schleiner, Theodore Steinberg, and Gary Waller, have explored Mary Sidney Herbert’s independent virtuosic range, from the psychological reality and conversational immediacy of her work to its astutely positioned political commentary and metrical daring. The Clarendon edition of her complete works admits her to the pantheon of canonical status. Mary Sidney Herbert established more credentials as a translator than her brother. She published under her own name an English version of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1578) as Antonius (1592);77 in the same edition, she included a prose version of Philippe de Mornay’s Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort (1576). Sidney Herbert’s translation of Garnier’s closet drama, titled The Tragedie of Antonie in its 1595 printing, emphasizes pithily and directly the psychological complexity of action and desire, not stinting at all on the corporeal reality and eroticism of the Egyptian queen. Diane Bornstein has demonstrated the superiority of the countess’s concise, accurate translation of de Mornay to the earlier attempt by the London bookseller Edward Aggas, in 1576.78 Sidney Herbert clearly warmed to the blend of Christian and Stoic philosophy in this meditation on death. Her work circulated in manuscript comprises an English version of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte, the completion of the Psalter project (Psalms 44–150), two dedicatory poems prefacing the presentation copy to Queen Elizabeth of this collaborative metrical psalmic paraphrase, and a pastoral dialogue in praise of the queen, ‘Astrea,’ on the occasion of Elizabeth’s visiting Wilton in 1599. ‘The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda,’ a pastoral elegy for her brother which first appeared in Spenser’s collection of laments for Sidney, Astrophel, in 1595, is considered a disputed text, with some readers viewing its apotheosis of the immortal spirit living in Paradise as Spenser’s imitation of the countess. In addition to her renown as a patron of writers and discerning influence in the devotional poetry of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and George Herbert, Lady Mary Sidney Herbert continued the revision, arranged the eclogues, and oversaw the publication of the composite folio consisting of Sir Philip’s new Arcadia with the last three books of the old Arcadia, called The Countess of 91

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Pembroke’s Arcadia. The emended text, according to its secretary Hugh Sanford, was ‘now by more than one interest The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; done, as it was, for her; as it is, by her.’79 Lady Mary also supervised the publication of Sidney’s Defence and the first complete edition of his Astrophil and Stella, and commissioned a fair copy of the Psalms prepared by John Davies of Hereford. She offered this beautiful manuscript, with ‘most of the capitals in gold’ and gilded ‘clubbed stems and looped tails of other letters,’80 to Elizabeth in the names of both translators since, as she knowingly observed, ‘A King should onely to a Queene bee sent’ (‘Even now that Care,’ line 53). Sidney Herbert was a collaborator aware of her own artistic worth. The most famous portrait, completed by Simon van de Passe in 1618, showcases her role as a translator holding the open book of the Psalms of David. We can only speculate whether brother and sister began the Psalter project together or if Sir Philip worked alone, but perhaps in the encouraging presence of his gifted, like-minded sister.Yet claims about Sir Philip’s continuing influence on the countess should not hinder discoveries of her unique daring as the partner who created more than two-thirds of this text. The evidence of the two dedicatory poems is vital to establishing her sense of self as an author. In ‘Even now that care,’ prefacing the 1599 manuscript presentation copy of the metrical psalmic paraphrase, Mary Sidney Herbert imaged their ‘worke’ as woven cloth, with her brother supplying the structural lengthwise threads and the countess crossing them with the weft or woof. Without such interweaving there would be no resultant ‘liverie,’ a word both translators use – Sir Philip in evoking redeemed souls (Psalm 34:10)81 and Lady Mary in imploring divine protection (Psalm 106:10). Conjectures about the ways Sidney and his sister worked together – in life and after his death – contribute to an understanding of the resultant text or ‘liverie’ as a social yet ever-mysterious series of experiments in expressivity, acknowledging language as a process of exchange. The second dedicatory poem, ‘To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney,’ shows the countess itemizing an ‘Audit of [her] woe’ (line 44), possibly modelled, as Lisa Jardine has suggested, on the eleventh exercise of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata, ‘the standard school(boy’s) textbook on rhetorical self-presentation.’82 Humility and inexpressibility topoi, though, do not keep the countess silent throughout the thirteen stanzas, where grief and selfjustification share space and emphasis. The first-person singular voice is audacious: ‘So dar’d my Muse with thine it selfe combine’ (line 5); ‘I call my thoughts’ (line 45); ‘Truth I invoke’ (line 50); ‘theise dearest offrings of my hart ... / I render here’ (lines 78, 81); ‘Deare Soule I take my leave’ (line 88). In the same stanza as she labels her ‘presumption’ a little excessively ‘too too bold’ (line 25), she also presents the completed Psalter: ‘Yet here behold ... / this finish’t now’ (lines 22–3). According to Michael Brennan, ‘it is possible to 92

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sense her determination.’83 Despite being ‘striken dumbe,’ she longs to explain ‘howe workes [her] hart, [her] sences’ (line 46). Reservations about the adequacy of language to express do not prevent her from concluding with an amazing image of ‘theise dearest offrings of [her] hart / dissolv’d to Inke, while penns impressions move / the bleeding veines of never dying love’ (lines 78–80).84 The blood of Sidney’s fatal thigh wound has become a creative medium for the countess; his death has released her writing. In the discussion of Mary Sidney Herbert as a major author in the next chapter, I will examine the Sidneian Psalms in greater detail, considering the ways in which brother and sister produced different poetry. Donne identified Sidney and the countess as ‘this Moses and this Miriam ... [who] tell us why and teach us how to sing’ (‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister,’ lines 46, 22). Although they shared sources, including the Book of Common Prayer, the Huguenot Psalter, the Geneva Bible, translations by Bèze, Marot, and Buchanan, and the commentaries of Calvin, brother and sister dissolved the dichotomies between sacred and secular in individual ways. The Countess of Pembroke emerges from the dedicatory poems and the Sidneian Psalms as a fully-fledged writer, collaborator, partner, finishing her brother’s draft and creating an entirely new work. Whether Genevan principles impinged on their work or whether they remained above the Reformational fray, English women translators of the second half of the sixteenth century show an increasingly close association with the issues of individual authorship. Without consigning translation to a subordinate role, I believe we can detect in the range of work – from Jane Lumley to Mary Sidney Herbert – the transforming, enabling influences of translation itself. Lumley’s subtly stirring perceptions of her own situation, the audibility and confidence of the public voice of the Cooke sisters, Anne Lock’s creative response to source texts, Margaret Tyler’s endorsement of secular material, and Mary Sidney Herbert’s determination to be taken seriously as a poet all argue for the meshing of borrowed texts and original expressivity. Through entering literary discourse, sixteenth-century women translators were becoming direct, active participants in public life.

Theological Debate, Romantic Intrigue, and Classical Tragedy: Elizabeth Cary, Susan DuVerger, Judith Man, Katherine Philips The four early seventeenth-century women who produced translations and who conclude this overview of the genre demonstrate a mingling of original and translated work throughout their careers. Although we can point to only 93

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one text for the eighteen-year-old Judith Man, a translation of a French version of a Latin romance, the work of her contemporaries is more extensive. Susan Du Verger not only translated tales and a novel from French, but also wrote an English rebuttal of Margaret Cavendish’s critique of monasticism. The translations of Elizabeth Cary and Katherine Philips, both bringing French texts to English readers, reveal authorial self-confidence and surety, while their choice of texts – theological debate and classical drama – attests to the continuing mixture of spiritual and secular topics, many supplying midseventeenth-century echoes of women translators’ earlier work. The career of Elizabeth (Tanfield) Cary, Lady Falkland (1585–1639) was long and varied. As a twelve-year-old girl she had translated Abraham Ortelius’s atlas, from the French Epitome du Theatre du Monde (1588), as The Mirror of the Worlde in approximately 1597; this manuscript atlas without maps, owned by the vicar and wardens of St John the Baptist Church, Burford, and on deposit with the Bodleian, is currently being prepared as a scholarly edition. A remarkable piece of juvenilia which she dedicated to her uncle, Sir Henry Lee, a well-travelled courtier and diplomat, The Mirror testifies to Elizabeth Tanfield’s interest in travel, exotic locales, and ‘skill in languages,’ as Michael Drayton’s dedicatory poem in England’s Heroicall Epistles (1597) itemized his praise. Cary had already written the first original drama by an Englishwoman, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), composed approximately eight years before its publication, and had experimented with the hybrid genre of prose chronicle and verse in The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, ostensibly written in 1627, but not published until 1680 (the authorship is still the topic of critical debate), when she turned to Englishing the response of Jacques Davy, Cardinal Du Perron, to King James’s attack of his work. Cary’s daughter and first biographer credits her with translating ‘the rest of his [Du Perron’s] works’ – sermons, discourses, harangues, letters, translations, poetry – ‘which she finished long after but was never able to print.’85 Although the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, seized and burnt copies of Cary’s translation of Du Perron’s reply to James, printed in Douay in 1630, The Lady Falkland: Her Life (written between 1643 and 1649 and preserved in manuscript in Lille) notes that ‘some few copies came to her hands.’ Cardinal Du Perron (1556– 1618), who himself abjured a Calvinist upbringing, held firmly ultramontane (pro-papacy) views against the gallicanism (questioning the irreversibility of papal judgments) of the Sorbonne and the French Parliament. He secured a number of high-profile conversions, most famously that of Henri IV in 1593. Cary’s own conversion to Catholicism resulted in estrangement from Sir Henry Cary and division within her family of nine children who survived infancy. Moreover, Henry Cary’s prodigality likely prompted Cary’s father, Lawrence Tanfield, to disinherit his only child. Yet despite the very real ruptures in the Cary marriage and family, where one son, Lucius, retained 94

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Anglican beliefs, with the surviving daughters and sons becoming nuns and priests on the Continent, Cary’s daughter presents a touching farewell at Henry Cary’s death from bleeding following the amputation of a gangrenous leg. Lady Cary not only attended this grisly scene, but discovered after his death that he had been ‘reading her translation of Perone (which she had given him, and found in his closet ... , all noted by him)’ (221). The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron, to the Answeare of the Most Excellent King of Great Britaine is a translation (464 pp.) of the first four books of the Reply, covering Church history, schisms and heresies, the concept of apostolic succession, and the background to the separation with England. The cardinal’s intention is to attend to ‘purely spirituall’ (463) matters; the tone is informed, precise, and extremely civil. Speaking of James, the cardinal observes ‘that, excepting the title of Catholicke, I know nothing wanting in him to expresse the figure of a perfect and compleate Prince’ (sig. A). The preliminary epistles and encomia are important indices of Cary’s sense of her role and accomplishment as a translator. In dedicating the work ‘To the Maiestie of Henrietta Maria of Bourbon Queene of Great Brittaine,’ Cary invokes ties of culture, marriage, and religion. She appeals to Charles’s queen as ‘a daughter of France, and therefore fittest to owne his worke who was in his time an Ornament of your countrie’; as the queen of England, ‘and therefore fittest to patronize the making him an English man that was so famous a French man’; as the daughter-in-law of the original recipient, and ‘fittest to receive it for him, who are such a parte of him’; as a woman, and ‘therefore fittest to protect a womans worke’; and as a zealous Catholic, ‘and therefore fittest to receive the dedication of a Catholicke worke’ (sig. a2). The poise, conciseness, and architectural skill of this epistle indicate an assured sense of value and achievement. So does the epistle to the reader, in which Cary introduces herself as ‘a Catholique and a Woman’ who seeks in this ‘welintended’ translation ‘to informe thee aright’ (sig. a2v ). Without false modesty, she declares ‘I thinke it well done.’ Refusing the coy excuses that it was printed against her will or by the importunity of friends, she not only assumes ownership of the work but takes justifiable pride in its didactic intent, which should puncture the pomp of university men who do not read French. Another learned Catholic apologist, Susan Du Verger, about whom we know considerably less, dedicated a translation of a work by a prolific French bishop to Queen Henrietta Maria. Les Evenemens Singuliers (1628) by Jean-Pierre Camus, Bishop of Belley, became DuVerger’s Admirable Events (1639), critiquing the chivalric ethic through a series of romance tales full of warnings about sin and exhortations to virtuous behaviour. Du Verger also translated Camus’s novel Diotrephe (1641), dedicated to Catholic aristocrats Lady Elizabeth Somerset Powis and her husband William Herbert Powis; its bizarre narrative 95

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concerns a sexual lottery which compels women whose names are picked from a barrel to live with the ticket holders as their wives for one year. Moreover, Susan DuVerger composed the original work DuVergers Humble Reflections (1657), ‘a defence of monastic life against charges made by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle,’ which was likely published in the recusant centre of Douai; ‘its extraordinarily detailed and passionate description of monastic life may reflect [DuVerger’s] being a member of a religious order.’86 Eighteen-year-old Judith Man offers more clues about her background in the dedicatory and prefatory materials of An Epitome of the History of Faire Argenis and Polyarchus (1640). Although John Barclay’s Latin prose romance had already been translated into English by Kingesmill Long in 1625 and Sir R. LeGuys and Thomas May in 1628, Man offers a translation from the French of M.N. Coeffeteau, Bishop of Marseilles. Identified as the daughter of William Man of Lyndsell, Essex, and granddaughter of John Man, warden of Merton College, Oxford,87 Man discloses the fact that she has been admitted to the household of the Earl of Strafford, lord lieutenant of Ireland. Because of her association ‘in a Schoole of Vertue’ (A2v) with Lady Anne Wentworth, the eldest daughter, Man dedicates this romance of the triumph of virtuous love to Lady Anne ‘as the Fairest, most Vertuous, and Constant Princesse of Her time’ (A3), with the hope that she may soon find a ‘worthy’ husband, ‘her Poliarchus, as the most Compleat Prince of the Earth’ (A4v). Admitting that her ‘humour inclin[es] to Melancholy’ (A5), she lets the reader know that the exercise was a Christmas diversion that she was ‘in a manner forc’d to expose ... to the publike view’ (A7). The expressions of diffidence, perhaps reflecting her youth and inexperience with public scrutiny, contrast markedly with the poise and self-assurance of Cary and Philips. Though she acknowledges the exception of ‘giving Argenis the precedency, rather then unto Poliarchus in the Frontispice of this Booke,’ she also notes her endebtedness to the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Mary Wroth, and ‘many of my sexe who have traced me the way’ (A7). Aware of a female literary tradition yet entering it hesitantly, Man invokes her ‘meere obedience and duty’ in exhorting the reader ‘to excuse the faults, if there be any, and remember, that women (for the most part) are unacquainted with the studies of Sciences; and by that meanes, may sooner erre’ (A7v). Full of the standard romance elements of swordplay, secret passageways, surprise revelations of siblings, and court intrigue, An Epitome ‘is a lively portraiture’ that ‘there is more prickles then Roses found in Royalty’ (2). This story of the protracted marriage of two noble characters, Argenis, daughter and heir of the King of Sicily, and Poliarchus, Prince and heir of France, relies on disguise to propel the action. Her long-delayed marriage to Poliarchus 96

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represents not only the union of ‘the two Crownes of France and Sicily’ but a sweet consummation after ‘all the crosses which [they] had suffered in this pursuit’ (71). Although the use of the code name ‘Poliarchus’ connects the poet, translator, and letter writer Katherine Philips (1632–64) to Judith Man, differences in generic experimentation and fame continue to separate them. Philips’s translation of Pierre Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée (1644), which she completed in 1663, provoked enough interest to lead to stage productions that year at the Theatre Royal in Smock Alley in Dublin and, in London, at the theatres in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and St James’s. Styling herself ‘Orinda,’ Philips wrote letters to Sir Charles Cotterell, whom she called ‘Poliarchus,’ revealing her anxieties about the accuracy of her work and the competing multi-authored translation, Pompey the Great translated by Certain Persons of Honour, a collaboration by Edmund Waller and four others which she referred to as ‘a place where so many of the greatest Wits have so long clubb’d.’88 Yet she also insisted that a copy of her translation be presented to the Duchess of York; in the event, copies were presented to both Charles II (Letter XXXI) and the duchess (Letter XXII). Corneille’s play about ancient Egypt, in which all glory is tainted and alliances are faithless, enjoyed great popularity in the seventeenth century. This vogue was possibly due to the topical parallels between the ruinous influence of the counsellor Photin on the ambitious but weak-willed boyking Ptolomy, who orders the death of Pompey, and the power exerted by Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin at the courts of Louis XIII and XIV. It is difficult for a contemporary reader of Corneille to see beyond the galanterie of set pieces about power, fate, and the impossibility of a return to virtue. None of the characters inspires sympathy: the titular hero does not appear; Ptolomy repays Pompey for placing him and Cleopatra on the Egyptian throne by arranging Pompey’s murder and ousting his sister; Caesar’s dalliance with Cleopatra is more political than passionate, resulting in the defeat of Ptolomy and the restoration of Cleopatra; and Caesar himself is pursued by Pompey’s widow, Cornelia, who is bent on vengeance. The strategies are grimly, relentlessly Machiavellian. Philips’s translation not only captures the nuance of Corneille’s alexandrines with precision and clarity, it also adds songs for the intervals between the five acts. While the songs are undistinguished, the play text itself is remarkable for the adroitness with which she represents Corneille’s metaphoric language. Philips’s Ptolomy speaks like a cunning bureaucrat, transforming the hints of metaphors about fortune’s wheel into the rationalizing strategies of a little dictator. Corneille’s Cleopatra is no siren or femme fatale, but a schemer who always lands on her feet: 97

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England Je n’ouvre point les yeux sur ma grandeur si proche, Qu’aussitôt à mon coeur mon sang ne le reproche, J’en ressens dans mon âme un murmure secret, Et ne puis remonter au Trône sans regret. (5.5.1787–96)

Philips’s Cleopatra utters a groan as she becomes queen: No sooner on my Grandeur I reflect, But my Ambition by my Blood is checkt. I meet my Fortune with a secret Groan, Nor dare without Regret ascend the Throne. (5.5.33–42)

A female admirer, identified only as ‘Philo-Philippa,’ sent her commendatory verses, ‘To the excellent Orinda,’ following a production of Pompey in 1663, though not published until 1667. In Philo-Philippa’s estimate, Orinda’s accomplishment is creative translation. To render word for word, at the old rate, Is only but to Construe, not Translate: In your own fancy free, to his sence true, We read Corneille, and Orinda too. (lines 157–60)89

At the time of her early death from smallpox, contracted during a visit to London to protest a pirated edition of her poems, Philips left unfinished a working translation of Corneille’s Horace. She had also translated French poetry: Marc-Antoine de Gérard, sieur de Saint-Amant’s ‘La Solitude,’ Monsieur de Scudéry’s ‘Pastoral’ from Almahide, ou L’Esclave Reine, and fifteen of the twenty-one stanzas from Corneille’s De l’imitation de Jesus-Christ. Traduite et paraphrasée en Vers François. This version of à Kempis appropriately closes the circle of early modern women’s translations. It recalls Margaret Beaufort’s devotional prose a century and a half earlier, itself likely mediated from Latin through French.Yet Philips’s cultivation of a direct, simple, personal voice also stands apart from the Lady Margaret’s paratactical constructions and invoked authorities. Ironically, despite the fact that Philips is translating, her ‘Fragment,’ derived from Corneille’s translation of Book 3, chapter 2 of à Kempis, stresses the importance (and perhaps the impossibility) of unmediated communication with the divine: I ask no Moses that for thee could speak, Nor Prophet to enlighten me, They are all taught, & sent by thee, And ’tis thy voice I only seek. (stanza 8)

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Meditations and Testimonials After the fine grain of the single-genre overview of translation, which nevertheless embraced prose, drama, and verse, it may seem inconsistent to switch to the wide mesh of multiple genres. My reasons for doing so are straightforward and, I trust, consistent. Meditations, testimonials, and prayers, along with diaries and letters, were overlapping modes of expressivity for early modern women. They testify to the reciprocal early modern relationship between cognition and spirituality. Using everyday occurrences as their context and enunciating, often combining, struggles about systems of belief, emotional attachments, and financial security, these texts were all – either intentionally or inadvertently – autobiographical. Moreover, in many cases, they remain the only source of information about the author herself. However difficult it may be for us in a postmodern context to fully understand, religious practice and doctrinal adherence affected all aspects of life in Tudor England. Religion was both national and hegemonic. Without submitting to the lures of either demonizers or hagiographers, we can see elements of admirable frailty and resolve in the dramatic reversals of fortunes experienced by some of the leading lights in Henrician, Edwardian, and Marian reigns. Bishop John Fisher, mentor of Lady Margaret Beaufort and chancellor of Cambridge University, was executed for refusing to accept the Primacy, as was Lord Chancellor Thomas More. William Tyndale, the strange and familiar ghost writer of what became the Authorized Version, was strangled and burned because of the unorthodoxy of his biblical translation. An orthodox Catholic humanist in his formation, Thomas Cranmer, primate of the Anglican Church for over twenty-five years and author of the Book of Common Prayer, was burned at Oxford, along with his episcopal colleagues Ridley and Latimer, for opposing the Marian restoration of Catholicism. Women who wrote and spoke on matters of devotion and belief were acutely aware of the perils of transgression. When Anne Askew was being examined by the King’s Council at Greenwich for her views on the Eucharist and when Henry’s last queen, Kateryn Parr, was composing her prayers and meditations, heresy was a capital offence, punishable by burning or hanging. In June 1539 Parliament passed the Act of the Six Articles, requiring acceptance of the corporal presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist, reception of communion in one kind, celibacy of the clergy, and auricular confession, and acknowledging the efficacy of private masses and the importance of vows of chastity. While we might consider the Eucharistic formula ‘This is My Body’ as a complicated word-game involving either catachresis or metonymy, the doctrine of transubstantiation, that is, the change of the entire substance of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at the Consecration of the 99

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Mass, was an article of faith to be enforced under pain of death. To underscore the volatility of the period and the emergence of a distinctly Protestant theology, it is worth noting that this view of transubstantiation was reversed in less than two decades. The Forty-Two Articles, drafted by Archbishop Cranmer for Edward VI and promulgated in June 1553, declared in Article 29 that ‘the change of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s body and blood cannot be proved by Holy Writ, but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.’ Although Edward’s sudden death in the next month meant that these articles were not immediately enforced, in the return to Romish practices and theology under Mary, the Forty-Two Articles were the basis of the Elizabethan revision, the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), which became the official doctrinal catalogue of the Church of England. As Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt pithily observe, ‘most of the significant and sustained thinking in the early modern period about the nature of linguistic signs centered on or was deeply influenced by eucharistic controversies.’90 Anne Askew (ca. 1521–46), a twenty-five-year-old gentlewoman from Lincolnshire, composed accounts of the two interrogations she underwent, in 1545 and 1546, prior to being burned as a heretic at Smithfield on 16 July 1546. The First Examinacyon (1546) and The Lattre Examinacyon (1547) were first edited, commented on, and published at Wesel in the Duchy of Cleves, near Düsseldorf, by John Bale, the antipapist Protestant propagandist, and later in both Latin and English by the martyrologist John Foxe in his Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum Commentarii (1559) and Actes and Monuments (1563). Bale prefaces Askew’s text with biographical information about the author, ‘a gentylwoman verye yonge, dayntye, and tender,’ whose ‘infatygable sprete’ and ‘hygh stomaked’ resolve he compares to that of Blandina of Lyons, martyred under Marcus Aurelius in 177.91 Bale also interleaves extensive and vehement anti-Catholic commentary in Askew’s narrative. In her two chronological accounts, her adaptation of Psalm 54, which closes The First Examinacyon, and the ballad she composed and sang in Newgate, which closes The Lattre Examinacyon, Askew shows a remarkable ability to hold her own and defend herself. Askew’s uncompromising rigour illustrates for Ellen Macek ‘a pattern of female spiritual maturation,’ while for Brad Gregory her passionate denial of transubstantiation ‘typifies the embrace of anti-Nicodemite attitudes, ... [which] specifically condemned those who, in order to avoid persecution, engaged in Catholic practices despite harboring Protestant sympathies.’92 John Knott draws attention to the instructional importance of Askew’s record as an ‘effort to witness to God’s truth for the instruction and support of the faithful.’93 Anne Askew was the daughter of Elizabeth (Wrottesley) and Sir William Askew (sometimes Ayscough or Ascue), high sherrif of Lincolnshire. While 100

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her sister Jane married into prominent Protestant families, Anne was forced into a marriage with the staunchly Catholic Thomas Kyme, following the death of her other sister Martha, who had been betrothed to him. Despite a Catholic upbringing, Anne’s Reformist views matured, through her reading of her own copy of Tyndale’s Bible which had been Englished in 1537 (the so-called Thomas Matthew Bible, edited by John Rogers, a friend of Tyndale) and her private copy of John Frith’s A Boke (1533), a theological tract against transubstantiation for which its author was burned. Kyme compelled Askew to leave his house after the birth of their two children. Seeking a divorce in London, Askew also re-established connection with Queen Kateryn Parr’s circle of Reform-minded noblewomen; this association brought her to the attention of the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, and the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, all of whom were seeking to expose and attack the queen’s theological independence. Askew’s first-person account of the ‘quest’ or inquiry into her beliefs during her first imprisonment, in the Counter in London, demonstrates her agility and poise as an interlocutor, whose powerful, terse replies defeat the schemes of her interrogators to trip her up. In defending her testimony about preferring five lines of the Bible to hearing five Masses, she buttresses her argument, ‘bycause the one ded greatlye edyfye me, and the other nothinge at all’ (lines 68–9), with Paul’s image of the trumpet giving an uncertain sound (I Corinthians 13). When pressed for her reaction to the approved catechism, ‘the kynges boke’ (line 127), her response is blunt: ‘I coulde saye nothynge to it, bycause I never sawe it’ (line 128). She does not mince words in describing private masses for the repose of departed souls as ‘great Idolatrye to beleve more in them, than in the death whych Christ dyed for us’ (lines 169–70). Askew has a knack for returning her interrogators’ questions with a sting, refusing to be tempted to say more than she could possibly know about scholastic debate since she ‘was but a woman, and knewe not the course of scoles’ (line 185). She shames her accusers, who are quick to condemn Frith but who have not read his book, for this proof of their ‘verye slendre wytt’ (line 596). Having skilfully deployed the tactics of her gendered position and of irony and silence to avoid signing the confession Bonner had prepared for her, Askew is aware of the temporariness of her victory in gaining a release. The closing psalmic prayer, ‘The voyce of Anne Askew out of the 54. Psalm of David,’ celebrates her insight about the peril she is in, recognizing the ‘faythlesse men’ who ‘agaynst me ryse’ and ‘my deathe practyse’ (lines 5–6) and thankful for the revelation ‘declarynge what, myne enymyes be’ (line 16). Both The First Examinacyon and The Lattre Examinacyon feature the frontispiece of a strong, upright, robed female figure, her face illuminated with rays of light, holding a palm of victory in her left hand and a boldly titled text of 101

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the Bible in the other. She is standing on top of and effectively crushing a dragon wearing the papal tiara. In a citational border both texts proclaim that ‘Anne Askewe stode fast by thys veryte of God to the ende.’ The biblical text providing the base of the woodcut in The First Examinacyon praises the woman who fears the Lord, who ‘openeth her mouthe to wysdome and in her language is the lawe of grace’ (Proverbs 31:26). The text for The Lattre Examinacyon emphasizes the continuing resonance of this language by citing the prophet Joel on the poured-out divine spirit through which ‘your sonnes and your doughters shall prophecye’ (Joel 2:28). Fittingly, Askew’s insistence throughout The Lattre Examinacyon is on the pre-eminence of scripture as the ultimate touchstone and criterion for ecclesiastical judgment. She upholds an empirical reality, maintaining that ‘as for that ye call your God, is but a pece of breade’ (lines 604–5). Her challenge of ocular proof continues: ‘lete it lye in the boxe but iii. monthes, and it will be moulde, and so turne to nothynge that is good. Whereupon I am persuaded, that it can not be God’ (lines 605–9). Though prompted and goaded, she refuses to inform on Queen Kateryn’s circle, whose members are named by Askew’s interrogators: Catherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk; Anne Radcliffe, Countess of Sussex; Anne Stanhope, Countess of Hertford; Lady Joan Denny; and Lady Jane FitzWilliam. Similarly, she pleads ignorance of the benefactors who have passed money along to her through her maid. However exceptional the torture, she is racked in Newgate by the lord chancellor and his lieutenant Richard Rich; although she argues with Wriothesley on the bare floor, she does not recant. Inspired by Ephesians 6:11–18 and possibly by the treatment of mutability in the paraphrases of Ecclesiastes 3 and 4 of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,94 ‘The Balade whych Anne Askew made and sange whan she was in Newgate’ details the armour she wears ‘as the armed knyght / Appoynted to the fielde’ (lines 1–2). In an affecting picture Foxe recounts how, being crippled by the rack, she was carried on a chair to Smithfield, an area of open land adjoining the city wall, used for pasture, poultry and cattle markets, and executions. She was unmoved by the pleas of Nicholas Shaxton, formerly bishop of Salisbury, who had recanted, that she do the same. Along with three other martyrs Askew was tied to the stake and burned. Four decades later, the Reverend John Mush’s biography of the Catholic martyr Margaret Clitherow presents an equally affecting – though contrastive – account of silence. While manuscript reports of the interrogation of this mother of three on the charge of harbouring priests, a felony punishable by death according to the Statute of 1585, her refusal to accept any of the thirteen invitations to reconsider her silence, and her gruesome last six hours as she was pressed to death at York in 1586 circulated in the late sixteenth century, Mush’s edition of Clitherow’s life was not printed until the nine102

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teenth century. Unlike Bale’s public assertions and interventions to champion Askew, Mush’s more private and deliberately hagiographic account shapes both subject construction and political purpose. As Megan Matchinske observes, ‘Elizabethan Catholic identity ... allow[ed] subjects to conform and resist for personal reasons and particular audiences.’ The influence of Father Mush as exemplar and ‘champion for the faith’ is evident too in the adolescence of Mary Ward, the founder of the Jesuit-inspired, unenclosed religious community for women, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Mush was the ‘ordinary confessor’ at Bapthorpe near York, the manor house of the Bapthorpe family, relatives of Mary’s mother, where she lived from 1600 to 1604, before beginning her experiments with religious life on the Continent.95 Though Kateryn Parr had neither the inclination nor the option to be a private person, she was aware of the climate of treachery and betrayal at the close of Henry’s reign. The queen, whose Reformist principles Gardiner, Bonner, and Wriothesley were desperately attempting to expose through the trial of Anne Askew, proved a shrewd tactician. Broader in scope than Askew’s Examinacyons and unmediated by an editor, Kateryn Parr’s spiritual autobiography, The Lamentacion of a synner (1547), is the first original prose composition by an Englishwoman. Withheld from publication until after Henry’s death, the text is a strategic staging of the self, which discloses through its public confessions, structuring contrasts, and subtle interlacing of individual and communal admonitions many of the hazards faced by a noble widow. Henry VIII’s sixth and last queen, herself in her third, but not final, marriage, Kateryn Parr was childless at this point. Experienced as a stepmother to Lord Latimer’s two children, she played an important role in the lives of Henry’s heirs. Queen Kateryn encouraged Princess Mary to begin the translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John. Princess Elizabeth’s New Year’s present of The Glass of the Sinful Soul, her translation of Kateryn’s Prayers or Meditacions into French, Italian, and Latin for her father, and the four of her five extant adolescent letters addressed to Kateryn all testify to the queen’s immense influence on Elizabeth. Kateryn may also have composed two elegant Latin letters to Prince Edward. The prime mover behind the project of translating Erasmus’s New Testament Paraphrases and subject of the text’s six dedicatory epistles, Queen Kateryn Parr lived her chosen, appropriately vernacular, motto, ‘to be useful in what I do.’96 She served as regent from July to October 1544, while Henry led the war in France. Before the autobiography, she published an anonymous translation of Psalmes and Prayers (1544) and identified herself as author of Prayers or Meditacions (1545). Her letter (26 February 1546) to Cambridge University, whose Regius Professor of Civil Law had expressed his colleagues’ fear of Henry’s newly granted 103

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power over them and had enlisted her help as an ally, reminded the university of its role as a centre of religious, as distinct from humanist, learning. Kateryn exhorted her readers ‘to studye and applye those doctrines as maynes and apte degrees to the atteyning and settyng forthe the better Christes reverent and most sacred doctryne, ... that Cambrydge may be accountyd rather an unyversytie of devyne phylosophie than of naturall or morall as Athens was.’97 Kateryn’s arguably most personal and intimate work, which she described as ‘a continuall conversacion in faythe,’98 is a Reformation paraphrase, a polyphony of Erasmus, Cranmer, Latimer, and Coverdale. This purposefully unresolved blend of biblical, devotional, and polemical influences is also intertextual, in the sense of ‘heaping up references to other parts of the Bible.’99 A conversation, too, between past and present selves, The Lamentacion100 dramatizes metaphorically the struggles in Kateryn’s psyche throughout her third marriage. Kateryn’s most recent biographer, Susan James, presents The Lamentacion as a ‘tangled skein of religious ideas.’101 Without unravelling it or disentangling the knots Kateryn has left in this skein, I want to attend to the ways she created or wove The Lamentacion. A pastiche of biblical quotes and allusions and a digest of the queen’s reading of Protestant and reform-minded Catholic authorities, the text relies on a series of metaphorical knots to summarize, tie up, and connect discursive subjects. In the first half of the account these personally inflected metaphors, the ‘intangled & waywarde maze’ of sin (Bii), ‘the booke of the crucifixe’ (Ciii), and ‘the passions of the fleshe [as] medicines of ye soule’ (D), function as synopsizing, figurative doctrines. In the second half the borrowed image of Henry VIII as Moses and the exhortation for all men and women ‘to become mete tillage for the fruites of the gospel’ (Fvii) underscore the text’s broadly instructive mission. Throughout Kateryn is recasting her Catholic upbringing as well as perhaps her two earlier marriages to Catholic widowers through the filter of Reformation principles and texts. In ‘bewailyng the ignoraunce of her blind life,’ Kateryn admits to the pride of thinking ‘I waulked in the perfit and right way’ (Aiii), and identifies the folly of her concept of auricular confession and confidence in the ‘bishop of Rome, ... trusting with greate confidence ... to receyve full remission of my sinnes’ (Av). The queen who loved dancing, diamonds, and crimson-coloured robes admits ‘I made a great ydol of my self: for I loved my self better then god’ (Aiiii). The opening section, replete with self-recrimination, stresses the inescapability of sin through the thrice-repeated metaphor of ‘this intangled & waywarde maze’ (Bii). Although Susan James labels this metaphor Calvinist, there is nothing exclusively Calvinist about the image of the maze, nor has Kateryn abandoned reason to explain her belief. Her sense of sin as a 104

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leaving of the path, disorder, and distortion fits especially the Old Testament depiction of a turning away from God. At no time does her image of the maze absolve the sinner of guilt for a wilful act, one unforced by compulsion or neurosis. Moreover, the understanding of sin’s entanglement that ensnares is fundamentally biblical (see Job 18:8; Psalms 119:110; Ecclesiastes 29:21). Kateryn’s image of the imprisonment of sin reflects her awareness of the consequential linkages of temptation, desire, sin, and death (James 1:14–15) and reiterates the Pauline conundrum, ‘For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do’ (Romans 7:19). She has, to be sure, embarked on a structured, affective, guardedly revealing public confession – the sort of candour we could associate with Erasmus’s Colloquies. Buttressed with marginal biblical citations, her account of justification by faith uses the imagery of the eye to link creature and Creator in the exercise of scrutiny. Kateryn’s repetitions about the faith that directs the eye in the study of ‘the booke of the crucifixe’ (Ciii) do not exclude book learning; in fact, she encourages biblical study – no doubt in full awareness of the 1543 Act of Parliament forbidding anyone below the rank of gentlewoman to read or discuss it. She argues that the Crucifixion ‘turned hatred into love, with his benefites, and godly zele’ (Cv–vi). Kateryn’s knowledge of Benedetto da Mantova’s Beneficio di Giesu Cristo Crocifisso or Edward Courtney’s manuscript translation remains an unsolved mystery.102 What is certain is the creative blend of the textual and the iconic in this principle of study: personal reading of the Bible, presumably in the vernacular, along with contemplation of the crucifix as a devotional object, a sacramental. Reformation and Romanist ideas are joined in this salient trope. Contrasts generate all movement. Frailties become strengths. Her metaphorical declaration, ‘The passions of the flesh are medicines of ye soule’ (D), astutely blends biblical reading with her considerable interest in Tudor pharmacopoeia. Henry VIII emerges as Moses, ‘moste godly, wise governer & kyng [who] hath delivered us oute of ye captivitie & bondage of Pharao, ... the bishop of Rome’ (Ei). Though she borrows the images from Coverdale’s preface to his English Bible (1535), an image Udall also appropriated, in the Paraphrases, Kateryn manages an adroit manoeuvre: simultaneously disarming the suspicions Henry voiced in the last year of his life about his studious, Reform-minded queen and overlooking the action at Meribah that blocked Moses’s entry into the Promised Land. Kateryn Parr may have been ‘unlettred’ in the sense of lacking a broad knowledge of Latin scholarship or the credentials of formal education. But, neither simple nor illiterate, she certainly deserves a place among English authors. This place would have to recognize the values of paradox and astuteness in her career. Here is a writer who knew the political work devotional literature could perform. Henry’s queen, who had outmanoeuvred 105

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his henchmen and mollified him, clearly fashioned obedience and homebound learning in productive ways. Two early seventeeth-century examples of women’s devotional writing, one Protestant and the other Recusant, typify the different directions this writing could take, as it reflected states of establishment or persecution. Helen Livingston, Countess of Linlithgow, supplies a bold contrast to the fraught politics of meditative discourse. In an enumerated, creedal, first-person list her Confession and Conversion (1629) catalogues opposition to priests, Latin prayers, medals, relics, and the Mass. The Catholic devotions of the Englishwoman Jane Owen, An Antidote Against Purgatory (1634), which was published posthumously at St Ommer and which included a translation of one chapter of Cardinal Bellarmine’s De Gemitu Columbae (The Mourning of the Dove), stresses the pains and flames of Purgatory – as appropriate yet also enabling reflections of times of persecution. This instructive warning, influenced as Dorothy Latz has noted by pre-Tridentine language of torture, shows remarkable, courageous observations of English Catholic life, during a period when ‘Catholic instruction/preaching was forbidden by the penal laws.’103 Owen was likely in Flanders only for the final years of her life, some time after 1626. But a sense of writing under interdict does not in any way cripple her style. The Countess of Linlithgow’s absolute assurances about truth and salvation were not characteristic of most women’s meditative exercises. Nor were Owen’s warnings of purgatorial flames. Mistress Rutherford’s Scottish Puritan autobiography, nestled in the Wodrow Manuscripts at the University of Edinburgh (Laing Mss, La. III. 263: Wodrow Octavo 33, no. 6), relates the tumult, isolation, and periodic despair experienced by its author (or subject) in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. Orphaned at the age of nine, raised thereafter by grandparents, choosing a marriage partner for herself, and communicating the effects of the deaths of this unnamed partner and their only child, Mistress Rutherford probably lived ‘on the fringes of the Scottish privileged caste’; she explains throughout the narrative her hard-won ‘conviction sustained by puritan doctrine and community.’104 Spiritual doubt and fear were never totally debilitating for Mistress Rutherford. As the following excerpted childhood experience illustrates, she realized through recourse to the scriptures and community leaders that she was never ‘comfortless’ (John 14:18): ‘And one Sabbath I arose timely to seek preparation for the right spending of the day (quhilk I had come short of at night) and went to the waterside aneath the place, and lay anneathe the water brae, laying out my want to God. My longing for God and death (that I might enjoy him without intermesion) encreased that I could do litle but mourn for to be out of the body and to be with him ... While I am weeping for enjoying of God and fear to mispend the day, John 14 at the beginning is cast into my mind, Let not etc. 106

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in my Father’s house etc. ... Thus lovingly was I reproved; I had a sweet blyth day.’ Few religious accounts were as succinct as Livingston’s (30 pp. in a slim 60 × 110 mm volume) or Mistress Rutherford’s (16 MS pp.). Alice Sutcliffe’s Meditations of Mans Mortalitie; or, A Way to True Blessedness, first published in 1633 and in an ‘enlarged’ second edition by 1634, consists of six prose meditations (140 pp.) and eighty-eight stanzas of poetry (60 pp.). Identifying her husband, John Sutcliffe, as ‘Groome of his Maiesties most Honourable Privie Chamber’ on the title-page, and dedicating the work to the Duchess of Buckingham, whom she praises as being ‘more then a Mother to mee,’ and her sister the Countess of Denbeigh, Sutcliffe ‘humbly crave[s] ... a favourable Censure of my proceedings, it beeing ... not usuall for a Woman to doe such things’ (A4). However, she was well aware of the value of prestigious preliminaries; in addition to her acrostics to the duchess and countess, she includes four poems of praise, from Jonson, Wither, Heywood, and Lenton. Ben Jonson wittily observed that anyone who ‘had supp’d so deepe of this sweet Chalice, / Must CELIA be, the anagram of ALICE.’ George Wither disarmed critics of a writing woman’s accomplishment, noting I am not of their mind, who if they see Some Female-Studies fairely ripened be, (With Masculine successe) doe peevishly, Their worths due honour unto them deny, By overstrictly censuring the same; Or doubting whether from themselves it came.

The remarkable feature of Sutcliffe’s Meditations, in addition to the ways its dedication and encomia are ‘designed to promote her husband and herself,’105 is its sheer abundance of images of transience, a baroque farrago of biblical and contemporary idioms: ‘Thou shalt finde this World to bee a Casket of sorrowes and grievances, a Schoole of Vanity, a laborinth of Errors, a dungeon of Darknesse, a Market-place of Cousenages, a way beset with Theeves, a ditch full of mud, and a Sea continually tost and troubled with stormes and Tempests’ (81). As well as being less punctilious and crisp than the Countess of Linlithgow’s, most women’s discourses of religious and meditative experiences, particularly during the period of the Civil War and Protectorate, also accentuated the spiritual unease described by Mistress Rutherford. In Elizabeth Warren’s learned meditations, Spiritual Thrift (1647), replete with Latin marginal glosses from biblical and patristic sources, this Suffolk gentlewoman likened the ‘Civill War’ and its ‘unnaturall divisions’ to a ‘tumour’ (35) in need of lancing. Praised by Robert Cade in a prefatory note as a ‘Deborah [who] present[s] in 107

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these her labours Bee-like a sting and hony conjoyn’d,’ Warren was precise and didactic in directing her readers ‘to give up our selves, in all holy service to our heavenly Master, in whose sacred Academy we have been instructed, in the saving principles of celestiall wisdome’ (39). Alongside a marginal gloss announcing ‘Clavis est scientia scriptuarum,’ she upheld Scripture ‘as an infallible guide,’ especially for ‘the weaker sex, ... who armed with abilities to understand the Scriptures, become a prey to erroneous teachers’ (80–1). The motif of instructive weakness presents a more complex problem of interpretation, requiring the scrutiny of narrative strategies and intervening voices, as in the case of the witnessed torments of Sarah Wight, a sinstruck sixteen-year-old Londoner. She experienced seventy days of catatonic numbness and inedia from April to July 1647, a period corresponding to the interval during which Parliament denied the soldiers in the New Model Army, who themselves wanted to delimit the power of Parliament and the king, the right to petition. While Dorothy Ludlow maintains that Sarah Wight was ‘never a threat to civil authorities,’ Barbara Ritter Dailey draws illuminating parallels between the catatonia of this ‘holy innocent’ and a muzzling of public voices.106 Unlike John Bale’s publishing of the testimony and championing of the cause of Anne Askew a century earlier, the Reverend Henry Jessey, an Independent Baptist minister, transcribed and, as some argue, ventriloquized the voice of Sarah Wight in The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced by the Spirit of Grace, in an Empty Nothing Creature (1647). Jessey not only documents Sarah Wight’s struggles to speak, name, and declare her sinfulness, he also makes her an enabling counsellor of other distressed souls, who are all women. Numerous dramatic suicide attempts – stabbing and scorching her body, pounding her head until it bled, jumping from a roof, throwing herself to the dogs on Lambeth Marsh – are punctuated with declarations of worthlessness as ‘a reprobate, a castaway’ (14). Jessey stresses the superiority of her despair, as in this exchange between Sarah and another young gentlewoman. Mris. A. I must be damn’d. Mris S. I am damn’d already, from all eternitie, all eternitie ... A. I was a great professor, but I was but an hypocrite, and an hypocrites hope shall perish. S. I have been an hypocrite, a revolter, a backslider. A. I know it shall be well with you. S. As well as it was with Judas, who repented and hang’d himselfe: which I must doe before I shall be free from these torments. (44)

Interrogated by disbelieving critics anxious to nullify her inability to eat or sleep and sought out as a spiritual psychoanalyst, Sarah withstands these 108

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external tests and, through grace, overcomes the terror of beholding herself ‘in hell locally’ (78). Jane Turner, wife to Parliamentary Army captain John Turner, justified the printing of her private meditations, Choice Experiences of the kind dealings of God before, in, and after Conversion: Laid down in six general Heads (1653), as ‘an instrument for the good of souls’ (B8). Addressed to brethren at Newcastle, Berwick, and Scotland, and recounting her successive conversions from being a Presbyterian, a Quaker, and finally a Baptist, Choice Experiences catalogues the confusion, doubts, and candidly admitted vanities of a believer who explores the nature of experience itself. ‘[E]xperience is more than a bare nowledge, it is either a begetter, or an effect of knowledge, and hath alwaies relation to some rule, ... if in natural things, it must answer a rule of nature, if in spiritual, it must answer a spiritual rule and the holy Scripture is that rule’ (198). Turner’s disclosures of what were for her the inadequacies of Quakerism, especially the claims about Christ within denying or limiting the wholeness of the gospel, did not go unnoticed. In his refutation, Something in Answer to a Book called Choice Experiences, Given forth by one J. Turner (1654), Quaker Edward Burrough charged bluntly: ‘she is in confusion and hath never been out of it, not somewhat in confusion, but is rowled and swallowed up in it’ (5). The influence of a rigorous Parliamentary family is another recurring motif, especially prominent in the related fears and sense of tumult in Anne Venn’s A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning (1658). This posthumous publication, surprisingly discovered in her closet, consists of three books of ‘experiences,’ sometimes called ‘experiments,’ following her psychic journey from the age of nine until her mid-thirties, in which Venn relates and bemoans her recognition of sinfulness, of enslavement to Satan, and of the need of prayers. She was the daughter of John Venn, Colonel of Foot in the Parliamentary Army, who had been a severe governor of Windsor Castle, plundering chapels and profiting from the estates of dispossessed papists; he was also a regicide whose name and seal were affixed to the death warrant of Charles I. Anne Venn laments the death of this ‘dear and precious Father ... in so sad and sudden a manner’ (26) in 1650 (suicide was suspected). The preface to A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning was supplied by her step-father Thomas Weld, who marvelled at the amount and tenor of manuscripts discovered, in which ‘she would often and deeply judge herself ’ (A4). An insomniac, who analysed her assumed failings with ferocious zeal to ‘see what was in the bottom of my heart, ... to turn the very inside of my heart outward and anatomize it before my eyes’ (74), Venn recounts the struggles of her soul in ways that mirror the topsyturvydom of the realm: ‘Surely the Lord hath been a long time, yea for many years, emptying me from vessel to vessel, and turning me, as it were, upside down, laying me under variety of conditions and dispensations, sometimes under mercies, sometimes afflictions, ... scoffs, scornes, injuries, wrongs 109

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from neer relations, sometimes sickness, weaknesses, pains, bodily trialls, spiritual exercises, under the power of corruption and temptation of all sorts’ (74). A remarkable feature of women’s meditative writing during the tumultuous years following the execution of Charles I and the defeat at Worcester is the expression of catharsis and attempted reintegration in the discourse of spiritual abjection, best exemplified in Elizabeth Major’s Honey on the Rod (1656), a combination of poetry and prose. In the preface to the densely packed, tiny volume (7.5 cm × 14.5 cm) bearing her name and published in the year of the opening of the second Protectorate Parliament, Joseph Caryl,107 who supplies the text’s Imprimatur, identifies her as ‘an afflicted Gentlewoman.’ Operating in a unique theological register, Honey on the Rod contains no reference to national events – the execution of the king, the Engagement (the official pledge of loyalty to the new Commonwealth), the work of the New Model Army, the defeat at Worcester, the installation of the Lord Protector, or the activities of successive Rump, Barebones, or Protectorate Parliaments – occurring at the same time as the inner experiences related. Autobiographical information gleaned mainly from the opening of the second section, consisting of rhyming couplets, reveals that her mother died in Major’s infancy, that she was brought up until age fifteen by ‘a godly and careful father,’ and that after ten years of either service or tutelage (or both) in ‘a great and honorable family’ Major was crippled and forced to return home, where she wasted time and money with dissolute companions who ‘pretended skill in lameness’ (h2– h3). Having ‘unmasked’ sin and confessed herself ‘a long and a perverse wanderer’ (h5), she catalogues her own inconstancy and vulnerability through the course of the book’s 212 pages. The reduced, twisted, maimed body houses a chastened, restored, invigorated spirit. Rebecca Travers, widow of a London tobacconist, Baptist convert to Quakerism, prominent worker for Morning Meetings and prolific writer, similarly emphasized her own experience to illustrate the need for mortification in Those that meet to worship at the Steeplehouse (1659). However, in the place of voice, Travers offers silence; in place of works, stillness; in place of interpretations, an inner light, which tenets Phyllis Mack has sketched as consonant with ‘the mortification of the intellect’ and the disavowal of ‘political ambitions’ characteristic of Quakerism.108 Unlike Sarah Wight, Travers speaks in her own voice, directly declaring ‘the blindness of your teachers, with their blasphemous and idolatrous doctrines, whereby they deceive the simple, lead captive silly women, which are always learning, but never come to the knowledge of the truth’ (2). Unlike Elizabeth Major, she is not expiating guilt or wracked with doubt. Instead, she is confident that, in interrogating the minister of the Steeplehouse of John the Evangelist, ‘for the 110

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Seed’s sake’ (3), she has made public his idolatry and deception, even though this act caused her to be scorned and vilified by the other parishioners. Travers deems that the principle of discerning the ‘intentions of the heart ... is not ink and paper, or words, ... but is spirit, life and power, killing and making alive’ (8); yet she makes these declarations through the very deliberate, self-conscious medium of her own words and stories. Meditations also provide means of distilling and dealing with traumatic histories, often through associations with biblical narratives and imagery. Although selections of Lady Anna (Murray) Halkett’s (1622–99) meditations, comprising over fifty manuscript volumes inspired by biblical texts and personal experiences, were published posthumously in 1701, Halkett wrote extensively throughout the 1640s and 1650s. Her life, with its elements of international intrigue, emotional betrayal, and fortitude, is worthy of a novel. Halkett participated in the plot to ensure the safe conveyance of the king’s son and heir out of England; she served as a military doctor; she married the widower Sir James Halkett (d. 1670) in 1656 and bore four children, all of whom died young except a son who predeceased her. Yet despite their acknowledgment of desolation and affliction, her meditations, which always strive for spiritual peace, make no direct references to the upheaval and disappointments she experienced. The youngest daughter of Robert Murray, preceptor to Prince Charles, and Jane (Drummond) Murray, sub-governess to the Duke of Gloucester and Princess Elizabeth, Halkett was a fervent Royalist. Her upbringing was not entirely conventional; as well as an intense attachment to the Bible, the reading of which would pacify her as a child, Halkett studied languages, sewing, medicine, and physick. In 1648 she prepared the disguise for the escape of the Duke of York, the future James II, from St James’s to France. Her difficult emotional involvement with Colonel Joseph Bampfield, who masterminded the Duke’s exit; her flight north to escape the vengeance of the Parliament men; her practice of medicine at Kinros and Fyvie, ministering to both Scottish and English wounded soldiers; and her protracted, ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to claim an inheritance are discernible only indirectly in the meditations on biblical texts she composed during this period. The forty-eight-page Meditations on the Twenty and Fifth Psalm, completed at Fyvie in 1651 though not published until 1701, rehearses various trials of Halkett’s faith and patience; seeking and believing in mercy, the first-person voice of the interpreter of biblical verse steers clear of any intimate, autobiographical disclosure: ‘I know thou hast not turned from me, as from Cain, for though I want the reflexive Act of Grace, which from thy Eye of Mercy has sometimes shined into my Soul, and highly exalted it; yet the attractive Act does still continue and draws me after Thee, though thou seemest to go to the highest seat of Justice; and this is some consolation to me, when I am most desolat, that I find earnest desires to have 111

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Thee turn again’ (34–5). The verbs which follow the first-person pronouns – ‘know,’ ‘want,’ ‘am,’ and ‘find’ – illustrate the complex blending of cognition and meditation. Meditations and testimonials were expressive conduits for women to explore and ponder or declare and delimit their beliefs. Women shaped this writing to convey creeds and criticism as well as recrimination, guilt, and selfdoubt. In forging new connections between different conceptual domains, meditations naturally connect with and often grow out of the more formulaic supplications, petitions, and thanksgivings of prayer. Prayers Early modern women’s meditative writing which took the form or title of prayer was purposefully oblique in its references to historical events and even to personal history. As original compositions, women’s prayers appeared mainly in the second half of the sixteenth century, a period of singular importance in shaping public devotion and in formulating the relationship between individual and communal liturgical speech. Although a century after the compilation of The Book of Common Prayer, Milton complained, in Eikonoklastes, about the imprisoning aspect of prepared words, ‘confin[ing] by force, into a Pinfold of set words, those two most unimprisonable things, our prayer and that divine spirit of utterance that moves them’ (221), the words of prayer, usually spoken in private, were creative expressions of faith for early modern women, whose interests expanded naturally from the prescribed forms and liturgical uses of sixteenth-century prayer to seventeenth-century meditation. Early modern women’s prayers treated the delicate ecological system between the soul and society in a post-Edenic world; part of the metanarrative of the Christian community, they pictured the earthly life poised in the wider cosmology of heaven and hell. Though they did not comment directly on Tudor politics, they were embedded in a context which from the time of the publication of The King’s Primer (1545) promoted prayer in the vulgar tongue as an inducement to peace and harmony. Whether written or commissioned by Henry VIII, the Primer, which went through thirteen editions in less than two years, presented prayer as a means of counteracting disorder: ‘Stey this confusion, set in order this horrible Chaos (O lorde Jesu), let thy spirit stretche out it selfe vpon these waters of euil waueryng opinions’ (sig. S1v). This function was long-lived: each of Henry’s three children ‘sponsored the publication of a primer.’109 However, since this period in liturgical culture also witnessed the change from the Sarum (pre-Reformation, Catholic) to the English rite (post-Reformation, Protestant), sanctioned forms of prayer and prayer books helped to shape public forms of devotion. Ramie Targoff 112

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observes that ‘immediately following the wide-scale distribution of the Prayer Book in 1549, Edward VI issued An act for the abolishing and putting away of divers books and images, demanding that all prior service books used by the clergy be surrendered to church authorities,’ and commanding the renunciation of ‘all antiphoners, missals, grails, processionals, manuals, legends, pies, portasses, journals, and ordinals, after the use of Sarum, Lincoln, York, or any other private use.’110 The order and equanimity provided by prayer, moreover, affected the realm as a corporate entity and the individual as a singular voice. Prayer’s petition underscored the neediness of the creature attempting to communicate with the Creator. Thomas Becon’s The Pommaunder of Prayers (1578) described the exercise as ‘a mournyng and a desire of the spirite to Godward for that which she lacketh euen as the sicke sorroweth in his hart, longyng for health: whereby (being reconciled to God by fayth) we may enjoy the thing we craue, or have need of ’ (sig. A2). The prayers addressed to and composed by queens, noblewomen, and gentlewomen show their desire for congruence between words and thoughts which, as Shakespeare’s Claudius realized, worked together to reach heaven in a convincing devotional performance (Hamlet, 3.3.97–8).111 These women illustrate an understanding of prayer that blends alertness with self-knowledge; that is, to cite another early seventeenth-century Shakespearean example, they combine the disparate concepts of the novice Isabella, who espouses ‘true prayers / That shall be up at heaven and enter there / Ere sunrise,’ and the deputy Angelo who admits that sexual temptation is the place ‘where prayers cross’ (Measure for Measure, 2.2.157–64). Sixteenth-century women’s prayers – from Queen Kateryn Parr, royal attendant Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, gentlewoman Anne Wheathill, and Lady Frances Abergavenny – expressed in unique, biblically filtered, and intertextual ways their need of a sustaining balance between a sense of unworthiness and hope, between the experience of carnality and the embrace of Jesus as a loving spouse, and between an awareness of the lures of worldly praise and the promise of invisible rewards. The title-page of Kateryn Parr’s Prayers or Meditacions (1545), which went through three editions in the first year, not only identified its author as ‘Quene of Englande, France and Irelande,’ but set in motion the antinomy of a mind ‘styrred paciently to suffre all afflictions here’ and a soul longing for ‘everlastyng felicitie.’ Influenced by and often paraphrasing both the Litanie (1544) of Thomas Cranmer, who was Queen Kateryn’s principal minister, and Richard Whitford’s translation, The Folowynge of Christ (1531), of the third book of à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi, Prayers or Meditacions reworks this source material, as Janel Mueller has demonstrated, ‘in a deliberate, bold, and sustained act of intertextual appropriation that constitutes a genuine claim to authorship.’112 Not only did Kateryn Parr replace Whitford’s dialogue be113

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tween the monk and the Creator with a single speaking voice, she also created a monologue that is a touchstone of devotional piety. Reissued seventeen times in the century, usually under the title The Queenes Prayers, the text distilled the thoughts of Latin devotions with an admirable directness and for the benefit of many without the privilege of a classical formation; it was also the collection her step-daughter Elizabeth chose to translate as a New Year’s gift for Henry. Parr’s metaphors vivify and flavour the prayers, as in her observation that ‘if any thing shuld be liking and sauory, it must be through helpe of thy grace, seasoned with the spyce of thy wysedome’ (sig. Bvi–vii) and her depiction of the Lord as ‘the heauenlie leache of mans soule, which strikest and healest’ (sig. Diii). One of the five original prayers Kateryn appended to the second section of the text acknowledges actual battle as opposed to a spiritual psychomachia. This address to men entering battle, probably composed before Henry left for France to lead the siege against Boulogne in the summer of 1544,113 implores the ‘lord god of hostes ... to turne the hertes of our ennemies to the desire of peace, that no uniust blud be spilt’ (sig. Dviii). Tiptoeing through a minefield of expectations about wifely subservience and suspicions of her Reform heterodoxy, Kateryn chose her words carefully in the prayer for the king, her own ‘most gracious soveraigne lorde,’ petitioning that he be instructed ‘that his humain maiestie alwaie obeye thy divine maiestie in feare and dreade’ (sig. Dvii). Discretion was a paramount concern for Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit (d. 1578), whose single extant text, Morning and Evening Prayer, with diuers Psalmes, Himnes and Meditations (1574), is bound with two other tracts in an ornate, tiny (60 × 80 mm) girdle prayer book made for a lady of the English court. Designed to depend from a reticule attached to a belt, the gold-bound, silvercovered casing, completed by Hieronymous Mamacker of Antwerp in 1543, featured enamelled reliefs of biblical scenes, with the lifting up of the serpent by Moses on the front cover and the judgment of Solomon in saving the infant’s life on the back. Encasing Tyrwhit’s text, this beautiful object, displayed in the British Museum, was formerly in the possession of Elizabeth I. The connections between the monarch and her second governess, who had also been Queen Kateryn Parr’s lady-in-waiting, involve the complex twists of spying and court intrigue, which charge the allusions to wisdom, hypocrisy, dissimulation, and pharisaism in Tyrwhit’s prayers with a special resonance. Sir Robert Tyrwhit of Leighton, Bromswold, Huntingdon, whom Elizabeth Oxenbridge married in 1546, was Kateryn Parr’s Master of the Horse. Protector Somerset employed Tyrwhit to interrogate and effectively spy on princess Elizabeth, with the result that the Princess’s beloved and indulgent governess Katharine Ashley was dismissed in February 1548 and replaced by Lady Tyrwhit. Lord Robert and Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit conveyed information to Somerset about the familiarity between his brother, Lord Admiral Sir 114

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Thomas Seymour, the husband of Dowager Queen Kateryn, and the Princess Elizabeth at the Seymours’ Chelsea residence; tales extracted from the confessions of Ashley and cofferer Thomas Parry involved reported early morning bedroom greetings and embraces, and, apparently with the cooperation of Kateryn herself, tickling and roughhousing on the lawn. The appointment of Lady Tyrwhit was Somerset’s overt attempt to control Elizabeth and condemn his brother, whom he had arraigned, condemned, and executed on thirtythree charges of treason. Keeping Princess Elizabeth under his control, however, was another matter. In replacing Katharine Ashley with Lady Tyrwhit, the Lords of the Council announced to the princess: ‘our Trust is that you will accept her Service thankfully.’ Within a day Elizabeth expressed her displeasure. As Lord Tyrwhit relayed his wife’s news about the princess, ‘she cane not dygeste sych advyse in no weye,’ and on the topic of the lord admiral he noted, ‘my wyffe tellyth me now, that she cane not here hyme discommendyt but she ys redy to mak answer therin.’ In addition to recalled conversations between Lady Tyrhwit and the lord admiral ‘about Devynnyte,’ in which Tyrwhit characterizes his wife as ‘halff a Scrypture Woman,’ the State Papers contain Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s own confession about Queen Kateryn’s admission two days before her death. Weakened with complications following the birth of her only child, Kateryn reportedly said: ‘My Lady Tyrwhyt, I am not wel handelyd, for thos that be abowt me caryth not for me, but standyth lawghyng at my Gref.’114 How might we read the prayers of this court insider, who knew and saw so much, who had such intimate experience of communication touching on coercion and collusion? Morning and Evening Prayer was, as the title-page testifies, ‘seene and allowed.’ Presumably the collection advanced no doctrine contested by the Establishment; acknowledging the divinity and redemptive sacrifice of the Father in its psalmic utterances, godly sentences, and prayerful meditations, the text also showed an awareness of liturgical rituals and ecclesiastical authority. Since the girdle book contained Elizabeth’s own copy, possibly presented by the author herself, we might also speculate that she lived on amiable terms with Tyrwhit or, at the very least, that there was some form of rapprochement between them. Furthermore, Tyrwhit’s story complicates at the same time as it codes the prayers; this background imparts a particular pungency to the exhortation that ‘nothing is more odious than hypocrisie and dissumulation’ (sig. Aiii), to the morning psalm, ‘Keepe me, that I sit not in the seate of pestilent scorners, which cloking their Pharisaicall and diuelish intents, condemne in other men thy verities and Gospell’ (sig. C), and to the request to ‘set a watch before my mouth, & keepe the doore of my lippes’ (sig. Cii). An unsurprising feature of the published prayers by sixteenth-century women is the aristocratic lineage of the authors. Addressed to her only child 115

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and to all classes of women, the prayers of Lady Frances Abergavenny (d. 1576), which Thomas Bentley published in the Second and Fifth Lamps of The Monument of Matrones (1582), reflect a thorough familiarity with biblical images and pericopes, an obsessive sense of contrition, and an engagement in the fullness of the Christian life. But, despite their discursive amplitude, they convey little or nothing of the lived reality of Lady Frances Manners, daughter of Lady Eleanor Paston and Thomas, Earl of Rutland, who became the first wife of Henry Nevill, Third Baron of Abergavenny and Premier Baron of England. Bentley’s first instalment, The Praiers made by the right Honourable Ladie Frances Aburgavennie, and committed at the houre of hir death, to the right worshipfull Ladie Marie Fane (hir onlie daughter) as a Iewell of health for the soule, and a perfect path to Paradise (I: 139–213), opens with an extended meditation on the most famous penitential, Psalm 51, the Miserere. She prays: ‘My sinnes are ever before mine eies: I am not worthie to live or enioie the fruits wherewith thou hast blest the earth ... Thou onlie (Jesu) art the sweet Physician of my soule, sprinkle upon me hysope, and I shall be made whiter than snowe ... A contrite and sorowful soule is the thing that thou doies most delight in ... (148, 151). Although Abergavenny catalogues prayers for a variety of daily and liturgical occasions (from going to bed to being purged from sin, obtaining grace, receiving Communion, attending a burial, and experiencing prosperity and affliction), she warily interprets each of these events as a sign of divine favour or displeasure. While noting that ‘we are defended from the cruell enemie and from domesticall and civill war [thanks to] godlie and zealous Preachers’ (178), she feels ‘the rod of correction ... heauie upon [her] shoulders’ (180) and acknowledges that ‘great is the corruption of our fraile and sinfull flesh’ (202). The only idiosyncratic traits of these formulaic utterances are the prose acrostic to her daughter, Mary Fane, and the verse acrostic on her own name, closing the segment in the Second Lamp, and the two prayers for women in labour included in Bentley’s Fifth Lamp. Fallibility and torment are causally, inextricably connected, a lesson Abergavenny would have learned from the Bible as well as, perhaps, from such a contemporary model as A Tablet for Gentlewomen (1574), published by William Seres. In the Tablet the woman in labour offers thanks to the Lord for having ‘sent into this world out of [her] wofull wombe this chylde,’ while admitting that she is ‘not able worthily inough of [her] owne frayle nature, to give ... condigne thanks, praise, honor and glorie, for ... so great benefits ... in pulling [her] out of the pittes brincke of death’ (sigs. e2v - E4). Bentley’s Second Lamp was a particularly rich repository of prayers by Tudor women, as signalled by the frame design of the frontispiece; the tetragrammaton in the top centre and a skeleton or memento mori enthroned 116

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at the bottom are joined to four medallions of queens encasing the sides (Elizabeth and Kateryn Parr on the left; Hester and Marguerite de Navarre on the right). In addition to Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening praiers (103– 38), Bentley reproduced ‘A certaine effectuall praier, made by the Ladie Jane Dudley, in the time of hir trouble, a little before hir death’ as well as the ‘exhortation’ Lady Jane Grey Dudley wrote on the back of her Greek New Testament for her sister (98–102). Lady Jane Grey (1537–54), the learned daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, corresponded at the age of fourteen in Latin with scholars in Switzerland about her Hebrew studies, and lived under the threat of her parents’ high expectations, manifested in sharp taunts and cruel pinches and nips. Forced into a loveless marriage with Guildford Dudley at the age of fifteen, she was also manipulated by her ambitious, mercenary father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, into consenting to the proclamation of her queenship following the death of her cousin Edward VI.115 Queen Jane’s reign lasted a mere nine days (10–18 July 1553), after which her imprisonment began. Before being beheaded in the Tower for treason, in February 1554, this sixteen-year-old woman unfolded her situation in a steady drumroll of participles. ‘And therefore I, being defiled with sinne, incumbred with affliction, unquieted with troubles, wrapped in cares, ouerwhelmed with miseries, vexed with temptations, and greeuouslie tormented with the long imprisonment of the uile masse of claie, my sinfull bodie and bloud do come unto thee O mercifull Sauior, craving thy mercie and helpe’ (98). As had Anne Askew in her Newgate ballad before her Smithfield execution, Lady Jane requested the armour of Ephesians: ‘my loines being girded about with veritie, hauing on the breastplate of righteousness, and shod with the shooes prepared by the Gospell of peace’ (100). She left the New Testament to Lady Katherine Grey as a gift that ‘will teach you to liue and learne you to die’ (101). Lady Jane wrote two Latin distichs with a pin and, at the time of her death, recited the Miserere mei Deus, Psalm 51, which Bentley’s printer Henry Denham represents in progressively smaller fonts within a final inverted triangle of text with the apex blocked off (102). Another set of prayers, combined with a catechism, which Bentley includes in the Second Lamp (221–2), is Dorcas Martin’s An Instruction for Christians. Anne Vaughan Lock’s editor, Susan Felch (xxxii), suggests that Dorcas Martin may in fact be the Mistress Martin who conveyed letters between Lock and the preacher Edward Dering during their courtship and who harboured and published the Puritan scholar Thomas Cartwright during his public wrangle with the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor and later Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift. The prayers follow a quotidian schedule: morning, before and after meals, before studies and evening. The prayerful cycle is larger than a single day, however; it encompasses a lifetime. The Protestant and godly nature 117

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of the catechism is evident both from the prominence of the mother as the catechist of the child and the preoccupation with clarifying corporal and spiritual understandings of the Lord’s Supper. The Mother quizzes the Child, ‘This bread and wine being called the bodie and bloud of the Lord, doo they change their substance and nature?,’ and the Child supplies the response that explains commemoration, ‘No: but as we corporallie eate the bread, & drinke the wine: so spirituallie we eate the bodie and drinke the bloud of the Lord’ (243). The first prayerbook published by an English gentlewoman and addressed to women, Anne Wheathill’s A handfull of holesome (though homelie) hearbs (1584), illustrates the capacity of Wheathill’s biblical gleanings to provide food, medicine, scent, and flavour. Dedicated ‘to all religious Ladies, Gentlewomen, and others and undertaken ‘without the counsell or helpe of anie’ (sig. Aiiv), this 144–leaf duodecimo (120 × 70 mm) text also supplies some insight into the ways Wheathill’s ‘willing hart and fervent mind’ arranged the exemplars and pericopes of the prime canonical text, the Bible, for supportive or critical assessment from readers. No specific details about Wheathill’s private life or family have been unearthed, beyond the text’s opaque references to her parentless state, with an inheritance ‘turned unto strangers’ (66), to her acceptance of ‘longer life’ (44), and her admission of having ‘long straied’ (129) from the Lord. Yet these forty-nine enumerated prayers, framed in one of two borders (either a combination of the Tudor rose and fleur-de-lis with the Beaufort portcullis or a chain of undecorated medallions and crests, the pattern alternating with every twenty-four-leaf gathering), tell us something of the working of Anne Wheathill’s mind, her awareness and independence of Book of Common Prayer protocols, and possibly, her knowledge of collections of prayers by aristocratic contemporaries, Lady Elizabeth Tyrwit and Lady Frances Abergavenny. One suggested interpretation of the absence of direct personal revelation is the claim of Colin and Jo Atkinson that Wheathill was ‘structuring her spiritual experience to reflect a universal pattern’ or appropriating the number patterns of the ‘hexameral tradition.’116 Instead of having to impose the often awkward fit of the symbolism of the number seven and to identify mournful petitions as Sabbath prayers (numbers 7, 14, 28, 35, 42, 49), a less Procrustean reading strategy attends to the ideological links between the different handfuls Wheathill arranged. In the small partnerings and larger motifs of her text, biblical metaphors permit her to make connections. She moves logically from an address to the Lord ‘who hast sowne’ (13) to an imperative, in the next prayer, to ‘sowe in my heart the graine of stedfast faith’ (14), from an image in Prayer 9 of sins hidden ‘in the bloodie wounds of Christ’ (22) to an assurance in Prayer 10 that ‘though thou make a wound, thou givest a plaister’ (23v), and from an invocation of the Lord, at the 118

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opening of one prayer, as ‘our schoolemaister’ (45v ) to an exhortation at the close to be inspired ‘with the true knowledge of the father and the sonne’ (48). While she presents related handfuls of images and ideas, she also makes her whole text a woven tissue of repeated iconic allusions: especially the swept, prepared house (18, 20, 38, 80, 118) and the desiccated or moistened garden (7, 12, 20, 50, 137). Concepts of sustenance and sin have a similarly extended life over the complete text – from the ‘grose hearbs’ of her gathering and the book eaten by Ezekiel (95) to the ‘true bread’ (131), from the recollected pride of Corah, Moses, and David (18) to the simile of ‘the stomach choaked with fat’ (60) and the strategic iterations of Adam’s transgressions (18, 51, 92). A comparison of Wheathill’s single work with the prayerbooks of two contemporaries, who also wrote only one text but about whose lineage and political connections we know a great deal, may serve to emphasize her singularity. The jewelled artifact of Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers is a liturgically conventional, calendar-oriented text. Unlike Wheathill’s strongly individuated movement from one emotional state to the next, Lady Tyrwhit’s gift to Elizabeth, its allusions to intrigue notwithstanding, follows the ritual orders, litanies, and hierarchies of the Established Church and the English kingdom. As transcribed by Thomas Bentley, the prayers of Lady Frances Abergavenny stress corruption and correction. Although Bentley and Wheathill shared the same printer, Henry Denham, the assignee of William Seres, who had printed the Tablet for Gentlewomen, Wheathill’s single-authored text, as opposed to Bentley’s voluminous anthology of women’s writing, is more compact, deliberately and boldly individualized. Highlighting neither domestic nor obstetric detail, A handfull of holesome (though homelie) hearbs offers a compelling synthesis of biblically figured and corroborated psychic verities. Whether tracing liturgical, biblical, or numerical formulae, early modern women’s prayers – despite the veiling of intimate details – are usually intended for publication. They anticipate a public, a readership. First and foremost communication with the Creator, they operate in a register related to, yet fundamentally different from, the humanness and dailiness of letters. Letters and Diaries Rarely designed for publication, letters and diaries are, in the first instance, forms of private communication, often correspondence with one other or with oneself. Even over a divide of four centuries the reader can feel like an intruder or voyeur trawling through the details and minutiae of an early modern woman’s life. Moreover, with their focus on a single correspondent, letters can strike us as especially exclusive and indeterminate. Though the 119

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topic is a cache of Victorian letters, the observations of A.S. Byatt’s dark-horse scholar, Roland Hill, in Possession are pertinent to any discussion of the purpose and readership of letters; Hill discovers that ‘Letters are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure ... Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going ... Letters, finally, exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader; they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader.117 Early modern theorists about letters drew attention to the ways this writing vivified states of presence and absence. William Fulwood’s The Enemy of Idlenesse (1568) claimed that letters were ‘a declaration by writing of the mindes of such as bee absent,’ while Angel Day’s The English Secretarie (1586) labelled them ‘the messenger and familiar speech of the absent.’ The following discussion of early modern women’s letters and diaries – the known, recovered ones, that is – will examine the ways their depictions of cultural, sexual, and political realities fulfil the requirements of vivid, compelling, distilled representation. The over one hundred letters of Lady Arbella Stuart (1575–1615), niece of Mary, Queen of Scots and cousin to James I, are intricately anchored in their time and place. This well-read, observant, and astute claimant to the English throne led an unhappy life: constantly monitored, controlled, and dependent, she nevertheless strove for and achieved an individual voice, one often inflected with abrupt changes of mood. Her formidable knowledge of Latin classics and biblical texts is evident throughout the letters; in fact she wrote several letters in Latin. George Chapman, translator of Homer, hailed her as ‘our English Athenia,’ while Amelia Lanyer, a contemporary poet, included a sonnet dedicated to this ‘Great learned Ladie.’118 The strongest impression that a postmodern reader carries away from Lady Arbella’s letters is the poignant longing for liberty – of person, of desires, of agency – and the sadly abortive attempts at fulfilment – in the fictional lover she created in 1603, in the secret marriage contracted with William Seymour in 1610, in the foiled escape scenario in which she resorted to male disguise to flee to France to join Seymour, and in her mysterious death in the Tower in 1615. Sara Jayne Steen’s edition of The Letters presents a very plausible explanation of Lady Arbella’s death from acute intermittent porphyria, ‘a genetic enzyme deficiency.’119 Three letters to different correspondents should illustrate the range, deliberateness, and idiosyncrasy of her style. The lengthy eight-page letter composed on Ash Wednesday, 1603, to Sir Henry Brounker, who had been sent to Hardwick Hall by Sir Robert Cecil to investigate her state, shows Stuart’s awareness of the intimate mingling of private and public behaviours, her refusal to be bullied as well as her sense of betrayal and forlornness, and her 120

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pertinacity in questioning her interrogator. Adroitly she distinguishes between Brounker, the ‘privat person,’ whom she ‘would trust as soone as any Gentleman,’ and the deputy commissioned by Cecil and Sir John Stanhope, in whom Stuart is convinced ‘hir Majesty is highely abused’ (Letter 16, lines 24– 8). With bluntness she reiterates her refusal to trim her testimony to what her interrogator wants to hear: ‘for my selfe I will rather spitt my tongue in my Examiner or Torturers face, then it shall be said to the dishonour of hir Majesties abused authority and bloud as extorted truth came out of my lippes’ (lines 85–8). Though willing to ‘live like an Owle in the wildernesse’ since she is without the protection of her ‘Pallas’ (lines 115–16) [that is, Elizabeth], Lady Arbella makes it clear that even in her abjection she sets the terms for Brounker’s inquiry: ‘I have cast away my hopes, I have forsaken all comfort, I have submitted my body and fortune to more subjection then could be commaunded, I have disposed of my liberty, I have cutt off all meanes of your atteining what you seeke till you seeke it of me by such meanes as I tell you’ (lines 204–8). The remarkable feature of this letter is its unremitting emphasis on Lady Arbella’s complete grasp of her situation. In striving to ‘be my owne woman,’ she notes the difference between ‘my long letters’ and Brounker’s ‘short and Courtyerlike peremptory letters’ (lines 301–3). Having aligned herself with God and the angels, she remains critically aware of Brounker’s hypocrisy. Her rhetorical questions – ‘How many vaine wordes are spoken and who dare speake for me? ... How many inquisitive questions are asked of me and how little inquisitive are my frends and aquaintance [to] what becommes of me?’ (lines 428–34) – convey her sense that ‘faire words’ have ‘vanished into smoke’ (lines 434–5). This twenty-seven-year-old woman who has lived under virtual house arrest not only invokes the example of the vindicated biblical queen Esther, who saw her favourite (Haman) hanged, but also declares for Brounker’s ‘Court-dazled eyes’ (line 496) that she remains ‘deafe to commaundment and dumbe to Authority’ (lines 464–5). Stuart’s letters from James’s court, where in her role as the queen’s carver she saw masques and attended dances, contain their predictable share of gossip; however, they also permit her to vent some strong moral opinions about female weakness and gullibility. Writing to her uncle, Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in December 1603, during the holiday preparations at Hampton Court, she bemoans the ‘truth ... that wickednesse prevaileth with somm of our sex because I dayly see somm even of the fairest amongst us misled and willingly and wittingly ensnared by the Prince of darknesse’ (Letter 34, lines 16–19). Her attitude towards court revels, where women are made ‘to play the childe againe’ (line 70), is mainly censorious. But as her royal favour declined when she hoped to marry, so too does the tone of her letters become more pleading and pathetic. The only hint of joy in these later letters, albeit tempered by the longing of separation, is her writing to her 121

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husband, to whom she admits that the memory of their brief pleasure is sustaining: ‘No separation but that deprives me of the comfort of you. for whearsoever you be or in what state so ever you are it sufficeth me you are mine’ (Letter 82, lines 13–15). Few letters or diaries occupied such an intense emotional space and defensive agenda as the pleadings of Lady Arbella. The most common link between the two genres as practised by early modern women is their recording of the day-to-day events of private life for their own or a single correspondent’s benefit. On the issue of private communication Sara Mendelson observes that ‘most diarists took active steps to conceal their writings from all other eyes.’120 The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby covering the years (1599– 1605) at the beginning of Lady Margaret’s (1571–1633) third marriage, to Thomas Posthumous Hoby, focuses mainly on her religious exercises, education of servants, and skill in surgery, physic, and household accounting. Though the six-year span of Lady Hoby’s diary coincides with periods of bad harvests, plague, the Essex conspiracy, the queen’s death, and the accession of James, these tumultuous events are in no sense pivotal to the fully detailed religious regimen. An early entry for 1599 captures a typical God-centred, prayer-framed day, which includes midwifery, domestic arrangements, counselling of a widow, and meditation on her chaplain’s advice: Wensday 15 In the morninge at :6: a clock I praied priuatly: that done, I went to awiffe in trauill of child, about whom I was busey tell: 1 a Cloke, about which time, She bing deliuered and I hauinge praised god, returned home and betook my selfe to priuat praier :2: seuerall times vpon occasion: then I wrett the mosst part of an examenation or triall of a christian, framed by Mr Rhodes, in the doinge wher I againe fell to praier, and after continewed writing after 3: a cloke: then I went to work tell after 5, and then to examenation and praier: the Lord make me thankfull, who hath hard my praiers and hath not turned his face from me: then I taked with Mrs Brutnell tell supper time, and after walked a litle into the feeldes, and so to prairs, and then to bed.121

The tone of The Knole Diary (1603–19) and The Kendal Diary (1650–75) of Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) is fundamentally different. A present-day descendant has given Lady Clifford’s diary entries these titles, designating the places of composition – Knole being the Kentish seat of the Sackville family into which she first married, Kendal the chief town of Westmoreland where, in finally gaining and ruling over her northern estates, she held the hereditary position of sheriff for her last twenty-five years. Though meticulous in their records of everyday events (meals, dresses, jewellery, furs, and encounters with relatives) and encrusted with genealogies, Lady Clifford’s diaries are anchored 122

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in a material realm, for it was in this milieu that she fought and eventually won battles to claim her inheritance. The only surviving child of the third Earl of Cumberland and Lady Margaret Russell, she enjoyed a blissful childhood: ‘I was verie happie in my first Constitution, both in my mynd and Bodye.’122 Happiness was shortlived: her father’s will virtually disinherited his daughter from Clifford titles and possessions in favour of male relatives; her two marriages (to Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, 1609–24, and in 1630, to Philip Herbert, fourth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, from whom she separated) were strained and problematic; her three sons died in infancy, though two daughters survived. In the face of opposition from her extravagant, prodigal first husband and from James, and often quarrelling with her second husband over the choice of a suitor for her younger daughter, Lady Anne maintained her fight for the Clifford northern castles and estates, of which she took possession in 1649. The experienced reality of her motto, ‘Preserve your Loyalties, Defend your Rights,’ is everywhere apparent in diary entries. When informed of the death of her mother, Lady Anne records on 29 May 1616 her ‘double Grief ... when I consider’d her Body should be carried away & not interr’d at Skipton [in Yorkshire]; so as I took that as a sign that I should be dispossessed of the Inheritance of my forefathers’ (36). Though she finds some relief in Irish stitch work and reading, she never forgets or neglects the issue of her inheritance, noting on 23 November 1616, ‘I did string the Pearls & Diamonds left me by my Mother into a necklace’ (41). Intensifying rather than changing the focus on legacies and family cycles, the entries begun after her move to the north offer some glimpses of the delight in so-called retirement and hard-won entitlement of Lady Clifford’s ‘goodly heritage’ (Psalm 16:6). From the Yorkshire place of her birth, the Countess Dowager of Pembroke and Montgomery, in 1650, records her observations on Pembroke’s death. She savours dramatic contrasts but remains a figure of action, as involved with repairs on her estates as she was two decades earlier with Inigo Jones’s restoration work at Wilton and as committed to Royalist sympathies as ever. Her determination to reconcile differences with her tenants through compromise and her eager anticipation of her first grandchild to carry on the family name – even as it has instigated decades of wrangling and grief – hint at a slight mellowing. Seven letter-writing, diary-keeping contemporaries of Lady Anne – Lady Brilliana Harley, Lady Isabella Twysden, Dorothy Osborne, and the four Fairfax sisters – representing a range of Royalist and Parliamentary loyalties, cast Civil War realities in multiple perspectives. The letters of Lady Brilliana Harley, covering the period from 1625 to 1643, are addressed to her husband, Sir Robert, who was often absent on Parliament business, and her son Edward, while he was studying at Oxford and when he became a captain in the Parliamentary Army.123 This alert, Calvinist mother of three sons and four 123

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daughters cautions her son to ‘rwite nothing but what any may see, for many times the letters miscarry’ (17 November 1638) and sends him her English version of portions of Calvin’s ‘life of Luther’ (10 May 1639). Clearly mother and son enjoyed intellectual exchanges: She thanks him for sending her ‘the Man in the Moune.’ ‘I had harde of the booke,’ she remarks, ‘but not seene it’ (30 November 1638). Edward was keeping his mother up to date in supplying a copy of Bishop Francis Godwin’s early voyage imaginaire, The Man in the Moon (1638). For her part his mother was not only forwarding her own translations of Calvin but keeping her son abreast of the home front. Before the Royalist soldiers’ six-week siege of Brampton Castle, where she was shut up with her younger children, she admitted that soldiers were ‘so neare ... that theare will be no gooing out’ (13 December 1642). Lady Isabella Twysden’s efficiently matter-of-fact Royalist diary, stretching from 1645 to 1651, is full of amazing, brief stories. ‘A lady living in troubled times, her husband imprisoned, the estate despoiled,’ Isabella does not dawdle in describing her horseback ride to Peckham in the eighth month of pregnancy or in reporting on the 4 a.m. 26 April 1651 search by ‘tropers at our hous at peck: to serch as they sed for armes and letters, for letters there was none they cared for ... and they carried awy my husband, and my bro ... to leeds castell prisoners, for no cause I thank Christ.’124 The reserved but revealing letters of the Royalist Dorothy Osborne to the Parliament-supporting William Temple, who became her husband, describe a courtship during the Commonwealth and Protectorate at the same time as they enliven our understanding of summer evenings in Hyde Park and a young woman’s engaged responses to a diversity of reading, from Jeremy Taylor and Abraham Cowley to Mademoiselle de Scudéry. The least-known of this group of letter and diary writers are the Fairfax sisters. The manuscript volume labelled cryptically ‘Fairfax’ (MS. Bodl. Add. A. 119) is an unedited collection of letters sent to Mary Fairfax Arthington by her sisters in the 1630s and ’40s and transcribed by the recipient’s daughter, Mary Arthington, in the 1670s. With many letters undated, in haphazard order, but in a generally legible secretary hand, the seventy-four leaves, a remarkable tapestry of the quotidian and the eschatological, contain twentyfive letters from Frances Widdrington, fourteen from Dorothy Hutton, two from Ellinor Selby, two from Thomas Fairfax, one from Charles Fairfax, five from Mary Arthington to her husband, and prose and verse tributes on the death of Frances Widdrington. The sisters correspond at a time when their brother, Generalissimo Thomas Fairfax, commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary forces at the age of thirty-three, is covering himself with glory in siege after siege against Royalist forces, at Leeds, Wakefield, Nantwich, Selby, Oxford, and Naseby, and recapturing Leicester,Taunton, Langport, Bridgewater, and Bristol. As Frances Widdrington, wife of the MP for Berwick and Speaker 124

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of the House of Commons, admits on 20 January 1642, ‘writing is not now safe’ (18), ‘troubles are upon us and greater expected every day’ (18v). Frances, Dorothy, and Ellinor write to Mary to recommend readings from divines Dod and Preston and to offer advice about keeping the sabbath, overcoming melancholy and ‘sinfull lusts’ (10), recognizing true humility, and using her early single state as a ‘time to store up knowledge’ (22). Although always ‘strained for time’ (12), either rushing to feed breakfast to a crying child or squeezing in their correspondence late at night, the sisters send letters tessellated with biblical citations, along with equally informed comments on ‘breeding’ (26v) and barrenness, the health of ‘little ones both visible and invisible’ (53), the news of Mary’s growing ‘big and heavy’ (47v), the values of inducing a vomit, and the availability of bloodstones (49) (streaked red stones with styptic powers worn as amulets). Deaths and births are connected realities: their father Ferdinando dies at a time when another sister ‘is breeding’ (26v); Frances’s death in childbirth is followed by those of her daughter and Mary’s son. While all the letters, notes, and poetry of Lord General Fairfax, ‘whose name in arms,’ according to Milton, ‘through Europe rings’ (‘On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester’), have been edited, the correspondence of his admiring sisters sits untouched. Although the Fairfax sisters were likely on their own for periods of time similar to those experienced by Lady Brilliana Harley, their letters betray less sense of public attack; this could be the result of more secure protections or more discreet disclosures. The Fairfax sisters’ country network, their edifying recommendations of Mr Dod’s Sayings or A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments and Dr Preston’s The Breastplate of Faith and Love or Sun-beams of Gospel-light, and their reports of children and ailments also seem generations and miles removed from Dorothy Osborne’s enjoyment of the romances of de Scudéry and Brilliana Harley’s comments on the science fiction of Bishop Godwin. Frances Widdrington, Dorothy Hutton, Ellinor Selby, and Mary Arthington did not have the time of Lady Anna Halket to compose meditations, prayers, proclamations, and exhortations, and unlike Mrs Alice Thornton, they were not inclined to provide gynaecological details of their labours. They did, however, write knowingly, lovingly, compassionately. In the five letters addressed to her husband absent on Parliament business, all signed with the somewhat formulaic Mary Fairfax ‘your very loving and dutyfull’ (67) or ‘loving and obedient’ (67v) wife, household news – rents, bills, children’s health, his horse’s recovery – screens out most but not all of the anxiety in her voice. ‘I feare the worst yet’ (65v), she observes about the length of Parliament’s sitting. She explains the expected return letter she could not supply: ‘the time was so short & I not very well that did hinder me’(67v). The sisters’ letters to Mary, which form the bulk of the collection, reveal an 125

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awareness of her temperamental doubt, at its height before her marriage but not entirely abated thereafter. A lengthy undated letter from Dorothy Hutton, ostensibly written before Mary Fairfax’s marriage, illustrates the candour and assurance with which these women set themselves up as counsellors and analysts for one another, and their sense of the utter appropriateness, in fact the zealous mission, of this undertaking. Dorothy writes: ... for truly sister I cannot but admire the Lords mercie and grace to you, that keeps alive in you those desires of sanctification and sence of sin, fearing to depart from god, hating yourself when under the sense of failings & comming short of that sanctity which the rule requires I say I admire the godnes of the Lord to you when I consider what bulkackes you have in your constetution being Mellancholy and reserved, and so not only unable to fetch in and receive those refreshments which every common providence afords you, but it also prompts you to repell & refuse those comforts both common & speciall, ... another pul backe is your want of such compiny as would converse freely with you of such things as your heart is set upon, you seeme to be alone ... but besides these of your naturall constetution & want of society, there are spirituall enemies which war agt your peace ... the work required of you is beleeving, labour after it more than any other act of sanctification, for this will purify the heart, ... aboue all other your Christian weapons you are to take to you the shield of faith, my deare sister up & be doing the worke of god, for which mercie you want not the prayers & hopes of Your weake but truly affectionate sister (61–62v)

The conventions of punctuation do not slacken or slow this sisterly rush of advice; without hectoring or hedging, she lays out the reasons for Mary’s depression. Purposive but not blandly pragmatic, her conclusion is designed to be stirring and enspiriting. One especially noticeable feature of this letter, like many of the other counsels given to Mary, is the natural rhythms in which biblical exemplars and pericopes mingle with idiosyncratic words like ‘bulkackes,’ which may have had a currency within the family circle. For all its obsolescence and strangeness (the OED defines only ‘balkiness,’ a favourite word of Spenser’s, as the quality of shirking, ignoring, refusing, thwarting, frustrating, quibbling), ‘bulkackes’ captures precisely the inherent and, for her sisters, perverse, disposition to stop short, which they worried about in Mary. The letter illustrates how the work of these literate sisters inhabits space that is vulnerably public and private, familial and everyday as well as universalizing and eternal. The last example, the CCXI Sociable Letters (1664) of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, deliberately tangles and twists everyday rapportage and fiction. In the hands of Margaret Cavendish the epistolary genre becomes a 126

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hybrid. Under the guise of corresponding with a female friend from whom she is separated, Cavendish fashions observations gleaned from her own childhood, her experience in Antwerp during the 1650s, and her knowledge of Restoration society. Always keenly aware of the power of publishing, she delights in characterizing and positioning herself as a writer ‘fit for no other Employment but to Scratch Paper’ in work that ‘Employes all the Faculties and Powers of my Soul, Mind, and Spirits’ (CL: 314–15). She is also quick to protect and defend her writing, pointing out on the occasion of the sinking of the ship on which the courier carrying the manuscript of her twenty plays to London was travelling that she considered the potential ‘Loss of my Twenty Playes as the Loss of Twenty Lives’ (CXLIII: 295). Unperturbed by the drowning of the courier, Cavendish finds solace in the copies of her ‘Poor Labours,’ which she prudently keeps ‘until they are printed,’ and then burns. She remarks that this fire of ‘their Paper Bodies’ makes ‘a great Blazing Light’ (CXLIII: 296), which metaphor prompts the editors of a recent Cavendish reader, Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson, to suggest that ‘her writings serve as surrogate bodies that will keep her identity and ideas alive.’125 The candour of the duchess’s aphoristic letters is highly self-conscious, and her understanding of gender remains one of their most challenging and forthright features. In a letter (CXXIII) which constitutes the first published criticism of Shakespeare by a woman, Cavendish credits the insight of his characterization of women – from Cleopatra to Beatrice, Mistress Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet – that makes the reader think he had been ‘metamorphosed from a man to a woman.’ Women, the letter writer maintains, exert an affective power. Although they ‘are not made Citizens of the Commonwealth, ... hold no Offices, nor bear ... any Authority therein, ... accountable neither Useful in Peace, nor Serviceable in War,’ they have ‘Beauty and other good Graces ... to insinuate [them] selves into men’s Affections,’ with the result that women ‘oftener inslave men, than men enslave us’ (XVI: 27). Sociable Letters continues to navigate at the same time as it acknowledges the divide between private and public realms. The text’s judgments on other women are couched in thoroughly materialist terms. The visit of a former friend, who had given up ‘Curling her Hair, Black Patches, ... Laced Shoes and Galoshes, ... Fans, Ribbonds, Pendants, Neck-laces, and the like’ and who spoke ‘of nothing but Heaven and Purification,’ leads Cavendish to conclude that ‘she is become a Preaching Sister,’ whose ‘Eloquent Sermons’ she dismisses as ‘Nonsense’ (LI: 103, 105). Curiously the hardworking, wholesome ‘Country Huswives,’ who milk and churn and bake (all labours which Cavendish avoided), are credited with ‘more Quiet and Peaceable Minds and Thoughts’ than the painting, curling, fretting ‘great Ladies.’ A great lady herself often criticized for vanity, whose doting widowerhusband sponsored all her publications, Cavendish writes letters full of con127

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tradictory yet canny insights, which scarcely conceal their autobiographical origin. A woman who marries a widower with a grown-up family is counselled against pining for children of her own, since ‘first her Name is Lost as to her Particular, in her Marrying, for she quits her Own, and is Named as her Husband; also her Family, for neither Name nor Estate goes to her Family according to the Laws and Customes of this Countrey’ (XCIII: 183–4). She comments obliquely on childlessness, too. Cavendish’s first publication, Poems and Fancies (1653), had made it clear in the address ‘To the Reader’ that she had ‘no children to imploy [her] Care’ and that she was as ‘fond of [her] Book as to make it as it were [her] Child.’ To those who long for marriage and family at any cost, the letter writer’s advice is pithy and sobering: ‘But I am not of their minds, for I think a Bad Husband is far worse than No Husband, and to have Unnatural Children is more unhappy than to have No Children’ (184). The self-consciousness of Sociable Letters and the ways in which Cavendish catered, in this ostensibly private medium, to the expectations of the literary marketplace provide a hinge between the more sequestered or predictable forms of early modern women’s writing (translation, meditation, prayer, letters, and diaries) and the poetry, drama, and prose associated more readily with a public realm. Although the translations of the Cooke sisters, the Countess of Pembroke, and Viscountess Falkland commented on such public issues as statecraft and theology, and although the meditations and letters of the Interregnum, in particular, exposed the topsy-turvydom of the nation through accounts of personal torments, the general characteristics of private and public realms of discourse obtain. What is remarkable, however, in the history of early modern Englishwomen’s writing is the degree of crosspollination between these realms. Translators were also poets; dramatists turned to family stories for models; anxious mothers-to-be and polemical prophets relied on meditations, prayers, and biblical pericopes to structure their argument. The interanimation of public and private realms is part of the legacy of early modern women writers. Poetry Elizabethan Poets: Isabella Whitney, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, Anne Vaughan Lock, Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Dowriche, Elizabeth Melville Poetry is always connected to the project of language and the politics of identity. As readers we strive to understand its lyric subjectivity, to discern what the addresses, descriptions, and attributions of its imagistic language are doing. We explore the conventions of the speaking ‘I.’ We wonder about qualities of authenticity and directness of voice. We search for evidence of 128

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formally innovative poetic practice. Early modern women poets offer us glimpses of the ways female selfhood could be generated by language. By either inscribing or challenging the ideology of the female, these poets assist us in ordering cultural meaning and in organizing frames for readable identities. Susan Frye comments on the accession of Elizabeth as the point when she ‘crossed into the public male realm of poetry and speech writing that were denied most women.’126 The exceptional women to be discussed in this section, including queens (regnant and in waiting), members of the aristocracy, nobility, gentry and professional classes, along with those whose lineage is obscure, both heeded Elizabeth’s example and struck out on their own. While discussions of the traditions extending from Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson to Donne, Marvell, Milton, and Traherne still dominate studies of Tudor and Stuart poetry, it is worth noting how the work of their female contemporaries offers both a complement and a counterpoint. The women’s self-possessed complaints about faithless lovers, poignant meditations on salvation and sexuality, verse epistles to confidantes, and odes on historical events experiment with form, voice, and audience. From Elizabeth herself and her contemporaries (Isabella Whitney, Anne Vaughan Lock, Mary Stuart, Anne Dowriche, Mary Sidney Herbert, Esther Inglis, and Elizabeth Melville), to her successors (Elizabeth Jane Weston, Bathsua Reginald Makin, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Diana Primrose, An Collins, ‘Eliza,’ Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips), the women poets constitute a formidable regiment. Rather than judging them as subalterns in the public male realm or condescending to them as mere versifiers, I propose to examine the ways these women exploited the particular qualities of the English language as a strong stylistic medium. Although he was no champion of the education of girls, schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster was a real advocate of the English language as an inimitable resource. The peroration to his treatise Elementarie outlines the four qualities which contribute to this force: ‘“daliance,” the ability of the language to carry repeated sound patterns; “staie of speche, and strong ending,” acknowledging monosyllables and stressed final syllables; “fine translation,” referring to the capacity for metaphor and related figures; and “close delivery in few words” found especially in the similitude and the proverb.’127 These early modern criteria can be tailored to fit and showcase women’s poetry. Isabella Whitney, gentlewoman, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, wrote of the anxieties and disappointments of sexual passion. Whitney’s three works, The Copy of a Letter, lately written in meeter, by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her unconstant Lover (1567), A sweet Nosegay, or pleasant Posye (1573), and The Lamentacion of a Gentlewoman upon the Death of her Late-Deceased Friend, William Gruffith, Gentleman (1578), establish the forceful awareness of a 129

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woman’s voice in the public realm of print and the erudite sphere of classical allusions. The volume of The Copy of a Letter consists of four parts: Whitney’s balladstanza epistle to her lover who has broken their engagement and is about to marry another, her ‘admonition to al yong Gentilwomen and to al other Mayds in general to beware men’nes flattery,’ and as countervailing emphases from the printer Richard Jones, two male voices complaining of the doubledealing and falsehood of women, W.G.’s A Loveletter, or an earnest perswasion of a Lover and R W Against the wilful Inconstancie of his dear foe ... warnyng for all youngmen to beware the fained fidelytie of unconstant Maydens. In contrast to the fickleness of her lover, Whitney speaks from the position of constancy and equanimity: You know I alwayes wisht you wel So wyll I during lyfe: But sith you shal a husband be God send you a good wyfe. (A2)

The poet appears to be speaking directly and candidly, entertaining the notion that her love ‘is not so far past, / but might agayne be wonne’ (A2). However, the ease with which she catalogues male ‘falshood’ in Sinon, Eneas, Theseus, and Jason means that she knows the case is hopeless. She is not wasting the opportunity of telling a good tale about the connections between her situation and that of classical rejected women, nor does she resist turning the screw about the connections between her lover, whom she barely resists calling a jerk, and the mythological examples. The virtues Whitney wishes for her lover’s future wife, for which ‘she nede not be suspect’ (A4), are themselves full of tragic omens. She wishes her Helen’s face, Penelope’s chastity, Lucrece’s constancy, and Thisbe’s truth, which allusions summon up tales of the Trojan war, the siege of Ithaca, the rape by Tarquin, and the death of Thisbe from grief at the loss of Pyramus. Without doubt Whitney wanted her poem to affect its recipient, to whom she concludes with blunt monosyllables and stressed end-stopped lines: And when you shall this letter have let it be kept in store: For she that sent the same, hath sworn as yet to send no more. (A5)

We might wonder how distraught Isabella Whitney, Cheshire-born sister of the emblem writer Geoffrey Whitney, actually was by this broken engagement. The printer, Richard Jones, puffed the volume to buyers as containing 130

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‘some trifle that is trew’ and ‘some Fables that be fained’ and therefore ‘both false and also true.’ In Jones’s explanation, Whitney’s poetry participates in the tradition of telegraphing personal torment through mythological tales. Here is a verse epistle which in the repeated sound patterns of truth and falsehood, in the similitude of classical examples, and in stressed final syllables illustrates the qualities of ‘daliance,’ ‘close delivery in few words,’ and ‘strong ending’ which Mulcaster praised as constitutive of the strength of English. The codalike admonition to ‘virgins [who] from Cupids tentes / do beare away the foyle / Whose hartes as yet wth raging loue / most paynfully do boyle’ cites her own experience to offer advice about female liberty and the dangers of courtship. Not only does she warn maidens to beware of ‘fayre and painted talke,’ she also counsels them to test their lovers and decide for themselves, ‘And alwayes trie before ye trust, / so shall you better speed.’ As Ilona Bell comments on this novel and subversive discourse, ‘it is hard to know what is more daring: Whitney’s spirited kinship with all the other Elizabethan women who are boiling and raging with libidinous urges, or her claim to be a judge of men and a teacher of women.’128 When illness forces the London-based but unemployed Whitney to move to the country, she prepares her second volume, A Sweet Nosegay; it consists of 110 verses of practical philosophy called ‘flowers’ gathered from the Senecan prose of Sir Hugh Plat, an exchange of verse epistles with her family (two brothers, one married sister, and two unmarried younger sisters employed as serving women) and friends, and her will, which makes London the executor of her legacies.129 ‘Haruestlesse’ and ‘seruicelesse,’ contemplating her ‘lucklesse lyfe,’ she discovers the restorative tonic of Plat’s Floures of Philosophie (1572), and offers her own bouquet to the reader. Her flowers touch on all ages and conditions and range in subject from the upbringing of children to sensuality in youth and choice in courtship. The conversation with family and friends in the Familiar Epistles section of The Nosegay shows Whitney as a solicitous sister, anxious to buoy the confidence of her brother Brooke, eager to see and receive news from Geoffrey, full of advice for her younger sisters, and wishing health and long life to her married sister, Anne Baron, her husband and sons. In closing her letter to Anne, Whitney appears to be reconciled to an aunt’s role, but not without acknowledging the artistic liberty she enjoys as a single woman: Had I a husband, or a house, and all that longes therto My selfe could frame about to rouse as other women do: But til some houshold cares mee tye, My bookes and pen I wyll apply. (Dii)

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A similar blend of assurance and playful irony informs her Wyll and Testament, whose rootedness in the materiality of urban life has inspired a range of readings.130 Whitney is the ever-observant flâneur, knowing the artisans and streets of London as an insider, favouring booksellers before bureaucrats and creditors, sketching futures and combining ranks with a fairy godmother’s zest. As she itemizes bequests, she discloses her own literary and whimsically levelling loyalties: To all the Bookebinders by Paulles because I lyke their Arte: They evry weeke shal mony have when they from Bookes depart. Amongst them all, my Printer must, have somwhat to his share: I wyll my friends these Bookes to bye of him, with other ware.

Her lament for William Gruffith, which appeared in Thomas Proctor’s miscellany, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (78), demonstrates the poise with which she can adjust humility topoi and mythological allusion to suit her own feminist aims. The twenty-two sestets of the elegy establish both her right and ability to mourn this ‘late deceased friend,’ neither husband nor relative, who may be ‘the Elizabethan printer William Griffith’ or ‘the W. G. who contributed an after piece to Whitney’s Copy of a Letter.’131 Whitney wastes no time in distinguishing male and female cultural prerogatives in the business of mourning and illustrating the powerful advantage which she has as ‘a maid, ... forced to use my head’ (line 9). She refashions the story of Alcestis, the true wife, volunteering to die in place of her husband, Admetus, whose grief and hospitality prompt Heracles to rescue Alcestis from the underworld. Whitney reworks the gendered roles, familiar from Euripides’ Alcestis, to assume the position of the rescuing Heracles herself and transform Gruffith into the ever-faithful Alcestis. Issues of class, disputed authenticity, and embroiled biography separate Isabella Whitney from Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87). Mary’s tragic story is the product of many partisan accounts, with opposite poles presenting her as either an adulterous murderess or an innocent martyr. From the sour disapproval of John Knox’s History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland, we know she delighted in music and dancing. From the evidence of her Holyrood library, bequeathed to the University of St Andrews, we know she read Latin (Livy, Horace, the Psalms), Greek (Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripdes, Plato), and Italian (Ariosto, Boccaccio). From the evidence of her writing, in French, we know she loved poetry, especially the works of 132

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Pléiadistes Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, her mentor and friend. The thrice-married Catholic queen wrote an ode on the death of her first husband, François II, poems to her cousin Elizabeth, who regarded her suspiciously as a rival for the English throne, and, during the two decades of her imprisonment, which ended in execution, meditations on worldly vanity and moral quatrains. The twelve sonnets to James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, Mary’s third husband, who was implicated in the murder of her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, are themselves disputed documents. No manuscript survives and the publication history reflects vogues of romanticizing and revisionism. The Casket love letters and sonnets, so called because of the silver container in which a Protestant confederacy of nobles presented evidence against both Bothwell and Mary in Darnley’s murder, are still open to charges of inauthenticity. The casket was removed from the Castle of Edinburgh by Bothwell’s servant and seized by the confederacy, who sought to release the queen from what they saw as a disgracing marriage to a man who had abducted her and to force her to abdicate in favour of her son. Scholars have pored over the alleged contents – eight undated letters purportedly from Mary to Bothwell, the sonnets, and two marriage contracts between Mary and Bothwell.132 The casket’s mixture of the real and the ersatz continues to provoke differing opinion, especially about the sonnets.133 The sonnets were written between April and June 1567, a momentous period during which Bothwell seized the queen and carried her off to Dunbar, divorced Lady Jean Gordon only two weeks before his marriage to Mary in a Protestant ceremony on 15 May, and finally fled the country to Norway and thence to Denmark, where he was imprisoned and died eleven years later. After their parley with Scottish nobles at Carberry Hill, Mary – in the first trimester of a pregnancy with twins, whom she miscarried the next month – returned to Edinburgh under guard to begin decades of imprisonment. She was forced to abdicate on 24 July; her thirteen-month-old son was crowned James VI at Stirling on 29 July, with the Earl of Moray as his regent. What image of passion or obsession do these love sonnets convey? Following the Petrarchan or Italian scheme, with some variations in the sestet rhyme, they examine doubt from many angles. Proof, constancy, and assurance are repeated words. The speaker seems to be addressing herself as much as Bothwell; in striving for ‘preuve certaine ... de mon amour et ferme affection,’ she tallies up what she has renounced gladly for him: Pour lui tous mes amis j’estime moins que rien Et de mes ennemis je veux espérer bien. J’ai hasardé pour lui et nom et conscience. For his sake I value all my friends as dust

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Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England And in my enemies I seek to place my trust. For him, my conscience and good name to chance I’ve cast. (Sonnet 1, lines 2, 4, 9–11)

Jealousy of the other woman, Bothwell’s wife, feeds the pervasive mood of apprehensiveness. The raw candour of these poems, so closely allied to fear and imminent collapse, makes them poignant. She not only admits to Bothwell’s taking her by force, ‘quand il se fit de ce corps possesseur, / Duquel alors il n’avait pas le coeur’ (when he took my body and made it his own / Although my heart was not yet won), but she also conveys the crippling sense of fear (‘une autre dure alarme’) when she revisits her losses as a way of convincing herself that this union must work: she has nothing else to lose. Her grief and anxiety never abate throughout the 158 lines. Consoling herself with word play about her pregnancy (‘l’amour que je vous porte’) and doubted sincerity (‘vous dépeignez de cire mon las coeur’), she insists – with the perversity of one who has abandoned all for love – that his suspicions and carelessness actually intensify her ardour. While the religious passions – those of reformed Protestantism – which inform the poetry written, translated, or reproduced by Anne Vaughan Lock, Anne Dowriche, Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Culros, and Esther Inglis, rely on many French models and sources, their work is worlds apart from the private griefs of Mary Stuart’s Casket sonnets and the street smarts of Isabella Whitney’s letter, nosegay, will, and lament. The sphere of this religious poetry is avowedly public, underscoring the intricate hinging of systems of belief and government. The religious poets are adroit and unabashed in drawing parallels to and commenting on Elizabethan statecraft. Their work also acknowledges the influence of their families, especially husbands and brothers, and male mentors. Anne Vaughan Lock, primarily a translator (see 88–9) of Jean Calvin and Jean Taffin, appended a sonnet sequence, a meditation on the Miserere, to her translation of four sermons by Calvin (1560) and a verse coda, ‘The necessitie and benefite of affliction,’ to her translation of Taffin (1590). She also contributed a four-line Latin wordplay, ‘Anna Dering in Barth: Sylvam Medicum Taurinensem’ (Cambridge University Library MS li.5.37), on the name of the Italian émigré, Dr Bartolo Sylva, for the exquisitely illustrated, hand-coloured manuscript Gia Sylva Hor Giardino cosmografico coltivato (1572). I have noted already the pervasive, cringing gloom of her work. Lock’s editor, Susan Felch, refers to the twenty-one sonnets on Psalm 51 as ‘explicative paraphrase’ with a ‘circular’ movement ‘reenacting a repetitive cycle of complaint, repentance and hope’ (lv–lvi). What is remarkable in this firstperson penitential formula is the severe constraint surrounding personal 134

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disclosure. The speaker repeatedly declares sinfulness: ‘My sinking soul is now so sore opprest’ (line 103), ‘My filth and fault are ever in my face’ (line 142), and ‘I am but sinne, and sinfull ought to die’ (line 175). Although the sequence has a built-in rubric of biblical verses, it supplies no specific details about the ‘secret remorse and gnawing of [her] hart’ (line 134). Lock’s own imagery, however, conveys a surprisingly visceral force. My cruel conscience with sharpened knife Doth splat my ripped hert, and layes abrode The lothesome secretes of my filthy life, And spredes them forth before the face of God. (lines 151–4)

Her coda of alternately rhymed lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter on the necessity of affliction scrutinizes several distinctions between worldly and biblically illumined understanding. For Lock the chastisement of affliction instructs and transforms. Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589), a long narrative poem about three specific incidents of Protestant persecution during successive reigns in sixteenth-century France, is also interested in the instructive nature of affliction. The wife of Hugh Dowriche, reform rector at Honiton, in Devon, Dowriche dedicated the work to her brother, Piers Edgcumbe, member of six Elizabethan parliaments, with whom she and her husband shared radical Puritan views. Unlike Lock’s sources in sermons and meditations, Dowriche borrows from history, Thomas Tymme’s The Three Partes of Commentaries, Containing the whole and perfect discourse of the Civill warres of Fraunce (1574). The historical martyrdoms explicitly linked to biblical prototypes and Elizabethan parallels, her unremittingly Protestant reformist argument, and her announced purpose ‘to restore againe some credit if I can unto Poetrie, hauing been defaced of late so many waies by wanton vanities’ (‘To the Reader’) establish The French Historie as a work that publicly promotes a forceful interpretive stance. Dowriche’s French examples – the murders in 1557 in St James Street (Rue Saint Jacques) of the Lutheran supporters of the overthrown Constable of France imprisoned by the Catholic King of Spain; the martyrdom in 1559 of the courageous councillor Annas Burgeus (Anne du Bourg) who dared to defend his faith before Henri III; and the butcherly assassination of the Admiral of France, Gaspar de Coligny, and his co-religionists in the 1572 St Bartholomew Massacre by the Guise faction – prompt a not-so-oblique consideration of events in Elizabethan England. As Elaine Beilin remarks on the skilful, public tactics of resistance in Dowriche’s narrative, ‘printed in London for booksellers in both London and Exeter, near Dowriche’s home,’ it provided ‘an extended critique of the relations between the monarch and her 135

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subjects on topics such as Mary Stuart, the safety of the realm, and the continued reformation of the church.’134 Moreover, Dowriche’s work implicates the twenty-first-century reader in the critical issues of reading history and grasping the relationship between interpretation and politico-religious community. Attention to the registers of Dowriche’s language in all three sections of The French Historie provides one way of grappling with her use of French and biblical exemplarity and, possibly, of assessing her tendentious argumentation. Mulcaster’s criterion of ‘daliance,’ the ability of language to carry repeated sound patterns, sheds some light on the binarism of the valorized godly and demonized papist which operates throughout. The imprisoned and fasting followers of the overthrown Constable of France are notable for their patient conviction ‘That all things done to Gods elect are alwaies for the best’ (6r). The constant Annas Burgeus, ‘a parliamentary hero,’135 discourses at length – 121 lines – to the King’s Council, perorating after a string of examples of Old Testament prophets who warn backsliding kings. Burgeus not only defends the godly to the king as ‘the best in all your land’ but, when sentenced to death, fearlessly proclaims That Antichrist hencefoorth in me maie claime no part; Whose whorish art and Romish raggs I hate with al my hart. This Popish sinfull oyle I gladlie here doo leaue; For this, of God a glorious crowne I know I shall receaue. (13v)

The wounded Admiral de Coligny, though initially misled by the Guise faction and the intrigue of the Queen Mother, realizes their treachery; even as the troops of the Duke of Guise are about to break down his door, he sermonizes his friends. After the murder, dismemberment, and decapitation of the admiral, the Guise rouses his troops to continue the bloodshed in the name of holy obedience and loyalty: ‘Now sanctifie your swords, and bath them in the blood / Of these religious Rebels, which do meane the King no good’ (28). Against the pacifism and victimization of the faithful, such as Francis Collute in Lyons encouraging his sons to ‘gladlie giue our throate vnto the knife’ (33v) and the preacher Masson de Rivers in Angiers who, with a pistol pointed to his head and his weeping wife and children at his side, proclaims ‘my comfort is the liuing Lord, which shields me from decaie’ (35), stands the insatiable bloodlust of the Guise, ‘with crying voice, Kill, kill the knaues, this is the princes wil’ (30). Elements of retributive justice and political warning heighten the immediacy of Dowriche’s narratives. Prefaced by the examples of such betrayers as Cain, Esau, Korath, Shimei, Achitophel, Pilate, and Judas, the end of the murderers in St James Street is ‘sharp & sodain death’ (9). After the killing of 136

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Burgeus, the fate of Henri II, as ‘dilated by the examples of Ahab, Amaziah, and Zedechiah, wicked kings’ (17), involves his being pierced in the eye and brain in a joust. In the wake of the St Bartholomew Massacre, Charles IX endures the gruesome death, foretold by the stories of the fratricide King Ablimelech, the deceitful Triphon, and the matricide and fratricide Aristobolus, of haemorrhaging from every orifice. The warning for English readers and benediction of Elizabeth create a concluding sense of informed caution. The male speaker directs Englishmen ‘to shun the like’ and ‘take better heede,’ while Elizabeth, ‘chiefe Pastor of thy sheepe,’ is exhorted to ‘hunt with perfect hate / The Popish harts of fained friends before it be too late’ (37v). The last page of The French Historie is an emblem entitled ‘Veritie purtraied by the French Pilgrime,’ alluding to the fact that the foregoing narrative was related by a Huguenot refugee to an English interlocutor. The motto encircling a medallion is Virescit Vulnere Veritas (truth flourishes through injury), which as we know from the emblematic stitchwork of Mary, Queen of Scots, was also enspiriting during this deposed monarch’s decades of imprisonment (see page 16). Clearly the motto was multivalent – as apt to crystallize Anne Dowriche’s reformed Protestant histories as to convey Mary’s irritating Catholic presence. At the close of The French Historie, the oval medallion, from which a naked crowned female figure with scourges at her back looks out, appears above two rime royal stanzas outlining Truth’s mission and the world’s belligerent reply. This inclusion contrasts tellingly with Anne Lock’s final verses on the religious benefits of affliction, which was printed in the following year. Unlike Lock’s quietistic resignation, the emphasis in the emblem is on the surprisingly non-denominational Truth. After the vehemently partisan narratives, this addition – in an Italic font and with a more exacting rhyme scheme than the utilitarian rapportage of the sturdy poulter’s measure of the narratives – strikes precisely the appropriate note: high-minded, determined, triumphalist. Moreover, the medallion itself, perhaps a stock item with the printer Thomas Orwin, could be compared with a similar motto and female figure (though facing left rather than right, with the scourge dependant from a divine hand) used over two decades later by Thomas Creede, London printer of Elizabeth Cary’s original drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), about King Herod’s maligned and misjudged wife (see chapter 4). Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Melville, and Esther Inglis translated, adapted, or reconfigured religious models: psalms, dream visions, moralizing quatrains. Since the Countess of Pembroke’s poetic eulogies and psalmic metaphrases will be addressed in the next chapter, I will discuss here the work of her lesser known Scots contemporaries. Ane Godlie Dreame (1603) by Elizabeth Melville, later Lady Culros, consists of sixty ottava rima stanzas in which the poet concentrates in roughly equal 137

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parts on periods of depression and despair, a harrowing dream journey to hell under the guidance of an angel, and homiletic encouragement addressed to the reader. Daughter of Christina (Boswell) and Sir James Melville, Laird of Halhill, a historian, she is referred to at times as Elizabeth Colville, at others as Lady Cumrie. Around 1598, Elizabeth Melville married John Colville, elder son of the Commendator of Culros who, during his father’s life was called Colville of Wester-Cumrie, and whose wife was titled Lady Cumrie and, subsequently, Lady Culros. It is likely that Ane Godlie Dreame, first printed in Scottish metre in Edinburgh, had circulated in manuscript, even before her marriage. In 1598, the poet and minister of the gospel Alexander Hume dedicated his Hymnes or Sacred Songs (1599) to Melville as ‘the Godlie daughter of a faithfull father, ... sad, solitare and sanctified.’136 Her dream vision enjoyed a remarkable publication history, with ten editions before the middle of the eighteenth century. Its frantic horrors have also been the subject of considerable critical scrutiny – from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comments on its terror to twentieth-century observations on the horrific quest elements of the vision’s inspired utterance.137 A pre-Bunyan dream-vision journey, Ane Godlie Dreame illustrates Melville’s ability in crafting metaphorical and proverbial language. To convey her spiritual dejection, the first-person narrator, who cannot eat or drink and complains of being ‘clogged with sinne’ (A3), captures the sense of being abused and polluted in ‘this wretched world [which] did so molest my minde’ (A2), the ‘wicked world [which] doth stronglie us infect’ (A2v). While she sleeps, a visit from an angel, who, as in Dante, convinces this joyless pilgrim that ‘that pleasant place must purchast be with paine’ (A4v), offers solace at the same time as it inaugurates a journey of sensual closeness and horrific sights. One particular trial, called a trance, enacts temptation through precisely identified physical details entwined in sexually charged language. I held him fast, as hee did give command And through the trance together wee went: Where in the mides great prickes of Yron did stand; Wherewith my feet were all betorne and rent. Take courage now said hee, and bee content To suffer this the pleasure comes at last. I answered not but ranne incontinent Out over the fire, and so the paine was past. (A6)

‘Incontinent’ here has the meaning of ‘oblivious’ or ‘heedless,’ for shortly the narrator observes, ‘His words so sweet did cheare mine heavie heart / Incontinent I cast my care aside’ (A7). Although the speaker inquires if the ‘pit

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most black’ is ‘the Papists purging place / Where they affirme, that sillie soules do dwell, / To purge their sinnes, before they rest in peace’ (A6v), she is informed that this pit is not purgatory but hell, to traverse which she must ‘play the man’ (A7). In the journey through hell physical torments concretize spiritual weakness. The narrative voice in the instructive final third of the poem is assured and purposive, making personal experience an empowering impetus. The firstperson aspect of Melville’s voice fades away as exhortation, its proverbial character underscored with mid-line caesural patterns, takes over. Prepare your selves, bee valiant men of warre, And thrust with force out through the narrow way: Hold on your course, and shrinke not back for feare Christ is your guide, yee shall not goe astray. (B2v)

Women’s poetry composed during the Elizabethan period displays a range of creative talents – from alert materiality and the ability to frame both passion and abjection with witty candour to cataloguing triumphalist history and relating a haunting vision. Not only does their work brush against the grain of such received forms as the Petrarchan sonnet and versified chronicle, it also adapts such non-poetic conventions as the last will and testament. Their poetic voices reveal exceptional confidence, whether facing unemployment and sexual abandonment or daring to send a warning to the queen. With native coinages and idiosyncratic forms Elizabethan women poets remake and claim as their own the richly suggestive genres of the Psalms and the allegorical dream vision. Out of the welter of experiences of torment and dejection, political commitment and spiritual questing, their work displays a self-discipline and refinement, a cultural vernacular removed equally from mere belletristic utterance and from a stark didactic idiolect. Moreover, as the accomplishments of Esther Inglis and Elizabeth Jane Weston illustrate, their work challenges and extends typographic and linguistic norms. Esther Inglis and Elizabeth Jane Weston in the Republic of Letters The work of the second Scots contemporary of the Countess of Pembroke, Esther Inglis (some times Anglois or Langlois), Edinburgh-raised daughter of Huguenot refugees, exemplifies the cosmopolitanism and virtuosity of women’s writing. Some might quibble about use of the term ‘writer’ to describe the output of this bilingual calligrapher and miniaturist, whose bravura execution of scores of writing styles presented biblical texts and Calvinist moral verse in stunning manuscript gift books sent to potential patrons. Inglis (1571–1624)

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also prefaced many of her exquisite manuscripts, often in her own binding of embossed leather, embroidered silk, or pearl-studded velvet, with dedicatory epistles and self-portraits. The female contemporary who seems to me to provide the most instructive comparison is the multilingual Neo-Latin poet, Elizabeth Jane Weston (1582–1612), Oxfordshire-born citizen of Prague. Known as ‘Westonia,’ she wrote and published poetry under her own name to be noticed by influential rulers and scholars. She was twenty at the time of the publication of her first collection. These gifted, though financially straitened, commoners prompt us to reassess our grasp of textuality, authorial creation, national literature, and the relationships between text and illustration, the borrower and her sources. Reading the work of both Inglis and Weston involves the consideration of writing as a physical and socially remunerated activity, as a form of selfrepresentation, and as a series of adjustments of models allowing entry into the discourse of literary intertextuality. Although, given their relative obscurity and remove from the centres of the English court and aristocracy and the metropolis of London, these two artists do not fit readily into the picture of such carefully studied female writing contemporaries as Elizabeth I and the Countess of Pembroke, Inglis and Weston are not without champions. A.H. Scott-Elliot and Elspeth Yeo have compiled a catalogue of Inglis’s Elizabethan manuscripts and presentation copies, and Donald Cheney and Brenda Hosington have edited and translated Weston’s Collected Writings.138 In over fifty-five manuscripts uncovered to date, Esther Inglis presents a test case for the early modern artist-author. From the appearance of her first work at age fifteen, a transcription of two psalms illustrating five writing styles, an effort endorsed by her father as the product of her own pen (‘Texuit has calamo Galla puella sua’), to one of her final manuscripts, an adaptation of the Huguenot emblematist Georgette de Montenay as Ce livre contenant cinquante Emblemes Chrestiens (1624), Inglis maintained a reputation as a distinguished calligrapher who practised, in Harold Love’s terms, ‘a close simulacrum of printed lettering.’ As Henry Woudhuysen has demonstrated, ‘the recycling of already-printed texts back into manuscript form was not unusual at the time.’139 Inglis sent her work to royalty, nobility, and clerical leaders of the reformed religion. Like her mother, the writing teacher Marie Presot, Inglis did not change her name upon marrying Bartholomew Kello, a minister and minor functionary, in 1598. Inglis was always attempting to supplement the family income. After serving in a very small parish in Essex, the couple returned to Edinburgh in 1615. Of their six children, an only son, for whom Inglis petitioned James to secure his admission to Christ Church, Oxford, and two daughters survived their parents. Although she died in debt at age fifty-three, 140

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‘leaving a deficiency of £156 Scots,’ as David Laing observed tersely, she had received recognition in her day as more than a borrower and an imitator. Praised in Latin verses by the principals of the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh for her vivified symbols (‘signa creans animata’) and her more admirable hand (‘mage mira Manus’; MS. Bodl. 990), Inglis had the good market sense to append these commendations to the opening self-portraits of many manuscripts, thereby producing an early version of a calling card. She was also hailed by the leading Dutch calligrapher Jan Van de Velde as ‘l’unique et souveraine Dame de la plume’ and eulogized by the Scottish divine Robert Boyd, who had ministered in France and was principal of the University of Edinburgh, as ‘entre autres, excellent escrivain, par dessus toutes les femmes de son siecle’ [among other things, an excellent writer above all the women of her century]. Payment from a royal treasury is recorded, as is, a half-century after her death, an appreciative nod from the Bodleian visitor John Evelyn for her gift to the Earl of Essex as one of the library’s ‘nicer curiosities.’140 In light of judgments about her ‘limited abilities,’141 Inglis’s accomplishment invites an examination of the constructedness of the stigma of the copyist and miniaturist. The invention and necessity of this artist, who dared to imitate and recycle, to promote and present herself – as her borrowed mottoes (Durum patientia frango / I shatter difficulty through patience; Nil penna, sed usus / Not by the quill, but by practice; and Vive la plume / Long live the pen) testify – through persistence and practice, illustrate how the subjectivity of Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural exchange was deeply divided between public and private sensibilities. Her use of early modern prefatory conventions supplies a largely unexamined site for exploring the relationship between the ‘public and private faces of authorship.’142 The publications of the young Neo-Latin poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, Poëmata (1602) and Parthenicon (ca. 1608), illustrate her understanding of another route to patronage and notice. Instead of displaying virtuosic skill, Weston concentrates on the ornamentation of learning. Step-daughter of Dr Dee’s crystal-gazer, Edward Kelley, whom Elizabeth Jane’s widowed mother had married in 1582 when Elizabeth Jane was an infant, she spent her childhood and adulthood in Catholic Bohemia. Her step-father’s murky career at the court of Rudolf, his periods of imprisonment and mysterious death in 1597, left Elizabeth Jane, her mother, and her brother destitute. The appeal to and invocation of international celebrities in her poetry – from the Dutch humanist scholar Joseph Scaliger and the German poet laureate Paul Melissus to the recently crowned James I – are attempts to secure patronage not, however, through complaints about poverty, but through the persuasive demonstration of talent and erudition. Praised on the title-page of Parthenicon as a noble virgin and eminent poet, fluent in many tongues – ‘Virginis nobilissimae, poetriae florentissimae, linguarum plurimarum peritissimae’ – Weston, 141

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‘Virgo Angla,’ was regularly celebrated in superlatives, although by the time of Parthenicon she had married Johannes Leo, a court solicitor. Known like Inglis by her maiden name, she bore seven children, of whom only three daughters survived her. Both Inglis and Weston belonged to the professional and therefore literate class. Inglis’s hands are the medium that at once binds her to the emerging traditions of women’s writing and dissociates her from them. While Inglis appears to fulfil the qualifications of the ideal female imagined by Castiglione’s advocate for women, in The Courtier, ‘that this woman have a sight in letters, in musicke, in drawing or painting’ (Book III), Lord Julian, we remember, was fashioning a perfect lady-in-waiting at the court. Moreover, while schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster’s observation, in Positions, that ‘commonly they that have any naturall towardnesse to write well, have a knacke of drawing too,’ would seem to be a validating description of Inglis, we must keep in mind women’s limited opportunities and their general denigration even within mercantile society. Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s popular city comedy Westward-Hoe (1607) disguised the satirical observer of London citizenry as a writing master, who comments on the ‘poor living’ he picks out with merchants’ wives, noting of his female pupils that ‘the very worst of them lye by very good men’s sides’ (Act II, scene i). Weston constantly emphasizes how her reading influences her writing. Her erudition is noteworthy for its classical allusions, familiarity with Continental intelligentsia, pithy moralizing, and poignant evocations of death and exile. Though in a privileged category, they both lacked the advantages of royal and titled contemporaries. Both, however, present poised and sober accomplishments, relying on their art as the passport to the society of nobility and gentry. One remarkable feature of Inglis’s textual and visual preliminaries is the weaving of humility topoi with audacious self-promotion. In presenting a French psalter to Elizabeth on 27 March 1599 Inglis refers immediately to the boldness of the gift and unparalleled display of hands: ‘ie prens la hardiesse de vous fair offre de ce mien labeur et fruicts de ma plume, ... sinon pour la varieté de l’escriture, de laquelle ie pense auoir tracé autant façons diverses qu’aucun autre de ce temps’ [I dare to offer you this work of mine and fruit of my pen ... as much for the variety of the writing in which I have copied as many styles as anyone else of this time].143 The Bible is a readymade springboard of praise for Elizabeth, as a contemporary David, ‘laquelle entre tous les Princes approche de plus près a ce Royal Prophete’ [who among all royalty is closest to this royal prophet]. Inglis also defends the miniature dimensions of her gift measuring 5" × 7". ‘Les deux mailles de la pauure veufe,’ she notes, ‘ne furent pas reiettees pour leur petitesse’ [the two mites of the poor widow were not rejected because of their smallness]. In addressing the most powerful woman in the realm, Inglis turns her own gender and economic circumstances to a 142

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contrastive advantage. Underlying the representation of her mere femaleness – ‘quoy que ie sois femme, et de petite condition’ [although I am a woman and of a lowly state] – and material constraints – ‘ma pauvreté de biens, et d’esprit, et de main qui m’empeschent d’offrir present plus digne de vostre grandeur’ [my poverty of goods, of spirit, of dexterity that prevents me from offering a gift more worthy of your greatness] – is the desire to be recognized and valued discriminatingly. Her express wish that the gift find a place in Elizabeth’s library, albeit ‘en quelque coing retiré [in some private corner], and that the donor not be considered daring – ‘que ie ne soie plus condamnée pour temeraire’ [that I not be further condemned for presumption] – suggests that Inglis sees the gift, now housed in the Library of Christ Church, as worthy of noble place and of recognition precisely because of her boldness in offering it. This rhetoric of addressing potential patrons becomes a template for Inglis’s dedications. After introducing the motivation of her ‘hardiesse pls que feminine’ [more than feminine audacity], Inglis’s gift of Les Proverbes de Salomon to Essex on 13 April 1599 hails him as ‘paterne de toute sagesse, oracle de prudence, et vray Salomon de cest age’ [pattern of all wisdom, oracle of prudence, true Solomon of this age] (MS. Bodl. 990. xi). While the allusion to the widow’s mite disappears, the linkage between appreciating Solomonic wisdom and her own artistic sparkling justifies the gift in comparable ways. The dedication of one of her last productions, Ce livre contenant cinquante Emblemes Chrestiens, to Prince Charles in 1624 combines candour with the most artistically self-conscious biblical allusion. She addresses fifty emblems to aristocrats and politicians and, for ease of reference, includes an alphabetized index, both a who’s who of her day and a career summary of her pursuit of patrons. Though acknowledging her ‘totering right hand, now being in the age of fiftie three yeeres’ and her borrowing from ‘the invention of a noble ladie of France,’ Inglis also displays remarkable sprezzatura in comparing her work to that of the divinely commissioned designers of the furniture and appointments of the first tabernacle, Aholiab and Bezaleel (Exodus 31:1; 35:30): And as the curious works of Aholiab and Bezaleel wer to be sene long after ther dayes in the Temple: so this small pledge of my duetifull and verie humble obeisance may have sum retired place in your Highnesse Cabinet.144

Comparable to Inglis’s language of humility, Weston’s sense of longing, which soaks her writing in exile with more tears than Ovid expressed in the Tristia, and her pen’s hallmark business of sorrow contribute to her exceptionality. Here is a poet who styles herself as ‘Altera Lesbia, another Lesbia’ in her invocation to the Imperial Poet of Prague.145 Weston could assemble classical 143

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allusion for encomiastic purposes too. The third book of Parthenicon opens with a salutation of James I by Westonia Anglica; though she positions herself ‘Nam licet a Patrijs procul absim dissita terris / far distant from my native lands,’ her expatriot’s voice, as translated by Donald Cheney and Brenda Hosington, is undiminished and self-aware: behold, the English Weston kisses your hand, suppliant on bended knees, and congratulates you on those deserved honours which the heavenly Trinity has recently bestowed. (lines 7–11)

Whether the monarch actually read the poems is not the critical issue. More important, I believe, is the resourcefulness of this poet remote from the illustrious court who endorses the worthiness and legitimacy of James’s kingship. In fact, Weston did not stop at praise, but pointed a finger of blame, too. She complained in a letter (28 June 1604) to an English court counsellor about what she had heard from a countryman visiting in Prague: ‘So far from His Majesty’s reading them, he did not even glance at them, but rejected them with a righteous indignation, as wrongly delivered to him and as a gratuitous piece of flattery.’ The letter resulted in a spin-doctoring response from London (1 August 1604) about the ‘supreme clemency [of] his most Serene Majesty [who] accepted [the poems] and perused them’ and about the counsellor’s ignorance ‘of any harsh critic of your verses.’146 Throughout her career Inglis was a gifted and exacting borrower, skilfully mimicking by hand the intricate ornaments, borders, medallions and lettering of the press, as in her imitated title pages for Les Proverbes du Roy Salomon (1601) and Le Livre de l’Ecclesiate (1601) presented to the Huguenot Rohan family. Her gift to Catherine de Parthenay, Vicomtesse de Rohan, the urnencapsulated text of Psalm 117, replicates needlework as an ‘object for a lady’s cabinet.’147 Her adaptation of Pierre Woeiriot’s engraving of Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, and of Georgette de Montenay’s verse for her emblematical drawing of Mary, Queen of Scots, presented to the Earl of Mar, lord high treasurer of Scotland, in 1622, demonstrates the subtle creativity of her borrowing. For a Jacobean reader she strategically adjusts the gloss of the emblem entitled ‘Sapiens Mulier Aedificat Domus’ (the wise woman builds her house) to refer to ‘ceste Dame’ as opposed to ‘ceste Reine.’ She duplicates precisely the motto, the figure’s stance down to the beringed index finger, the booklike bricks, and the set-square, compass, and rule of measurement. The crown atop the figure’s headgear is not as pronounced (nor is her nose); the extended epaulettes of her gown are more defined; and on the stone pillar Woeiriot’s rebus is replaced by the declaration, ‘Drawin and writtin by me Esther Inglis Ianvar 1622.’148 144

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‘Sapiens Mulier Ædificat Domus,’ an emblematical drawing of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Esther Inglis (1622). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Esther Inglis’s Les Proverbes de Salomon, presented to the Earl of Essex (1599). MS. Bodl. 990, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Inglis was determined to be taken seriously as a writer. In every type of self-portrait she is presented at a table, pen in hand, at an open book. Her gifts of texts of the Psalms and Proverbs – to Essex (1599), to Prince Maurice of Nassau (1599), and to Catherine de Bourbon (1601) – use a similar ink, crosshatched drawing of a slim, high-browed figure in formal but businesslike attire wearing a veiled headdress and displaying delicately poised fingers at a table with a lute, an open musical score, and a text bearing the motto ‘De l’Eternal le bien, de moi, le mal ou rien’ [From God, all good; from me, trouble or nothing], all against a shaded background and with different clusters of fruit and architectural ornaments surrounding the medallion and 146

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commendatory verses. Her presentation of Latin verse summaries of the Psalms (1606) to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord chancellor, features a 3.5" × 4" portrait with a blue background and subtle flesh colouring; she wears a ruff-collared gown and domed hat and there are small animals at each edge of the oval medallion. Her gift of the translated verses of the Genevan Calvinist pastor and theologian Antoine de la Roche Chandieu, The Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World, to Prince Henry in 1600 contains the smallest portrait (1.75" × 1.25") and the attire shows significant changes. Inglis’s adaptation of Pierre Woeiriot’s engraving of Georgette de Montenay in her (Inglis’s) Cinquante Emblemes (1624) reinforces the differences between a sixteenth-century French court lady and an early seventeenth-century English professional woman. De Montenay, pictured gazing to the right, wears a lace headdress and diaphanous muslintopped brocade bodice open to display a necklace; her pen and paper are held by beringed fingers, the page containing a line from a subtended poem ‘O plume en la main non vaine.’ The arms akimbo are the main similarities between the two portraits. Wearing a masculine jerkin, a broad-brimmed, flatcrowned hat, and no jewellery, facing a table without a lute or musical score, with only an open text, inkwell, rule, and compass surrounding the single sheet bearing the now-signature motto, ‘De l’Eternel le bien de moy le mal ou le rien,’ dated 1624, Inglis faces straight ahead. A portrait from artistic life, so to speak, can also be drawn from Weston’s poetry. As Inglis deliberately mimicked the technological advances of movable type in her exquisite manuscripts, so Weston used her poetry to comment on the transformative genius of Johannes Gutenberg. ‘Typographia,’ her praise of the printing press, catalogues the leisurely, accessible, democratic, endlessly satisfying golden age – a true republic of letters – it inaugurated. Her poem in praise of hard-working and hard-drinking printers, ‘De & pro Typographis,’ portrays an alert, sympathetic intelligence, aware of the demands of the marketplace, delighting in wordplays and confirming the recreative value of leisure. The hard-drinking printers (Typographos bibaces) whom she characterizes also work strenuously to ‘print the type on the thirsty papyrus’ (ut bibulae typos papiro / imprimant alacres! ); these perspiring brothers (Sudantum ... fratrum), sweaty from so much work (nimis laboriosa), take a well-deserved break in what we would call a watering hole and what Weston adroitly labels ‘moist taverns’ (Udis ... tabernis). Such hydration restores the balance in every sense and continues a cycle of circulation. The thirsty printers are refreshed, and the pages, which they have taken with them to the tavern, are shown around. Weston’s down-to-earth, shop-floor picture of early seventeenthcentury printing shows an artisanal and jocular awareness of the realities of creation, production, and distribution. Both Inglis and Weston can be considered moral artists who showcased and created poetry, which itself highlights the central tensions and ironies of their 147

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work. Despite the sombre stress on creaturely fallibility and nothingness in Inglis’s signature statements, she directed her work to the sphere of statecraft and influence peddling. She demonstrated an understanding of private and public domains and of the hand-lettered, ornamented page to match contemporary technology. Weston’s invocations, salutations, eulogies, and epigrams illustrate a similar grasp of transience and ephemerality. The pithiest examples are her epigrams about reputation and virtue. In Poëmata the twenty-year-old, who had secured the support of the Silesian aristocrat Georg Martinius von Baldhoven as her editor, observed astutely: Sed si te celebret, quem reddit fama celebrem, Nomine non tacito, laus tua major erit. But if someone celebrates you whom fame has made a celebrity, whose name is well known, your praise will be greater.

Six years later, as the wife of Johannes Leo, she provided this sober comment on virtue granting nobility and the true fame of piety and intelligence (pietas ingeniumque): Fortunas & opes jactasse, & nomina avorum, Est desperatae conditionis opus. Clarius aeterna mihi nobilitate coruscat, Quem celebrem pietas, ingeniumque facit. To have boasted of fortunes and wealth, and of ancestors’ names, is an act of desperation. For my part, he whom piety and intelligence make famous shines more brightly than old nobility.149

Discerning commoners, working at distances from perceived centres of power and influence, Inglis and Westonia extend the site and the ground for display of Elizabethan poetry. Shaped and moulded by the socially valorized tenets of patronage, their address to the ruling elite unashamedly draws attention to themselves, reminding their recipients of women artists’ often overlooked abilities. Moreover, the manuscript and published work of Esther Inglis and Elizabeth Jane Weston prompts readers discovering them today to be acutely aware of the cultural materiality of early modern women writers’ productions. Jacobean Polemical Talents: Aemilia Lanyer, Bathsua Reginald, Rachel Speght, Lady Mary Wroth These four London-based poets offer remarkable examples of different combinations of intelligence with hermeneutics, displays of erudition and erotic 148

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despair, in their production of a series of firsts: Lanyer’s first English house poem of the seventeenth century (predating Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’) in addition to a feminocentric narrative of Christ’s Passion; Reginald’s publication – at age sixteen – of Latin, Greek, and French poetry addressed to royalty; Speght’s position as the first combatant in the gender wars to identify herself as a woman; and Wroth’s first corona-style secular sonnet sequence by an Englishwoman. Though neglected for centuries, Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645) is a hot commodity in today’s scholarly marketplace of the recovery of early modern women’s writing. The daughter of a common law union of a Venetian musician at the Elizabethan court, Baptista Bassano, and Margaret Johnson, Aemilia Bassano was the mistress of Shakespeare’s patron Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the lord chamberlain, before her marriage in 1592 to Alfonso Lanyer (d. 1613), another court musician. Her surviving child, Henry Lanyer, born in early 1593, is presumed to be Lord Hunsdon’s son; a daughter born in 1599 lived only nine months. Lanyer’s consultation of the astrologer Simon Forman was the topic of scurrilous comments in Forman’s charts, while her time spent in the household of Susan Wingfield, Countess of Kent, and her association with Margaret Russell, Countess Dowager of Cumberland, and her daughter Anne Clifford, later Countess of Dorset, was the subject of Lanyer’s dedicatory poems to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and its appended ‘The Description of Cooke-ham,’ about her idyllic period with noble ladies at this royal manor in Berkshire. Lanyer emerged from relative obscurity with A.L. Rowse’s tendentious identification of her as Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady.’ His comment on Lanyer’s defence of Eve, which she places in the mouth of the wife of Pilate in Salve Deus, summarizes his attitude towards the ‘rampant feminism’ of her writing: ‘We may legitimately, if modestly, conclude that men found her a bit much.’ Feminist scholars, however, who have contributed most to the rehabilitation and careful study of Lanyer – Elaine Beilin, Marie Loughlin, Kari Boyd McBride, Lynette McGrath, Esther Richey, Suzanne Trill, and Susanne Woods, among them – have found her work abundantly important: passionate, bold, deeply faith-informed, and transgressive.150 The opening dedications addressed to nine specific royal and aristocratic women praise their discernment at the same time as they introduce Lanyer’s women-centred argument. To Queen Anne she announces the central challenge of her crisply logical hermeneutics: ‘why are poore Women blam’d, / Or by more faultie Men so much defam’d? (lines 77–8). Lanyer’s encomiastic mode is not servile. Her celebration of the Countess of Pembroke, for instance, proves that Lanyer participated in aristocratic literary exchanges in which Lady Mary Sidney Herbert’s manuscripts circulated. Lanyer praises the Countess’s Psalm translations as ‘holy Sonnets’ of ‘sweet harmony [whose] 149

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musicke might in eares of Angels ring’ (lines 121, 123–4), but also dares to offer her own ‘meanest flowres,’ knowing ‘there is hony’ in ‘these unlearned lines,’ confident they are her ‘best’ (lines 196, 203). Noting the difference between herself ‘here on earth’ and Pembroke ‘in the heav’ns above’ (line 154), Lanyer also distinguishes between her native ‘hony’ (line 196) and Pembroke’s ‘sugar ... more finer, higher priz’d’ (line 198), a product, William J. Kennedy remarks, ‘imported from New World colonies.’ As Kennedy argues, Lanyer’s ‘crisscrossed patterns of tacit affection and affiliation in interlocking, interpenetrating layers of shared community ... press the old conventions of Petrarchism to register the new pulse of seventeenth-century England.’151 An indication of this newness is the remarkable assurance of Lanyer’s poetic gift. The final prefatory address, in prose ‘To the Vertuous Reader,’ previews the force of her parallelism, repetitions, and cumulative detail; she highlights the place of women in the redemptive history of the birth, ministry, and death of Jesus, who was pleased ‘to be begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed a woman, pardoned women, comforted women: yea, even when he was in his greatest agonie and bloodie sweat, going to be crucified, and also in the last houre of his death, tooke care to dispose of a woman: after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman, sent a woman to declare his most glorious resurrection to the rest of the Disciples’ (lines 43–50). As Esther Gilman Richey observes, Lanyer uses her knowledge of writers who praised women and particularly Cornelius Agrippa’s Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankinde (1542) ‘to recover the status that Christ assigns women.’152 Lanyer’s treatment of biblical narrative in the ottava rima of the Salve Deus purposefully mixes and splices chronology. The point of her 230 rhyme royale stanzas is not to retell but to reposition and reassess. Her criteria are interior, spiritual, eschatological. Her topic is not ‘outward Beautie’ (line 185) but ‘a mind enrich’d with Virtue,’ which ‘addes everlasting Beauty, gives true grace’ (lines 197–8). Such non-worldly measures permit Lanyer to claim that the passion of Christ can make the Countess Dowager of Cumberland, who had been deprived of her inheritance at the time of her husband’s death, ‘Dowager of all, / Nay more, Co-heire of that eternall blisse’ (lines 257–8). Exegesis underscores inheritance rights. It is important to take Lanyer’s relationship to scripture and spirituality seriously, to see her poetry as primarily a sincere articulation of faith rather than a performance. Reading Salve Deus ‘as a profession of faith rather than as feminist propaganda,’ Suzanne Trill demonstrates that Lanyer’s ‘feminism is facilitated by her faith.’153 As with the unconventional chronology, reversals of expectations and fortune further Lanyer’s exposure of the blindness of the high priests, scribes, and elders, who ‘could not discerne the Light’ (line 505) and whose ‘Owly eies ... cannot see’ (line 712). The motif of sight, extended to imply foresight 150

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and understanding, explains the exoneration of ‘simply good’ Eve, ‘who tasted of the Tree, / Giving to Adam what she held most deare, ... and had no powre to see, / The after-comming harme did not appeare’ (lines 763–6); it also implicates Adam, ‘the perfect’st man that breathed on earth,’ as being ‘most too blame,’ since he ‘from Gods mouth receiv’d that strait command, / The breach whereof he knew was present death’ (lines 786, 778, 787–8). Lanyer’s challenge to the practices of patriarchy shows how, as Michael Schoenfeldt notes, ‘the devotional subject is drawn to articulate desires which transgress the precepts of the society it inhabits.’154 Recent graduate seminar discussions about the troublesome nature of ‘Eves Apologie,’ presented by Pilate’s wife, Procula, have opened my eyes to third-wave feminist responses to Lanyer. While I strove to characterize Lanyer’s Eve as an upholder of Agrippa’s argument, noting that Eve’s ‘undiscerning Ignorance’ (line 769) and ‘too much love’ (line 801) ascribe a surplus of motives, my students grappled with Lanyer’s contradictory and, in the view of many, ultimately disabling characterization of Eve, which they read as reinforcing patriarchy and justifying women’s inferiority. Together we attempted to understand why Lanyer assigns Eve such problematic motives, why she attributes both ignorance and knowledge to her. The process revealed a good deal about Lanyer’s canny argumentation and shrewd interpretation of expectations of femininity. Michelle Balen noted that ‘arguing for Eve’s culpability in relationship to Adam is only part of Lanyer’s point; her larger argument is that, compared to having crucified Christ (an action performed by men, not women, according to Lanyer), Eve’s sin is minor.’155 It is just as necessary, we realized, to consider Lanyer’s Adam and the unforgiving malevolence Lanyer ascribes to him. Lanyer’s Adam is the prototype of the patriarch-predator, quick to exclude women from a circle of knowledge but equally prompt to appropriate feminine knowledge: He never sought her weakenesse to reprove, With those sharpe words, which he of God did heare: Yet men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke. (lines 805–8)

As an illustration of Lanyer’s awareness of what her readership would tolerate, Procula reserves the petition, ‘Then let us have our Libertie againe’ (line 825), and the condemnation of men until the close of the Eden narrative. We noted Lanyer’s omissions as well as the thorny virtues she assigns metonymically to womankind. In discussing the claim of female priesthood in Salve Deus, the students expressed disappointment that Lanyer omits the most obvious example of women’s preaching: Jesus’s appearance to Mary Magdalen and her subsequent spreading of the Good News of the resurrection to the disciples. 151

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Although Lanyer alludes to the Magdalen’s preaching in her address ‘To the Vertuous Reader,’ she chooses to omit what the students considered ‘the most potent example of female power and priestly capacity in the Passion story,’ a decision they initially labelled ‘a missed opportunity.’ However, after positioning Lanyer within seventeenth-century society, and specifically within – not outside of – the all-male school of Metaphysical literature, they concluded that even though many of her contemporaries (Donne, Herbert, Herrick) included the Magdalen in their poetry, they did not share, as Michelle Balen put it, ‘Lanyer’s rather precarious position as a woman with a scandalous sexual history’; hence, Balen observed, Lanyer’s ‘decision to recoil from the reformed prostitute’ seems very astute. Lanyer’s adroitness in blending Old and New Testament imagery, a strategy which Marie Loughlin sees as pivotal to making the poem’s Old Testament women into ‘prefiguring types for its New Testament and Jacobean women,’156 contributes a powerful, often juxtapositional, resonance to her argument. Typology promotes devotion to the unseen and mysterious along with a subversion of mere human authority. As a foretaste of the intense drama of Donne’s ‘Goodfriday 1613, Riding Westward,’ Lanyer distills the apparently contradictory truths inherent in the crucifixion: ‘Our Joy and Griefe both at one instant fram’d, / Compounded: Contrarieties contend / Each to exceed, yet neither to be blam’d’ (lines 1218–20). Her vision of the resurrected Lord enthroned combines the language of Genesis and Revelation. This that great almightie Lord that made Both heaven and earth, and lives for evermore; By him the worlds foundation first was laid: He fram’d the things that never were before: The Sea within his bounds by him is staid, He judgeth all alike, both rich and poore: All might, all majestie, all love, all lawe Remaines in him that keepes all worlds in awe. (lines 1641–8)

Lanyer’s text is truly a weave of apocalyptic, prophetic utterance, drawn from pictures of mortal unworthiness and divine opening of the Book (Revelation 5:5; 6:1), from an axiom about a rejected cornerstone (Psalms 118:22), from Synoptic accounts of the baptism in the Jordan (Matthew 3:17, Mark 1:11, Luke 3:22), and from enlightened fear of divine wrath enunciated in the Widsom literature (Job 19:29, Psalms 85:3). The appended topographical valediction to Cookham, where natural equilibrium prevails, celebrates the principle of harmony, which the spot, the house, and its aristocratic inhabitants embody.157 The ‘gentle Windes’ delight to stir a ‘pleasing sound’ in the woods ‘that Pleasure in that place might more 152

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abound’ (lines 39–42).To the mistress of Cookham, the countess of Cumberland, Lanyer concedes ‘The pretty Birds would oft come to attend thee, / Yet flie away for feare they should offend thee’ (lines 47–8). From an oak-crowned promontory the Countess could look out on a vast domain of ‘thirteene shires,’ in comparison with which ‘Europe could not afford much more delight’ (lines 73–4). Cookham provides a locus amoenus for contemplation of the intermingling of the Book of Nature and the Book of the Word; in the ‘beauties’ of these shires Cumberland can ‘plaine descrie’ the Creator’s ‘beauty, wisdome, grace, love, majestie’ (lines 79–80). Although the departure of the Countess of Cumberland and her daughter is not delayed by the synaesthetic reaction of the trees and flowers, whose ‘very leaves did wither, / Changing their colours as they grewe together’ (lines 135–6), the sense of loss is echoed in a loss of natural affect: The Windes and Waters seem’d to chide together, Because you went away they know not whither: And those sweet Brookes that ranne so faire and cleare, With grief and trouble wrinckled did appeare. Those pretty Birds that wonted were to sing, Now neither sing, nor chirp, nor use their wing. (lines 181–6)

Lanyer’s reported farewell to Lady Anne, a girl twenty years her junior who was soon to become the Countess of Dorset, is an especially moving evocation of their friendship, as crystallized in a scene of reading under a ‘faire tree ... where many a learned Booke was read and skand’ (lines 157, 161). In this 210–line poem, she locates herself as the memorialist ensuring fame for the house or, more accurately, the salubrious spot, and her likeminded aristocratic companions. Both Bathsua Reginald (1600–ca. 1675) and Rachel Speght (1597– ?) understood that publication could bring fame.158 Parental influence, especially the opportunities extended by fathers, is a determining factor in both their careers. Reginald (or Reynolds) was the star pupil in the school in Stepney run by her father. According to Sir Simonds D’Ewes, a pupil at Reynolds’s school, enrolment increased because of ‘the fame of her abilities,’ which included ‘an exact knowledge in the Greek, Latin, and French tongues, with some insight also into Hebrew and Syriac’; D’Ewes’s Autobiography affirms that this daughter ‘doubtless’ had ‘much more learning ... than her father.’ James Speght was a London-based Calvinist minister who definitely provided a grammar-school education for his daughter. The Speghts’ neighbours in Milk Street were the Moundfords; Mrs Mary Moundford was Rachel’s godmother, to whom she dedicated Mortalities Memorandum (1621), and Dr 153

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Thomas Moundford, author of Vir Bonus (1622), attended among other patients the learned though tragic Lady Arbella Stuart. After Speght’s marriage to William Procter, a minister, in 1621, she drops out of sight and publishes no more; Reynolds’s situation after her marriage in the same year to Richard Makin, a minor court servant with a shaky employment history, is precisely the opposite. As the main breadwinner in a family of three children, Bathsua Makin was employed as tutor to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Charles I, and, in the 1650s in the household of Lucy Hastings, Dowager Countess of Huntington; she corresponded with Anna Maria van Schurman, the learned virgin of Utrecht, with whom she shared a keen interest in the education of girls, and may have met the Czech educational pioneer Jan Amos Comenius during his 1641 visit to London. Her last publication, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), not only advertised the expansive curriculum of the school for gentlewomen she established at Tottenham-High-Cross (ranging from dancing, singing, writing, arithmetic, and history to the optional study of Latin, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish), but also praised ancient, biblical, and contemporary women as ‘good Philosophers, good Arithmeticians, good Divines, and good Poets.’ The original encomia addressed to King James, Queen Anne, Princess Elizabeth, the Elector Palatine, Prince Charles, and others in Latin, German, French, and Hebrew in Bathsua Reginald’s Musa Virginea (1616) testify, as Frances Teague observes, to ‘an extraordinary education.’ The title-page identifies Reginald’s father as a school teacher (‘gymnasiarchae’) and lover of words (‘philoglotti’). The agility with which Bathsua Reginald strings together epithets and nouns in apposition to describe her subjects indicates that she too loves words and the adroit display of her erudition. The French couplet which appears on Reginald’s title-page, ‘Le sens praeoccupé du Lecteur blasme ou prise / Tout escrit quel qu’il soit d’une voix mal apprise’ [The Reader’s sense prejudges blame or praise / For everything written with an unlearned voice], is a very assured statement of learning, of being bien apprise, positioned at the outset to defuse and rebut criticism. The tone of Reginald’s verses stresses the laus side of the encomium coin. To the most bright and most powerful King James, ‘Ad serenissimum et potentissimum Jacobus,’ she addresses praise of his justice, dutifulness, and peacemaking. To the most wise Anne (‘Ad Annam ... prudentissimam’) Reginald presents epigrammatic celebrations, as true as the theories of Pythagoras (‘At si Pythagorae sunt dogmata vera’), of the queen’s bright shining religion and true nobility: ‘in Te majora refulgent / Relligio, & verae Nobilitatis honos’ (A3). Wishing Prince Charles a long and happy life, she hails him as a clear star of his country, ‘Nobilis & patriae lucida stella Tuae’ (A4). The ‘cantique enomiastique’ Reginald addresses to Princess Elizabeth rejoices in her marriage to Frederick as a peaceful alliance with 154

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Bavarian Germany, a jurisdiction under a count of the Holy Roman Empire, and a further frustration for the bestial papacy. Rachel Speght was as keen as Bathsua Reginald to display her learning. But the purpose of Speght’s two-part Mortalities Memorandum (1621), consisting of an allegorical dialogue about women’s pursuit of knowledge and a biblically inspired meditation on death, is essentially instructive. Though aware of the inevitable censure of the ‘publique act’ (A2v) of writing, since she entered the pamphlet fray four years earlier in answering Joseph Swetnam in A Mouzell for Melastomus, Speght is determined to be seen, to be heard, and to be useful. As she paraphrases the Matthean pericope, ‘A candle put under a bushell doth not illuminate an house’ (A2). The ease and frequency with which Speght cites ‘paradigma’ – in praising her dedicatee Mrs Moundford as ‘a paradigma to others’ (A3) and alluding to the ‘paradigma’ (36) of King Hezekiah’s preparation for death – and her reliance on the conversation of personified abstractions convey one aspect of Speght’s feminist purposiveness. Her argument hinges on discounting patriarchal claims about women’s inferiority. As the speaker is being conducted by Industrie to Erudition’s garden to gain Knowledge, Dissuasion interrupts with proposed hindrances, Disswasion hearing her assigne my helpe, (And seeing that consent I did detect) Did many remoraes to me propose, As dulnesse, and my memories defect; The difficulties of attaining lore, My time, and sex, with many others more. (4)

Rebutting this criticism with a catalogue of classical learned women and allusion to her own publication unfolds as Speght’s logical rhetorical strategy. It is obvious, too, that her earlier precise reply to Swetnam’s venomous bile has taught her the value of the pungent rhetoric of disgust. Truth’s reply to Dissuasion shows her awareness of base and mired motives, since ‘swine-like natures prize not cristall streames’ (6). Within the ratiocinative structure of her meditation on death she revisits the vocabulary of filth and excrement to underscore the liberation from the prison of the body which death represents. The topic of Lady Mary Wroth’s poetry, the most extensive and accomplished body of work of this group, is the labyrinthine twists, reflections, and interpretations of love. Niece to Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke and eldest daughter of Sir Robert Sidney, also a poet, Lady Mary (1587– 1653) enjoyed privileges foreign to Reginald and Speght. Although she endured a decade-long unhappy marriage to Sir Robert Wroth (d. 1614), she was also part of Queen Anne’s intimate circle of ladies, performing in the 155

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court masques The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty, and receiving acknowledgment for her poetry in a dedicatory sonnet in Chapman’s Iliads (1611) and Jonson’s dedication of The Alchemist (1612) to her. Chapman referred to Wroth as the ‘rare Lady’ and ‘faire Starre’ of ‘our Sydneian Asterisme’ who takes ‘the soules part, and her saving Light, / While others blinde and burie both in Sense’ (‘To the Happy Starre’). Though Wroth revised and composed more poetry than Chapman had seen in circulated manuscripts in 1611 – Josephine Roberts, Wroth’s major editor, enumerates 105 sonnets: ‘83 in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 19 in the published Urania, and 3 in the Newberry manuscript’159 – it seems to me that Chapman does spotlight the salient feature of Wroth’s soulful, interior examination of emotional entanglement. Between this early period of recognition and her later infamy, Wroth revised the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (literally ‘The AllLoving One to Him Who Loves Two, or Him Who Loves Both Ways’); she also composed the prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, which included many poems and songs, and published in 1621 its first part, to which the poetry collection Pamphilia to Amphilanthus was appended, but then withdrew it from publication. With liberal borrowings from Ariosto’s crossdressing Bradamante, who pines for the fickle Ruggiero, along with many parallels to the Arcadia, the first part of Urania presents the multivalent, interlaced narrative of Pamphilia, the virgin princess and queen, while the second part relates her activities as a wife to both Amphilanthus and Rhodomandro. Wroth also bore three children: a son, who lived only two years, to Sir Robert Wroth, and a son and daughter to her cousin, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. Her loss of favour at court coincided with the death of Wroth, her insecure financial situation, and scandal about the illegitimacy. Wroth takes what Chapman called ‘the soules part’ in a style that appears to be ‘an almost inscrutable private language.’160 She does so by knowing manipulations of Petrarchan conventions about the paradoxes of love, both concealing and revealing female subjectivity. Although the first-person voice declares that her ‘poore hart’ is ‘martir’d’ (P 1, line 12), that she is ‘wreched’ in ‘hart-held dispaire’ (P 6, lines 8, 12), that she sees ‘butt torments’ and ‘harmes doe only tarry’ (P 10, lines 8, 9), she also admits the sweetness of this pain: ‘Long have I suffer’d, and esteem’d itt deere’ (P 6, line 9). Disclosures of identity are few and oblique; one of the suggested allusions to William Herbert occurs in the possibly embedded name of ‘Will’ (or the future of promise and determination) in the concluding line, ‘Yett love I will till I butt ashes prove’ (P 55, line 14). Pamphilia’s perspective on the dynamic of ‘noble autonomy and amatory choice’161 is especially revealing in Sonnet 14 [P 16]. The opening quatrain’s rhetorical 156

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questions imply great resolve not to be bound or imprisoned: Am I thus conquer’d? Have I lost the powers That to withstand, which joy’s to ruin mee? Must I be still while itt my strength devowres And captive leads mee prisoner, bound, unfree?

Wroth’s lover sets up a series of almost impossible conditions – ‘Love first shall leave mens phant’sies to them free’ (line 5) and ‘Love shall loose all his darts’ (line 7) – that must be met before she, paradoxically, submits. In setting up ‘a negative resolution with positive consequences: No, I am not conquered, I have not lost my powers, I cannot be still,’ Wroth’s poem sets in motion what William Kennedy calls a ‘radical contrariety.’ The sestet dramatizes the friction between ‘anacreontic’ and ‘scriptural’ claims, with ‘loves purblind charmes’ (line 9) and ‘babish trickes’ (line 12) clashing with the speaker’s quest for ‘some hoste’ (line 11) and ‘freedome’ (line 12). Kennedy’s probing of the ‘discordant possibilities’ nestled in the word ‘hoste’ (evoking not only the Communion bread of sacrifice but the military armed host, the household guest or host, and an enemy presence) illuminates the struggle within Pamphilia. The unbalanced battle results in the compulsion of her surrender: ‘I love, and must: So farwell liberty’ (line 14). The interiority and the vale of painful soul-making of this love are best exemplified in ‘A Crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love.’ This interconnected, circular sequence, with final and subsequent beginning lines of the next sonnet being the same, had already been popularized by Sidney in the Old Arcadia; George Chapman in the ten-part ‘A Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie’ (1595), with its praise of ‘her remov’d, and soule-infusde regard’; and John Donne’s seven sonnets about the mysteries of the life of Christ, ‘La Corona.’ Wroth’s corona also recalls a crown of four poems by her father, Robert Sidney, which concentrated on carnal love. In evoking the Petrarchan figure of the labyrinth at the outset and conclusion, Wroth’s ‘crowne of sonetts’ explores the ‘conflicting interpretations ... between perceiving the labyrinth in malo as a site of amatory doubt, suspicion, and turmoil and experiencing it in bono as a site of wholly sublimated, fully achieved love.’162 By seizing the thread Pamphilia becomes the Theseus figure, while Amphilanthus takes on the role of the unrescuable Ariadne. Yet this gender inversion has its costs, in making the speaker subject to jealousy and suspicion. Wroth’s maze-bound creature finds no exit or guiding thread. In this strang labourinth how shall I turne? Wayes are on all sids while the way I miss. (P 77)

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An idealizing perception, which is artistically enabling, accounts for the willingness of this imprisonment. The love she envisions is its own cynosure: ‘Two bodies, butt one soule to rule the minde’ (P 82, line 4). But such idealized oneness also glimpses at, half-reveals, suspicions and feelings of abandonment. Though the speaker wants to perceive Love ‘Free from all fogs butt shining faire, and cleere’ (P 88), she closes by admitting that she feels her ‘faith untouch’d’ and ‘pure thoughts’ (P 90, line 6) are devalued (‘As worthles to bee kept in your choyse store’ [line 3]) and undone by ‘Curst jealousie’ (line 11). The collection closes with a sonnet far removed from fogs and a sense of worthlessness, a lyric which appears to be a farewell to writing: My muse now hapy, lay thy self to rest, Sleepe in the quiett of a faithfull love, Write you noe more, butt lett thes phant’sies move Some other harts, wake nott to new unrest. (P 103, lines 1–4)

In suggesting that ‘thes phant’sies’ might move others, could Wroth actually be offering her work as a model and herself as an emblem of fidelity? Her decision to ‘leave the discource of Venus’ (line 9) to beginners indicates that such neophytes will find inspiration and heat in her example. The concluding couplet, ‘And thus leave off, what’s past showes you can love, / Now lett your constancy your honor prove’ (lines 13–14), is predictably ambivalent, invoking her own now-silenced narrative as a proof of love, which will assuredly live on in her ‘storys of great love’ (line 11), while withdrawing from fiction to enact and embody constancy in life. The ambivalence is compounded by the fact that imaginative creation and biographical reality have mirrored each other throughout Wroth’s career; there seems to be no reason to doubt that this connection will continue. The poetry of Lanyer, Reginald, Speght, and Wroth testifies to the richly composite discourse of early modern Englishwomen’s writing. It foregrounds the interrelations between local identification and universal longing. In dramatizing emotively ideas about friendship, sex, class, the pursuit of learning, gendered bodies, and state bureaucracy, their modes of poetic expression reveal the tensions and complexities of language. Just as ‘passion’ can reflect the redemptive suffering of the Saviour and the endless torments of sexuality, so too ‘promotion’ can underpin adolescent intellectualism and allegorical quests. Although their poised, assured, self-aware publications proclaimed their identity in the Jacobean literary marketplace, almost four centuries separate their original appearance from our belated discovery. 158

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Caroline, Protectorate, and Restoration Poets’ Complication of Early Modern Selfhood: Diana Primrose, Mary Fage, An Collins,‘Eliza,’ Elizabeth Major, Gertrude Thimelby, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips Although Wroth lived until the establishment of the Protectorate, there is no record of publication for her after 1621. The next wave of women poets, who wrote during the second half of Wroth’s life and who – except for the trio of Bradstreet, Cavendish, and Philips – remain obscure, nevertheless clearly illustrates the enmeshed intricacies of early modern selfhood. Influencing its endlessly variable expression are the effects of schooling, position within the family, maternity, connections with the monarchy, and religious affiliations. Diana Primrose’s only extant work, A Chaine of Pearle, or A Memoriall of the peerles Graces, and Heroick Vertues of Queene Elizabeth, of Glorious Memory (1630),163 is the source of any information to be gleaned about this poet. Styling herself ‘thy Emperiall Majesties eternall Votary,’ Primrose creates a necklace of ten pearls of virtue fashioned in iambic pentameter couplets, which she offers with conventional humility as ‘these ill-composed PearlyRowes’ (‘Induction’). However, she is not unaware of her subject’s singularity, comparing Great Eliza to the sun, whom ‘the twinkling Stars and Asterismes doth chase’ from his triumphant throne, just as England’s queen ‘admits not here the least Comparison;/ Whose Glories, doe the Greatest Princes dampe’ (‘Induction’). Whether Primrose knew of Chapman’s praise of Wroth’s participation in the ‘Sydneian Asterisme’ is debatable, but it is worth noting how absolutely non-pareille – without comparisons and affiliations – she makes Elizabeth. Moreover, Primrose’s humility topos foregrounds her role as a writer: ‘For by these lines so black and impolite, / Thy Swan-like Lustre shall appeare more white’ (‘Induction’). In ‘the general nostalgia in the 1620–30s for the Elizabethan period’ a likely influence on Primrose’s picture of a unique woman’s unviolated ‘autonomous identity’ was the publication of William Camden’s Historie of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1625–1630).164 Primrose’s encomium rewrites history, presenting in the First Pearle of Religion a latitudinarian Elizabeth who ‘swaid the Scepter with a Ladies hand / Not urging any Romanist in the Land’ and who was only provoked to act (‘Shee bang’d the Pope’) by ‘factious Romanists’ and the Pope’s ‘Leaden Bull’ (2–3). Praise of Elizabeth’s chastity, prudence, temperance, clemency, justice, fortitude, science, patience, and bounty is grounded in the monarch’s formidable intellect, most prominently displayed in the tribute to her knowledge or science. In Primrose’s characterization, Elizabeth was an interdisciplinary scholar avant la lettre, blending practical and theoretical understanding, ‘Atticke Eloquence’ and ‘well-tuned Words,’ to ravish ‘our Academians,’ ‘imparadise Her Parliaments,’ and entertain ‘her Loyall Commons ... with a most Royall Grace’ (10–11). 159

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The salient feature of Mary Fage’s Fames Roule (1637), an obsequious collection of tortured acrostic rhymes, is not nostalgic praise of royal female intellect, but a display of the royalty, aristocracy, and clerical hierarchy with whom Fage, who identifies herself on the title-page as the wife of Robert Fage, the younger, Gentleman, is currying favour. Combining lavish superlatives and effusive humility, Fage’s mode is genuflectional; addressing her noble subjects, she craves pardon for the portraits of her ‘handmaids Pen, presuming you to paint, the Worthiest Men’ (297). The only women to appear in Fames Roule are queens and princesses. She claims to be adapting the Persian custom whereby a subject should always be ready to offer a gift to the king – in the case of the legend, a handful of water. Fage instead presents her rhymes as ‘a bowle of water from the fount of Helicon,’ explaining away any imperfections with remarkable artistic assurance: ‘where it comes short, let my desire of perfectnesse supply.’ Stretching to create anagrams and acrostics for 396 addressees, her reach often exceeds her grasp. She is most successful with members of the royal family: anagramatizing the king, Carolus Stuarte, as ‘AV! SOL’S TRU TRACE’ (1) and the queen, Maria Stuarte, as ‘METT RARA AVIS’ (4). However, the reader’s endurance lessens as she transforms the Bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall, into ‘OH! IS AL HELP’ (82) and the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, Philip Pembrooke and Mountgomerye, as ‘O PRIM MEEK PEER MOUNT ON, I LODG BY HAP’ (274). Fage’s use of acrostics and verse anagrams – laboured and taxing though they are – is worth comparing with the more polemical anagrammatic prose prophecies of her contemporary Lady Eleanor Davies. Far from obsequious, Davies (who will be discussed in the section devoted to the dramatic utterances of polemics and prophecies) spools together criticism of and grim forecasts for rulers in her day with Old Testament narratives and prophetic discourse. ‘Eliza,’ An Collins, and Elizabeth Major signal shifts in locale and class – from the recollected or doted-on court to the home, and from the lower rungs of the aristocracy to merchant/tradesmen families. Their texts of religious melancholy and representation of the physiologically suffering self – Elizas Babes: or the Virgins-Offering. Being Divine Poems, and Meditations (1652), An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653), and Elizabeth Major’s Honey on the Rod: or a Comfortable Contemplation for one in Affliction with sundry Poems on several Subjects (1656)165 – are our only source of information about their lives. Although their work appeared in the space of five turbulent years following the regicide and the defeat at Worcester, with wars, successive parliaments, and forcible pledges of loyalty called ‘Engagement’ and ‘Recognition,’ it is easy to dismiss these private, devotional documents as unconnected with the public realm. Yet the very violence of these times, as Lois Schwoerer argues, moved women ‘to speak out.’166 160

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The religious melancholy of ‘Eliza,’ Collins, and Major is their vehicle for pledging engagement and recognition elsewhere. Often disconsolate and abject, in Julia Kristeva’s taxonomy of being ‘excluded’ and disturbing ‘identity, system and order,’ these Commonwealth women also fashion an idiosyncratic faith that sustains and buoys their burdened and occasionally aphasic spirits. Although they share the psychological symptoms of the disturbed patients treated by the seventeenth-century astrological physician Richard Napier, including calling on God, inability to pray, doubt of salvation, fearfulness, and weeping, these poets never succumb to despair or unorderable cognitive chaos. Sobriety, which may appear to be its opposite to unaffected observers, and eschatological insight are two salient features of their religious melancholy. Kristeva herself would recognize their spiritual tristitia as ‘mystical, ... as a means towards paradoxical knowledge of divine truth.’167 Certainly these women had just cause for wanting to transcend their situation. All suffered emotional or physiological pain. ‘Eliza’ states her preference for the relatively painless birth of her poetry to the delivery of offspring. Although her husband proves very sympathetic, ‘As if of heaven, he were elect,’ and she sees herself removed from the plight of most wives who ‘live in strife’ (‘The Change,’ 43–4), she insistently returns to the matter of progeny in comparing her intellectual offerings ‘to a Lady that bragg’d of her Children’: Thine doth delight in nought but sin, My Babes work is, to praise heavn’s King. Thine bring both sorrow, pain and fear, Mine banish from me dreadfull care. (55)

Collins and Major disclose other physiological torments. ‘Restrained from bodily employments,’ ‘enforced ... to a retired Course of life’ (‘To the Reader’), ‘[b]eing through weakness to the house confin’d’ (‘Preface’), Collins admits but refuses to dwell on chronic ill health. The autobiographical information gleaned mainly from the opening of the verse portion of Major’s work reveals, as we have seen, that her parents were dead, that she was crippled, and that she regretted having had dissolute companions. Because their sights are on an eschatological rather than a political economy, what connections exist between private and public, domestic and political, realities in their work? And how appropriate is the criterion that their poetry reflect circumambient conditions? As I read ‘Eliza,’ Collins, and Major, the culture of violence and chaos they inhabited, where the fates of occlusion, neglect, and retirement had been assigned to them, and the theological inculcation of guilt does not heighten feelings of neediness and powerlessness.168 Their melancholy is not passive; rather, it intensifies their anticipation of heaven. ‘Eliza’ experiences the curing and drawing out of ‘that distemper’ 161

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and ‘tormenting,’ ‘unrulie’ passions (‘On Earthly Love,’ 66) to be free to declare, ‘So though on earth, I as in heaven shall be’ (‘The Heart,’ 30). Collins proclaims that ‘blessed beames my mind eradiates, ... /And so ... communicates/ Celestiall health to ev’ry faculty’ (‘The Discourse,’ 8) and prizes ‘internall ornaments, ... / Though all things pleasing outward sense / Should utterly forsake [me]’ (‘A Song declaring that a Christian may finde tru Love only where tru Grace is,’ 39). Major anticipates liberation as she implores ‘unlink my heart,’ ‘unfix me, Lord, from earth,’ and ‘from thick clay unclog my drossy heart’ (182). The psychological dynamics of their connections to family, community, and state realities are perceptible.169 ‘Eliza’ commends her mother as a ‘souldier’ of Christ who ‘used her authority by love, to bring her children under the obedience of that Generall, whom she serv’d, and to make me love him in my childhood, whom her experience had taught to love and admire’ (‘The invincible Souldier,’ 79). She also addresses poems to two sisters, identified only by initials, and a ‘bill of thanks’ to a preacher, ‘Mr. C.’ (47–8), for his instruction. ‘Eliza’ is the most asssertive of the trio, addressing verses to Charles I advising him not to ‘affright’ her Babes ‘with war’ and to ‘be not too rigid’ (‘To the King. writ, 1644,’ 23); to his sister Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, in admiration; and to Cromwell, whose virtue she challenges to an equity match: But why doe I complain of thee? ’Cause thou art the rod that scourgeth mee? But if a good child I will bee, I’le kiss the Rod, and honour thee; And if thou’rt vertuous as ’tis sed, Thou’lt have the glory when thou’rt dead. (‘The General Cromwell,’ 54)

Her promise to be ‘a good child’ is not as regressive or infantilizing as it might at first sound; obedience is predicated on Cromwell’s ability to ‘whip ... the Lawyer from his fee’ and ‘Free us from ... Laws Tyranny.’ Without doubt ‘Eliza’s’ voice is the least melancholic and most assured. Depicting herself ‘sett free from thrall’ and ‘fild ... with contemplation’ (‘The Triumph,’ 6), ‘cur’d of the plague of [her] own heart’ (‘My Redemption acknowledged,’ 88), and en route to the ‘blessed Tabernacle of security’ (‘Security in Danger,’ 100), she rhapsodizes about being ‘unwrapt’ from the ‘robes of earth’ (‘Luke 20. 36 In that world they shall be equall to the Angels,’ 20). With An Collins we move to a more intimate, discursively present acknowledgment of Melancholy as an instructive, elevating state. Sorrow serves ‘as springing raine / To ripen fruits, indowments of the minde’ (‘The Preface,’ B). Seeking the retired shade of Melancholy is one thing, but resigning oneself to ‘excessive worldly Griefe’ (‘Another Song,’ 61) is unacceptable in Collins’s 162

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theology. Such a state ‘devouers’ the soul and ‘spoiles the activenesse of all Powers’ (‘Another Song,’ 61), as ‘sad Discontent and Murmors’ cause the creature to detest ‘all delight’: His Wits by sottish Folly Are ruinated quite. (‘Another song exciting to spirituall mirth,’ 51)

Collins’s engagement with the Cromwellian Protectorate, proclaimed in the year of her publication, is critical, for she devotes two lengthy songs to the topic. She holds forth against the false interpretation of scripture and the ‘Losse of lightsom Liberty,’ and prophesies the end of this ‘new Babell’ (‘A Song composed in time of the Civill Warr,’ 66). The most accomplished and arguably ‘radical’170 of these poets, Collins is clearly not preoccupied with the mire of sin and peccant fallibility. She devises the 103 stanzas of ‘The Discourse’ in rhyme royale with appended biblical glosses; she composes ballad stanzas, sestets, and octaves, and fashions original, if not experimental, metaphors, as in the image of the wind that ‘sweetly our soules refrigerates’ (‘This song sheweth that God is the strength of his People,’ 54) – a usage not included in the three pre-1660 examples of ‘refrigerate’ cited in the OED. Beyond the indirect endorsement of the Protectorate through the licensing of Joseph Caryl, a Cromwellian official who approved public ministers, and the text’s overall imperative to resist surrounding corruption, Honey on the Rod contains no specific or oblique reference to national events occurring at the time of the inner experiences related. Having ‘unmasked’ (h5) sin and confessed herself ‘a long and a perverse wanderer’ (26), Elizabeth Major catalogues her own inconstancy and vulnerability without apparent sense of progress through this private, intensely felt exploration of sin, sorrow, and self. She dispenses with most particularities to concentrate on interior dialogues between Soul and Consolation and Soul and Echo about overarching issues of worthiness and correction. In this circular, recursive narrative, her torment is real and all the more compelling for its non-patternable untidiness, the competing flashes of buoyancy and melancholy upending any program of surety. Major characterizes the rod according to the requirements of the situation and her own disposition – dejected, obstinate, amenable, grateful. She does not shrink from pain, as the frequent associations of the trope of the rod with wounds, darts, and imprisonment witness. She also uses metaphorical language to call for genuinely rough intervention. She solicits God, ‘husbandman to thy own purchased seed,’ to ‘break up this fallow ground of [her] heart’ (159–60). In addition to emptying her heart of all dross’ (164), divine intervention will ‘unglue [her] heart from earthen pleasures’ (196). She seeks God to counteract evil, ‘which like a Christmas Box, till brok’t has been, / Can’t vent the treasure that’s inclos’d within’ (179). 163

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In her poetic catalogue of the sources of deadly sins, her rehearsal of the ages of man, and the initial and terminal acrostics on her name, Major recalls, re-visits, and reconstructs her life. Neither placidness nor passivity characterizes the argument with herself about the seductiveness of sin and gift of submission. With a candour reminiscent of Paul’s admission (Romans 7:14– 15), she confesses, ‘When I would good, then evil shews his face, / The good I leave, the evil I embrace’ (198). A similar paradox informs her plea for ‘the gift of a submitting spirit’: O order then my changes, that a good day Make me not to presume, nor yet delay Hasting to thee; nor let a bad day cast Me in dispair, but to thy mercies haste. (210)

She strives to create her own consolation through language, thus fulfilling the ‘requisite’ of ‘imitation’ Ben Jonson suggested in Timber or Discoveries, as a creature ‘that feeds with an appetite, and hath a stomach to concoct, divide and turn all into nourishment, ... turn all into honey.’171 ‘Eliza,’ Collins, and Major confound the domestic stereotype of the godly housekeeper and debunk the suggestion that ‘the godly woman was the successfully socialised woman.’172 Songs are their children. They are all ‘autobiographer[s] of a self both tremulous and assured, suffering and singing, in the midst of spiritual and physical, public and personal pressures.’173 They exemplify the Pauline mystery of ‘powerlessness of the godly’ through the frequency of lapses into rebellion and momentary hopelessness.174 But this trio also propagates enticingly unresolved paradoxes about the conditions of women’s writing in the Commonwealth. They share an initial reluctance to publish dissolved by an insistence on catechetical utility, a co-existing humility topos and impressive spiritual poise, a quest of hope and comfort through the recounting of torment, and reliance on the Bible and the suffering, articulate self as the complete evidentiary ground of testimony. This remarkable balance of humility and doubt with productivity and confidence informs the conviction of their poetics. Conviction is foregrounded, too, in the recovered work of a more obscure trio of related Roman Catholic poets and letter writers, Gertrude (Aston) Thimelby (ca. 1617–68), Winefrid Thimelby (1618–90), and Katherine (Thimelby) Aston (ca. 1619–58). The poems and letters exchanged among five aristocratic, intermarried Roman Catholic families (Thimelby, Aston, Fowler, Persall, Southcote) in seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, Surrey, and Flanders, as transcribed from manuscripts by Arthur Clifford in Tixall Poetry (1813) and Tixall Letters (1815), are an amazing repository of 164

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elite culture, cross-Channel communication, and inter-generational dynamics.175 Though never intended for publication, these documents provide insights into families whose dwellings and names, all extinct in the male line, have perished. An enduring yet understudied feature of the collections is the prominence of women poets and letter writers and their shared, otherworldly, metaphysical perspective. Tixall Poetry and Tixall Letters supply a unique opportunity to trace the circulation and perseverance of ideas about acculturation, wealth, inheritance, and shared values within a single belief system across at least two generations in interlocked family units. Wife, mother, and widow, Gertrude Thimelby writes poetry about marital love, the death of her only child, and family weddings and funerals; demonstrating a familiarity with Milton, D’Avenant, and Waller, her poems convey a Donnean understanding of the mutually constitutive worlds of flesh and spirit. Although prompted by specific events, her poems are preoccupied with eternity, making them more unified and coherent than most collections of occasional work. In ‘On the Death of Her Only Child,’ Thimelby does not explain how this occurrence was ‘the mothers fault,’ but her closed couplets of iambic tetrameter express the struggle between assurance about her ‘sweet child in heaven plac’d’ and admittedly selfish longing for the infant: Yet must confesse my frailty such My joy by griefe’s exceeded much: Though I, in reason, know thy blisse Can not be wish’d more then it is, Yet this selfelove orerules me soe, I’de have thee here, or with thee goe.

Thimelby crafts a poem of similar comfort for her sister and brother-in-law on the death of their little son; softening the final line, derived from a Greek proverb, that ‘God loves the child that quickly dies,’ Thimelby’s eschatological perspective assures the grieving parents that ‘your gaine is greater then your loss’ on account of the prayerful intercession of little Frank: He your senses’ welcome guest, Treates your soules now with a feast. (‘To Sir William and My Lady Persall Uppon the Death of their Little Franke’)

Thimelby’s poems to her husband, who died early in their marriage, and to other couples on their wedding day expand and emphasize the purity, inviolateness, and exemplarity of their love in imagery reminiscent of Donne’s ‘Canonization.’ To her husband she maintains: 165

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England Weekes, months, and years, but moments prove To those that nobly are in love. This computation’s only knowne To them that our pure flame can owne. (‘To Her Husband, on New-Years-Day, 1651’)

Recalling the cynosure of Donne’s ‘The Good-Morrow’ and ‘The Sun Rising,’ Thimelby instructs the ‘worldly wise’ with ‘new lessons’ about an ‘unrepenting paire ... united by contented poverty’: Since these possess’d so absolute a calme, Love only knowes, who gives the soveraigne balme: Cures all distempers, even wishes vaine, When each from other all thats wish’d obtaine. (‘Contented Poverty’)

For the marriage of Lord Walter Aston and Lady Mary Weston she forwards a loving message without fanfare: ‘Whose spatious hearts are megazins, wher ioyes / Contented croud, are happy without noyse.’ In my estimate Thimelby’s most penetrating and revealing poems are ‘To Mr E___ T___, Who Holds Selfe-Love In All Our Actions,’ her response to her brother-in-law Edward Thimelby, a priest who was provost or superior of the College at Cambray, and ‘No Love Like That of the Soule.’ Her answer to Edward Thimelby casts aside decorum in the anxiety of the opening exclamation of disbelief: ‘Selfe-love in all? Sure I am not awake! / My dreames abuse me, or my eares mistake.’ To refute Edward’s claims about selfishness or selfabsorption, she marshals evidence from literature and legend. D’Avenant’s incomplete epic poem, Gondibert (1651), was clearly in her library; Thimelby extracts lessons from the situation of the heroine Birtha, affianced to Gondibert, Duke of Lombardy, who must deal with the proclamation of King Aribert, the healer of Gondibert’s wounds, that the duke will be his heir and that his daughter and only child, Rhodalind, will be Gondibert’s bride. In D’Avenant’s epic the hero pledges his fidelity to Birtha by the gift of an emerald ring which will turn pale if his love declines. Significantly, Thimelby concentrates on the conflict between the two noble and virtuous women: Doe you selfe-love in humble Birtha find, Who griev’d for fear of wronging Rhodalind, With sober minde acknowledg’d her desert, Fit only for her most lov’d Gondebert?

She also cites the legend of Queen Eleanor who, accompanying King Edward on crusade in the Holy Land, sucked the poison of a dagger wound from her 166

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husband. ‘Did not Queene Elnor love her husband more, / Who t’ease his paine suckt his invenom’d soare?’ Thimelby’s refutation of her brother-in-law, through the examples of female sacrifice in particular, is determined and unrelenting. ‘I dare mentaine the field,’ she avers, ‘though I’me sure you’de finde, / If not mongst men, most women of this minde.’ In ‘No Love Like That of the Soule,’ she adopts Donne’s attitude toward ‘dull sublunary lovers’ (‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,’ line 13) and his conviction of the strength in being ‘inter-assurèd of the mind’ (line 19), as she chastizes ‘froward heretickes, ... the idle likers of a face, / Who leave the soule for the fantastick case.’ The ephemerality of beauty and externals (‘who would this busy nothing prise’) underlines the transcendence of eternal joys: Tis only they with justice may pretend A lasting joy, whose love can know noe end. These are the wise admirers of the soule And these Fame only Lovers does inrole.

Thimelby’s reference to one particular heretic, ‘the unconstant Pamphilus,’ and ‘every change of his removing hart’ might indicate a knowledge of – and some transposition of names from – Lady Mary Wroth’s romance heroine Pamphilia and her wavering lover Amphilanthus. What distinguishes Thimelby’s poetry, and in fact all the women’s contributions to Tixall Poetry and Tixall Letters, is a view of life as a consecrated entity, a sacramental reality brought to fulfilment only at its conclusion. In widowhood Gertrude Thimelby left England to become a nun, joining her sister-in-law Winefrid Thimelby, abbess of the English Convent of Augustine nuns at Louvain, in Flanders. Winefrid Thimelby’s letters to her sister and brother-in-law, the Honourable Herbert Aston, relate the details of Gertrude’s profession and convey reports about the health of their daughter (and Winefrid’s niece), who was studying at Louvain as a postulant and eventually took vows before her early death. Full of the inquiries and solicitude of a fond aunt who was not ‘a well mortifyed nun dead to the world’ but a family member ‘as nearly concern’d for thos I love, as if I had never left them’ (Letter LVI), her letters express Winefrid’s motherly affection for all her nieces and nephews at the Aston family home at Bellamore. The third member of this linked chronicle relayed through the work of women is Winefrid’s sister and correspondent, Katherine Aston, also a poet, who died after the birth of her tenth child; fewer of her poems survive. For students of early modern women’s writing the Tixall archive offers a unique distillation of family activity and feeling, which nevertheless preserves a certain formality of expression.With their topics of early deaths (of Gertrude Thimelby’s child and several infant relatives), struggles with weak health 167

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(as with Kat Aston the postulant and novice), prolific and single-child marriages, and religious zeal shared by English and Continental residents, the retrieved commentaries of Gertrude Thimelby, Winefrid Thimelby, and Katherine Aston supply an instructive coda to the discrete productions on similar themes by better-known contemporaries. Anne Bradstreet (1612–72), Margaret Cavendish (1624–74), and Katherine Philips (1632–64) were all published during their lifetimes.176 They assumed the role of poet with less diffidence than Collins, ‘Eliza,’ and Major, and unlike the Thimelby-Aston connections, their family stories have been widely circulated and studied. Though without shared bloodlines, they took a common stand against patriarchal censure, using ironic disparagement, privileged access to literary culture, and an assured sense of social standing to minimize restraints. Less didactic as well, their poetry blends private and public spheres, anxieties about friendships, marriage, maternity, conception, children, and husbands with ideas about history, science, cosmology, and fame. Hailed as the first female poet of the New World, English-born Anne Bradstreet spent her adult life, from young bride to mother of eight children, in Andover, Massachusetts. Her father, Thomas Dudley, and, following her death, her husband, Simon Bradstreet, were the second and third governors of this Puritan colony. Her earliest work, The Tenth Muse (1650), probably written between 1630 and 1642 and published very successfully in England by her brother-in-law, was designed as a quaternion (four poems of four books) dedicated to her father, himself an author of a now-lost quaternion, to whom Bradstreet sent her ‘four times four, now meanly clad / To do their homage unto yours, full glad’ (‘To Her Most Honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq. These Humbly Presented,’ lines 14–15). Although John Woodbridge had had the text published without her knowledge, it proved to be a very vendible commodity and earned Bradstreet praise from Bathsua Makin, who in an Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), called her an ‘excellent’ poet. There is no indication that Bradstreet was either surprised or unhappy about the success of The Tenth Muse. In fact, her Prologue shows considerable spirit in deploying a denigrated domestic idiom to her advantage, asking only for a ‘thyme or parsley wreath’ (line 48) and pre-empting by discrediting the criticism based on woman’s role as a needleworker: I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they cast on female wits: If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance. (lines 27–32)

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The envoy, ‘The Author to Her Book,’ anticipates ‘Eliza’s’ use of the maternity topos, though Bradstreet spends as much time acknowledging this ‘ill-formed offspring’ as her ‘rambling brat’ as justifying its coarse clothes: ‘nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find’ (lines 1, 9, 19). ‘A Dialogue between Old England and New: Concerning Their Present Troubles, Anno, 1642’ is not only one way of dating this first collection, but an exposition of Bradstreet’s informed surety in scripting New England’s counsel of her dear mother Old England, who bemoans her ‘tattered state’ (line 16) and ‘fainting weak’ned body’ (line 19) at the outbreak of the Civil War. Filial but firm, New England issues the call ‘to root out Popelings head, tail, branch, and rush’ since ‘we hate Rome’s whore with all her trumpery’ (lines 236, 242). In contrast to the historiographic restyling of Diana Primrose’s necklace of pearls, Bradstreet’s praise of Elizabeth I discloses the poet’s knowledge of literary and historical texts while stressing the universal sway of this monarch: No Phoenix pen, nor Spenser’s poetry, No Speed’s nor Camden’s learned history, Eliza’s works, wars, praise, can e’er compact; The world’s the theatre where she did act. No memories nor volumes can contain The ’leven Olympiads of her happy reign. Who was so good, so just, so learn’d, so wise, From all the kings on earth she won the prize. (‘In Honour of The High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory,’ lines 24–31)

Bradstreet’s posthumously published poetry, inserted in the 1678 edition and discovered in the Andover mansucripts printed in 1867, illuminates domestic, emotional interiors. Here she speaks of marital passion as ‘such that rivers cannot quench’ (‘To My Dear and Loving Husband,’ line 8) and of her husband as ‘My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay, more, / My joy, my magazine of earthly store’ (‘A Letter to Her Husband Absent Upon Public Employment,’ lines 1–2). Before a delivery she acknowledges fear for her possibly widowed husband and motherless children and expresses delight in her brood of ‘eight birds hatched in one nest, / Four cocks there were, and hens the rest’ (‘In reference to Her Children,’ lines 1–2). The somatic imagery of her poem on the four humours shows Bradstreet’s familiarity with Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia or a Description of the Body of Man (1615), a translated digest of anatomical knowledge gleaned from Aristotle and Galen. Bradstreet’s gynaecological references disconnect ‘feminine physical nature from its associations with disease and immorality.’177 With maternal vigilance and Christian acceptance she adapts and condenses the genre of mothers’ advice books, recording sicknesses and deaths, journeys and homecomings, 169

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but resorting to no syntactic or prosodic pyrotechnics. Instead she lets the almost-prayerful rhythms of her ballad stanzas and couplets convey the benedictional outlook of one who ‘blest His name that gave and took’ (‘Here Follows Some Verses Upon the burning of Our House July 10th, 1666,’ line 18). Margaret Cavendish’s first publication, Poems and Fancies (1653), a secular work written and published while she and her Royalist husband were living in exile, gives a nodding glance to domesticity and the household idiom, in her admission that she has ‘no Children to imploy [her] Care’ but has laboured ‘these nine months’ to bring her ‘Book, ... as it were [her] Child ... to the World’ (‘To the Reader,’ A7). Locating the writing of poetry as a domestic pursuit, Cavendish is also conscious of creating a stir. She makes no secret of her purpose, boldly announcing ‘To All Noble and Worthy Ladies’: ‘For all I desire, is Fame, and Fame is nothing but a great noise, and noise lives most in a multitude; wherefore I wish my Book may set a worke every Tongue’ (A3). In many ways she got her wish. The letter writer Dorothy Osborne concluded that ‘there were more soberer people in Bedlam,’ while John Stainsby, friend of the antiquary Elias Ashmole, denigrated her as Newcastle’s ‘illustrious whore’ and ‘Great Atheistical Philosophraster.’178 Poems and Fancies makes forays into topics as diverse as natural philosophy, scientific discourse, fairies, talking birds, and magical castles. Cavendish’s marriage to an aristocratic widower thirty years her senior and association with the Newcastle circle (including William and Charles Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, Kenelm Digby, and René Descartes), where she remained ‘a silent but avid listener,’ allowed her only a visitor’s glimpse of the Royal Society, which excluded female membership until 1945.179 Because the first quarter of the two hundred pages of poetry in this volume delineates her atomistic philosophy, critical labels employ the language of seventeenth-century New Science, which ironically Cavendish observed from the sidelines, to classify the results as ‘vitalist’ or ‘mechanist.’180 A vitalist or atomistic view sees the world as an organism, while the mechanist world-view concentrates on responsiveness to the laws of Nature. A combination of vitalism and mechanism seems an appropriate reading strategy for Cavendish’s poems, in which many worlds are imagined, learning and speculation cavort, and paradox and contradiction are unashamedly at ease. She vivifies atoms of four shapes – square, round, long, and sharp – as the basis of her mechanistic materialism. But Cavendish’s mechanistic-seeming atoms can also be animated and self-moving; in ‘A World made by Atomes,’ they ‘dance about, fit places finde’ (5). For a postmodern reader, so inured to theories of doom, entropy, and deterioration, in which everything is running down, the discovery of Cavendish’s poetry – in all of its contradictions and intermixtures – is the purposefulness, the focused sensibility, of atomistic motion. As she characterizes it in ‘Of the Sympathy of their Figures,’ 170

Genres of Early Modern Women’s Writing Such sympathy there is in every Figure, That every several sort do flock together. As Aire, Water, Earth, and Fire; Which make each Element to be entire: Not but loose Atomes, like Sheep stray about, And into several places go in, and out. (12)

While Cavendish assigns reasoning powers to fish (‘Of Fishes’) and philosophical perceptions to beasts (‘A Discourse of Beasts’), she is at her most inventive when she describes emotions and mental faculties as the interactions of several atoms. So Wit, and Understanding in the Braine, Are as the severall Atomes reigne: And Dispositions good, or ill, Are as the severall Atomes still. And every Passion which doth rise, Is as the several Atomes lies. Thus Sickness, Health, and Peace, and War; Are alwaies as the severall Atomes are. (‘All things are govern’d by Atomes,’ 16)

Linguistic agility feeds Cavendish’s fantasy. In ‘A World in an Eare-Ring’ she animates a miniature world where ‘Seas may ebb, and flow, where Fishes swim, / And Islands be, where Spices grow therein’ (45). This microcosm is independent of the macrocosm. Both the ear and the ring shape of the ornament itself, the two linguistic components of the word ‘earring,’ are oblivious to the dramatic world of meadows, gardens, cities, churches, governors, battles, and rival lovers. Claire Jowitt makes the fascinating connection between the central image of this poem and the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth (1592), standing on a Saxon-style map of England and wearing not only necklaces of Armada pearls but ‘an armillary sphere – a skeleton celestial globe which depicts, with metal rings, the equator, ecliptic tropics, Antarctic and Arctic circles’ on her left ear. Just as this imagery, ‘depicting an enormous Elizabeth standing on top of England with a minute world hanging suspended from her ear,’181 conveys the queen’s power, so does Cavendish’s probable allusion offer a striking example of the empowerment of poetic language, particularly for defeated Royalists in the 1650s. Her contemporary Katherine Philips shared Cavendish’s Royalist sympathies and also married a widower more than three decades her senior. London-born Katherine Fowler, at the age of sixteen, married Puritan Parliamentarian James Philips, MP for Cardiganshire in Wales; he is addressed as ‘Antenor’ in her poetry. The nature of fame – overtly sought after or more 171

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covertly promoted – is another topic which invites comparison between these two poets. Cavendish made no bones about seeking fame and attempting entrées into the scientific discourse of the Newcastle circle. Philips, a relative through her mother, Katherine Oxenbridge, of Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit (lady-in-waiting to Queen Kateryn Parr, tutor to Princess Elizabeth, and author of a book of prayers) and through her second stepfather of John Dryden, relied on a network of enabling literary and cultural associations to cultivate her reputation. In addition to early notice from her Welsh neighbour, the Royalist poet Henry Vaughan, in his Olor Iscanus (1651), and solicitation of a commendatory poem for another Royalist poet, William Cartwright, her friends, among whom her verses circulated in manuscript, included Sir Edward Dering (‘Silvander’), Sir Charles Cotterell (‘Poliarchus’), Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Edmund Waller. Among her most prominent female friends were Mary Aubrey (‘Rosania’), from the time of their girlhood meeting at Mrs Salmon’s school in Hackney until Aubrey’s marriage, and Anne Owen (‘Lucasia’). This network of unrelated women, focused on the earthly dynamics of friendship, contrasts with the family connections of the Thimelby-Aston network and its emphasis on heavenly rewards. Philips’s early death at age thirty-two contributed to the legend of precocity, which was amplified by a production of her translation of Corneille and a collection of letters and poems on friendship sent by ‘Orinda’ to a coterie of select, primarily female, friends. As well as coming to terms with the constructedness of Philips’s reputation, the other principal issue in the growing body of criticism is the label of lesbian poet.182 It is possible, however, to assess the substance and range of Philips’s work without embellishing or denigrating her accomplishment or her shrewd use of contacts, and without turning her poems on romantic friendship into unquestionable depictions of homoerotic sexuality. Manuscript juvenilia (Orielton Estate MS., parcel 24, National Library of Wales)183 reveals clear-sighted poise and metrical playfulness, as the fourteenyear-old girl considers the qualities of a mate, the drawbacks of marriage, and a cure for lovesickness. Like Beatrice, keeping her heart ‘on the windy side of care’ (Much Ado About Nothing, 2.2.326), C. Fowler, as she signed the verse describing an ideal partner, conveys a youthful pertinacity in cataloguing the features of an agreeable kindred spirit: No blooming youth shall ever make me err I will the beauty of the mind prefer If himan rites shall call me hence It shall be with some man of sence Nott with the great butt with a good estate

172

Genres of Early Modern Women’s Writing Nott too well read nor yet illetterate In all his actions moderate grave & wise Redyer to bear than offer injuries ...

The verso of this sheet contains a poem on marriage, again from the point of view of an alert, observant adolescent whose mother had married three times: A marryd state affords but little Ease The best of husbands are so hard to please This in wifes Carefull faces you may spell Tho they desemble their misfortunes well ...

Her cure for lovesickness is a whimsical concotion of ‘two oz: of the spirits of reason three oz: of the Powder of experiance five drams of the Juce of Discretion three oz: of the Powder of good advise & a spoonfull of the Cooling watter of consideration.’ Philips’s mature poetry, circulated in the 1650s, ranges over topics from the regicide, which she denounced, to the country life, disputes in religion, the marriages of friends, the absence of her husband, and the death of children, particularly her only son. The focus, that is, could be public or private, national or local. Emotions are not exclusive; sympathetic understanding of another is not limited to marriage; and friendship can characterize deep same-sex attachments as well as marital unions. Friendship is ‘love refin’d and purg’d from all drosse, ... stronger then passion is, though not so grosse’; it is, moreover, ‘nobler’ than marriage (‘A Friend,’ lines 8, 10). In addresses to specific female friends Philips drapes her allusions to the embodied, possibly erotic realities in sufficient ambiguity to allow for lesbian and non-lesbian readings. ‘To my Lucasia,’ for instance, alludes to a simultaneous spiritual and tactile experience: By what strange harmony and course of things Each body to the whole a tribute brings; What secret Unions neighbouring agents make, And of each other how they doe partake. (3–6)

Yet the poet, in glancing at those ‘soft touches’ by which ‘spirits greet and kiss,’ refuses to satisfy prurient curiosity: ‘it will admit / No rude spectatour to contemplate it’ (11, 13–14). Another complication of an exclusively lesbian reading is Philips’s treatment of her husband. In ‘To my dearest Antenor on his parting’ she invokes a Donnean ‘Union’ (17) and ‘secret sympathy’ (21) to compose a living image in absence:

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Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England That magique which both fate and time beguiles, So in my brest thy Picture drawn shall be, My guide, life, object, friend, and destiny: And none shall know, though they employ their wit, Which is the right Antenor, thou, or it. (33–8)

Her ‘Epitaph on Hector Philips,’ her infant son who lived less than six weeks, poignantly relates her joy after ‘seven years Childless Marriage past’ (5) and comes to terms with his passing by comparing his brilliance to the sun. The setting is natural, part of a daily rhythm, and the diction has a nursery rhyme simplicity: So the sun, if it arise Half so glorious as his Ey’s, Like this Infant, takes a shroud, Bury’d in a morning Cloud. (19–22)

The voices of these mid-seventeenth-century women poets are complex and nuanced. Whether eager for fame or prizing retirement, they experiment with a range of moods and modes – from encomium to self-scrutiny and introspective observation – that testify to the mirroring of domestic, political, and sacred hierarchies. Their awareness of the plasticity, celebration, and confessionalism of language enlarges our understanding of the social and textual landscape. Like their Elizabethan and Jacobean foremothers, they supply gender-marked subjectivities, alternative to though not always separate from male-centred discourse and expression. They dare to develop sequences of tangents, to generate perceptions of wholeness and rupture, to delineate innovative emotional maps. Drama and the Dramatic If we limit drama and the dramatic to the public performance of the theatre, then we bypass a huge repository of work by early modern Englishwomen. Just as their poetry is a composite discourse, so too their dramatic creations embrace a variety of formats – from closet drama to the maternal monologues of advice manuals and the cultural critique of prophecies and polemics. The playhouse or the theatre is not the site of this dramatic utterance; it is enacted in private family performances, scripted at moments of anxiety by pregnant women and mothers, or responding with urgent directness to turmoil and upheaval in the public sphere. This hybridized concept of dramatic expression is not a perverse disregard of a prevailing genre. On the contrary, it encourages us to locate the ways early modern women constructed identity and repre174

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sented themselves in non-commercial sites. Moreover, this enlarged (or loosened) concept strives to extend the exploration of ‘the equivocal positions women occupied in the drama,’184 as Viviana Comensoli’s collection outlines them, to embrace the theatrical dimensions of a wide range of early modern women’s writing. The idea of the dramatic also acknowledges the considerable scholarly excavation of women’s drama and dramatic production. Such an inclusive understanding of drama clarifies how women’s dramatic utterance, though denied space in the professional theatre, crafted its own sites through manuscript circulation and the popular press. Moreover, their work as closet dramatists, manual writers, prophets, and polemicists illustrates forcefully the braiding of domestic and civic, maternal and cultural, religious and political realities. ‘Closet’ Drama: Translations, Adaptations, Original Creations Englishwomen’s drama mixes poetry (or poetic sources) and kaleidoscopic representations of family tensions and narratives. The relatively small number of plays by early modern Englishwomen – from the translation of the Tudor adolescent bride Lady Jane Lumley to the lauded and performed work of the Matchless Orinda, Katherine Philips – is neither mysterious nor anomalous. The barring of women from the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage and the closing of public theatres during the Interregnum effectively restricted the reality of public performance of their plays. With the exception of Philips’s translation of Corneille, staged in Dublin after the Restoration, inquiries about the performances of the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonius, Lady Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, the entertainment by the Cavendish sisters, Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley, The Concealed Fancies, and the nineteen plays by their step-mother, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, involve speculations about private theatricals, readings with family and friends, and private readings in the theatre of the mind. These possibilities all create different understandings of ‘closet’ drama. They also underscore the folly and injustice of trying to squeeze women’s modes of writing into canonical, public categories. Chapter 4 will attend in detail to Mary Sidney Herbert’s reconfiguration of Antony and Cleopatra, Elizabeth Cary’s embodiment of marital and dynastic tensions at the court of Herod, Mary Wroth’s reflection of family politics through the love matches of articulate shepherds and shepherdesses, and Margaret Cavendish’s (and her step-daughters) ironic commentary on romantic strategies and female empowerment in Civil War and Restoration milieux. This chapter has already examined Jane Lumley’s translation of Euripides (79–80) and Katherine Philips’s work as a translator (97–8). But for early modern Englishwomen drama did not start or stop with the stage, 175

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public or private. Just as conceptualizing the play as a mental exercise in a theatre of one’s own (or one’s family’s) devising enlarges our understanding of dramatic venues, so too our grasp of the constitutive elements of the dramatic is enriched by considering the poignant monologues and gestures of anticipation in mothers’ advice books and the conscious performativity of women’s diatribes, prophecies, and polemics. Mothers’ Advice Books: Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Clinton, Elizabeth Joscelin, Elizabeth Richardson The genre of mothers’ manuals, combining proverbial advice and moral guidance, highlights a particular form of expressly female communication. They furnish ‘opportunities for authority as well as service, and for instruction as well as training.’ The five works to be discussed in this section, Elizabeth Grymeston’s Miscelanea. Meditations. Memoratives (1604), Dorothy Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing (1616), Elizabeth Clinton’s The Countesse of Lincoln’s Nurserie (1622), Elizabeth Joscelin’s The Mothers Legacie to her Unborn Childe (1624), and Elizabeth Richardson’s A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters (1645),185 convey much more than the role of the mother as an earnest godly instructor. Through positioning the woman in a cultural role uniquely her own, these manuals reveal insights not only into well-founded and widely attested fears about safe, healthy deliveries, but into the family dynamics of relationships with spouses, parents, and in-laws as well as living or unborn children. They illustrate a diverse register of personally inflected, at times confessional, voices; their popularity, though connected with ‘an immediate male readership’ and a ‘buyership also predominantly male,’186 prompted the circulation of such doubtful imitations as M.R.’s The Mothers Counsell, or, Live within Compasse (1623) and the anonymous A Mothers Teares over hir seduced sonne (1627). The dramatic speaking voices of these manuals impress us as simultaneously private and public, intimate and didactic. Lady Elizabeth (Bernye) Grymeston (1563–1602/3) from a Catholic Norfolk family addressed her Miscelanea. Meditations. Memoratives to her son Bernye, the only surviving child of her nine children. By relating ‘motherhood and spirituality to the corporeal,’ Grymeston writes the female body ‘as a way of ...understanding the abstract concept of redemption.’187 Knowing herself to be ‘a dead woman among the living,’ she presents him with ‘this portable veni mecum [as] Counseller, in which [to] see the true portrature of thy mothers minde’ (A3). The picture that emerges is of a learned woman who knows the value of borrowing from the best; ‘the bees hony [is not] the worse,’ she notes, ‘for that gathered out of many flowers,’ and therefore she decides against setting down in her ‘broken stile’ a remark ‘better expressed by a graver author’ (A3). Grymeston delights in quoting Latin and Greek, 176

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fashions her own verse paraphrase of psalms (Chapter XIII), and distils proverbial wisdom into pithy directives (Chapter XIIII). But she also admits to great unhappiness in suffering her ‘mothers undeserved wrath so virulent’ (A3). This animosity – possibly the result of her marriage – which Grymeston had ‘neither power to resist ... nor patience to endure’ reduces her to a ‘languishing consumption’ (A3). The distinction between affectionate and wrathful mothers is evident throughout the text, hovering at the edge of such observations on human fallibility and torment as this conclusion to ‘Speculum vitae. A sinners glasse’: ‘The earth was created for a place of pleasure, the aire was created temperate, creatures were made to be obedient to man, all things framed to his best content: but see how sinne hath transformed pleasure into plagues, famine and murders many in number, grievous in qualities, and ordinarie in experience ...’ (Chapter V). In her borrowed proverbial advice Grymeston favours pointed contrasts (‘He that refuseth to take counsell good cheape, buyes repentance too deare’) and measured triads (‘Thinke from whence thou camest, and blush: where thou art, and sigh: and tremble to remember whither thou shalt goe’). A widow who saw herself ‘going out of the world’ (A6v), Dorothy (Kemp) Leigh addressed her posthumously published The Mothers Blessing, designed as the title-page attests to be ‘profitable for all Parents to leave as a Legacy to their Children,’ to her three sons, George, John, and William, probably grammar school pupils at the time. Leigh’s dedication to Princess Elizabeth, James’s daughter and wife of the Count Palatine of the Rhine, as ‘the protectresse of this my Booke’ (A4v), indicates the shrewd blend of mortal anxiety and desire for the circulation of ‘this scroule [which] should bee kept for my children: for they were too young to receive it, my selfe too old to keepe it, men too wise to direct it to, the world too wicked to endure it’ (A3v). Godly gentlewoman to royal co-religionist, Leigh seeks not only a kind of imprimatur but an assurance of textual longevity – surely prophetic for a text that went through twenty-three editions in less than sixty years. Desiring to see her sons ‘grow in godlinesse’ (A6v), this ‘fearefull, faithfull and carefull Mother’ adroitly combines purposiveness and humility; she presents the text to her sons, adventuring ‘to shew my imperfections to the view of the world, not regarding what censure shall for this bee laid upon mee’ (A7v). Such mortification of self punctuates this idiosyncratic account. Leigh maintains that she does not ‘care what you or any shall thinke of mee, if among many words I may write but one sentence, which may make you labour for the spirituall food of the soule, wch must be gathered every day out of the word, as the children of Israel gathered Manna in the wildernesse’ (A11). Her continuous border of scriptural allusions maps a path for pursuing this spiritual food, as do such direct exhorations as ‘I pray reade the story of Job, and not onely reade, but gather some fruite out of it’ (F). She not only forecasts roles for her 177

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young sons as godly parents, whose ‘children, be they Males or Females, may in their youth learne to read the Bible in their own mother tongue’ (C2), but also repeatedly (chapters 32, 44) hopes that her sons will be ‘preacher[s] of Gods word’ (G3). Elizabeth (Knevet) Clinton, Countess of Lincoln (1574?-?1630), alludes to scripture to offer another form of motherly – in this case grandmotherly – counsel. Addressing The Countesse of Lincolne’s Nurserie to her breastfeeding daughter-in-law Bridget, ‘giving the sweet milk of your own breasts to your own child,’ the countess wastes no time introducing her topic, ‘the duty of nursing due by mothers to their own children.’ She identifies her duty in ‘the express ordinance of God’ and illustrates it by a host of biblical examples (from Eve, Sarah, Hannah, and Rebecca to Mary). Clinton explains references to Rebecca’s ‘nurse’ as references to a secondary caregiver and discounts objections to messed clothes and looking old by claiming ‘they argue unmotherly affection, idleness, desire to have liberty to gad from home, pride, foolish fineness, lust, wantonness, and the like evils.’ Curiously it is only towards the close of The Nurserie that this mother of eighteen admits she did not nurse her own children. Though she offers the semi-justification that she was ‘over-ruled by another’s authority,’ she directs the same righteous indignation she had used against others on herself in acknowledging ‘being pricked in heart for [her] undutifulness’ and using the text ‘to redeem [her] peace ... for this [her] offence.’ Elizabeth (Brooke) Joscelin (1595–1622) began the incomplete Mothers Legacie to her unborne Childe during her first pregnancy. As her editor, the Anglican clergyman Thomas Goad, disclosed in ‘The Approbation,’ shortly after the birth of her daughter (Theodora) on 12 October 1622, Joscelin ‘called for her winding sheet to bee brought forth and laied upon her’ (44, line 114); she died of puerperal fever nine days later. Prefaced by a letter to her husband, Taurell Joscelin, and displaying a precise knowledge of biblical precedent, The Mothers Legacie, discovered posthumously in her writing desk, enjoyed considerable, long-lived popularity, with seven editions within eleven years and five nineteenth-century editions spanning 1840 to 1895. The posthumous publication, the ardour of the letter to her ‘truly lovinge and most dearly loved husband,’ and the poignant blend of fear of death and tenacious, spirited embrace of the role of guide and mentor are some of the reasons for the text’s enduring appeal. An only child whose mother died when she was six, and who experienced a semi-estrangment from her father, Elizabeth Brooke was raised by her maternal grandfather, previously Bishop of Chester and, during her childhood, Bishop of Lincoln. Taurell Joscelin, the Cambridge graduate whom she married in 1616, was in Sylvia Brown’s estimate ‘tolerant of the idea of a learned wife, perhaps even sympathetic, for Elizabeth continued her studies 178

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after her marriage.’188 The revelations of her letter to Taurell, with its admission of the terrifying spectre ‘of the paynfullness of that kinde of death’ and subsequent curing of those fears ‘wth the remembrance that all things worke together for the best to those that love god [a]nd a certayn assurance that hee will give mee patience accordinge to my payn’ (lines 7–12), have provoked diverse critical comment. While Kristen Poole concentrates on the ways Joscelin ‘turns this position of being closed and enclosed to her own advantage [and] ... paradoxically authorizes self-display,’ Teresa Feroli offers a contrasting Freudian reading of Joscelin’s ‘narcissistic preoccupation with her own pain ... as yet another example of the way she construes maternity as a threat to her ego.’ Feroli concludes dolefully that ‘the legacy she grants her child is one of despair and aggression couched in terms of maternal love.’189 Joscelin does not sugarcoat anxieties and strictures, all thoroughly consonant with her upbringing and time. Nor does she impress me as either narcissistic or despairing. Joscelin writes candidly to her husband that she desires ‘to bee religiously prepared to dy: yet my deare I dispayr not of life, nay I hope and dayly pray for it ...: nor shall I think this labor lost though I doo live for I will make it my own lookinge glasse whearin to see when I am too sevear, when too remiss and in my childes fault thorough this glass discern mine own error’ (lines 112–17). This admission captures the resolve, purposefulness, and acceptance of her self-scrutiny. The contrastingly lengthy period of composition of Elizabeth Richardson’s (1576–1651) A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters, prepared over a span of approximately forty years (1606–45), may at first glance argue for more encyclopedic recollection than poignant exhortation. However, the time of publication, when The Book of Common Prayer was banned and the Presbyterian Directory for Public Worship in force, indicates that Richardson’s rehabilitating of old prayers could be viewed as a ‘new note of defiance from the circumstances in which it was printed.’190 Organized as three books, A Ladies Legacie obliquely charts Richardson’s progress through two marriages and final widowhood. Book One, composed between 1606 and 1625, is addressed to her four daughters (three unmarried at the time). In 1620 with the death of John Ashburnham, her first husband, who had been imprisoned for debt, she was a widow with six children and a precarious future. Yet her letter to her daughters, though noting their ‘misfortunes and want of preferments in the world’ (4), introduces the sense of assurance in providential guidance. Consisting of twenty-two prayers – biblical expositions and paraphrases – for different times of the day and liturgical celebrations, the book has a pastiche quality that illustrates her contention that ‘faithfull and devout prayer is a continuall intercourse and communion betwixt the Lord and us, ... like Jacobs ladder, by which our prayers make our wants ascend unto God, and his mercie descend down upon us’ (9–10). Book Two, composed after the death in 1634 of her 179

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second husband, Sir Thomas Richardson, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, is, as her own prefatory note indicates, ‘a weekly exercise of Prayer’ (51). Book Three contains prayers on the topics of widowhood, affliction, sickness, and death. Richardson favours long, paratactic sentences, extending her widow’s petition with biblical exemplars of calm attention (Mary, who chose the better part over her sister Martha in Luke 10:39–42) and dutiful service (Hanna, the widow-prophetess who recognized the infant Jesus as the Saviour in Luke 2:36–8): ‘And now, O Lord, since it hath been thy will and pleasure, to take away, and call to thy selfe my deare husband out of this transitory life before me, and to bereave me of him who was my chiefe comfort in this world: I humbly beseech thee, vouchsafe to take me into thy care, and give me grace to choose with Mary, that better part which may never be taken from mee, chiefly to serve and follow thee, that so I may turne this freedome from the bond of marriage only the more to thy service, and may become thy bondwoman to serve and praise thee day and night like Hanna, so long as I live’ (134). Whether apprehensive about a future or recollecting a past, these poignant texts of expressly female writing emerge from times when their authors are not at ease. Moreover, these mothers and mothers-to-be are often isolated or estranged from female relatives and mentors, as evident in Lady Grymeston’s distance from her wrathful mother, the Countess of Lincoln’s self-recrimination, and the absence of motherly or sisterly figures in Elizabeth Joscelin’s young womanhood. They all find their way through an otherworldly, usually biblical, loyalty and exhort their readers to do likewise. But their route to this awareness is mapped clearly and deliberately in the immediate, surrounding world of family. Ever alert to last things and holding joy and pains together, these women are able to accept life’s tragedies without retreating from its blows. Prophecies and Polemics, Petitions and Missionary Accounts: Radical Women and Godly Zeal During the period of the First (1642–5) and Second (1648) Civil War and the Commonwealth (1649–60) women were immensely productive authors. The one hundred and twelve pamphlets by women appearing during the Civil War decade indicates that these Interregnum authors ‘clearly recognized the popular press as important and the most effective agent available to [them].’191 In fact, many of the same devices that accounted for the popularity of the mothers’ advice books – direct and unmediated voice, a sense of urgency and mission, and assurance of an attentive domestic circle – also contributed to the swelling numbers of tracts. ‘The distinction between women teaching at home and their preaching in public was often blurred,’ and this blurring of 180

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private and public, home and church, ‘allowed women to gather an audience.’192 At a time when religion and politics coalesced, women’s knowledge of the Bible guaranteed the ‘legitimacy of the message being conveyed.’193 As prophets, polemicists, catechists, and self-styled preachers, women authors of the Civil War and Revolution joined male contemporaries to rescue England from popery and reform the Church. Their crusades were motivated by prescient causes – whether prophesying the fall of Charles I, exposing the disease within Cromwell’s Army and the Established Church, petitioning for the release of persecuted co-religionists, or recounting torments suffered on account of their belief. Women’s testimonies to the power of the spirit and its enabling of their voice created a vigorous repository of the generic and ideological diversity of dissent and its tentacular influence. Lady Eleanor Davies’s (1590–1652) writing career, extending from the accession of Charles I until her death, and consisting of over sixty published tracts of apocalyptic warnings, led to charges of blasphemy and sacrilege and four periods of imprisonment. As well as being the most prolific woman prophet of the seventeenth century, Davies remains the most baffling. Her enigmatic, circuitous, anagrammatic, ambiguous prophecies, alerting king and Parliament alike, reveal information about her aristocratic family, her two marriages (in 1609, to Sir John Davies, James’s attorney in Ireland, and shortly after his death, in 1626, to Sir Archibald Douglas), and her attachment to her sole surviving child, Lucy Countess of Huntingdon. Both husbands burned her work, and she launched bitter lawsuits against her son-in-law for the restoration of Davies’s property. She warned Charles and Archbishop Laud, who also burned her prophecies, and praised Cromwell on his return from a bloody campaign in Ireland. Although Lady Eleanor ‘professed no direct links to any of the major religious factions,’194 she never obliterated her own forceful identity. Her work has been labelled ‘a holy hatred’ and her activity, ‘flagrantly transgressive’; yet, as her biographer Esther Cope concludes, Lady Eleanor did win affections. ‘Her ill-paid servants, her daughter Lucy, and her grandchildren sensed an affection that made them willing to tolerate her demands and eccentricities.’195 Fashioning herself as a prophet rather than a preacher, Davies delighted in such rough anagrams for Cromwell as ‘Howl Rome’ in The Benediction (1651) and figured another of her last works, The Restitution of the Prophecy (1651), begun in Fleet Prison on Christmas Day 1650 and concluded on Candlemas, the feast of the Purification of Mary, as a swaddled infant Christ. Using the signposts of these feasts, which highlight the role of Mary in bringing about restitution (or salvation), Davies weaves together personal and biblical histories as she presents her ‘babe.’ ‘This Babe, object to their scorn, for speaking the truth, informing of things future, notwithstanding thus difficult to be fathered or licensed. That incision to the quick, hath under gone; without their Benediction, in these plain Swathe-bands, 181

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though commended unto thy hands ... Although not in a Stable brought forth, yet a place like restless; a hard choice between extreams or streits of that kinde to distinguish. No Inferior Prison, or of obscure Denomination; whereof that street carrieth the name; not the least, honored with no less then the Temple for one’ (344). Connecting the processes of birthing and publishing (‘fathered or licensed’), linking the ‘stable’ of the Nativity to the ‘inferior prison’ (the Fleet) where she was confined, and playing with the homologies between the Temple of Jerusalem and the Inner and Middle Temples, the training ground for lawyers located between Fleet Street and the Thames, her rhetorical weave is deliberately idiosyncratic and eccentric. She might be considered an early modern Gertrude Stein. Relying heavily on biblical typology and the books of Daniel and Revelation, Davies’s prophetic writings put her in a category apart from more plebeian and shrewd contemporaries. The work of London Leveller Katherine Chidley (fl. 1640–50), especially The Iustification of the Independant Churches of Christ (1641), her vociferous, point-for-point refutation of Thomas Edward’s Reasons against the Independent Government of Particular Congregations (1641), and her contributions to The Humble Petition of Divers Wel-Affected Women (1649), by contrast, illustrates the remarkable power of merchant and artisanal networks. Wife of a Shrewsbury tailor, who along with his eldest son became a haberdasher in London, and herself a stockingseller, this mother of eight (seven living to adulthood) moved with ease within the circle of such fellow Levellers as ‘William Larner the printer, Thomas Prince the cheesemonger, William Allen the feltmaker, George Joyce the milliner and Edmund Chillenden the preacher.’196 Katharine Gillespie reminds us that ‘the toleration of private conventicles was a necessary condition for [Chidley’s] authorship as a plebeian woman.’197 Moreover, Chidley’s epigraph from l Samuel 17:45 both rehearses David’s triumphant words before the presumptuous Goliath and shows how, as the mother of Samuel Chidley, her co-worker in the Leveller movement, she exerted the authority of a mother-prophetess. ‘The plaine truth of holy Scripture,’ which in addressing ‘The Christian Reader’ Chidley distinguishes from ‘a schollerik way,’ is the touchstone throughout her coruscating riposte to Edwards, whom she attempts to convert in the last third of The Iustification.198 At the outset of this eighty-onepage tract she begs indulgence for ‘the ignorance and unskilfulnesse of the weake Instrument’ (2) and at the close, after having challenged Edwards to a public debate, she acknowledges that his victory would be slight since she is ‘a poore worme and unmeete to deale with you’ (81). Such admissions appear mere formalities. With an ardour that brooks little opposition, Chidley opposes episcopacy as blasphemous and popish and upholds Independent Churches as biblically sanctioned and true. Attacking the ‘armie of ArchBishops, Diocesan Bishops, Deanes, Suffragans, with the rest of that rabble’ as 182

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‘bred in the smoake of the pit’ and with ‘no footing in his Word’ (2), she depicts the Independent congregations as ‘perform[ing] Christs publike worship’ (20). ‘Separation,’ Chidley asserts, ‘is not a Scisme, but obedience to Gods Commandment’ (21). The evidence of the Pauline letters to early Christian communities and the mobility among them ‘admits of no ... disorder’ (27), while the canon law government of the ‘vaine and Popish’ (23), ‘sottle Church’ (33) defiles its own nest, making it ‘appeare to all men that you live in a Cage of uncleane birds’ (33). Ordained clergy are oppressive and venal, extracting fees that force poor people to pawn their clothes ‘before they can have a childe buried in one of the out-church-yards of the great Parishes’ (57) and insisting that ‘a corpse brought to Bedlam ... be constrained to have a twelve-penny Priest to say something over the grave’ (58). In contrast to clergy ‘glistering in all [their] pontificalls,’ Chidley points to ‘honest soules (though they are not of the Clergie, but of what you call Layetie) [as] the fittest men on earth to make Churches, and to chuse their owne Ministers though they be Trades-men and such as these have dependencie upon Christ alone, whose way is properly the sincere way of God’ (69). Women authors’ attacks against the corruption of episcopacy and civil government were in the vanguard of revolutionary ideology. In a decade that saw the trial and execution of the Earl of Strafford (1641), the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud (1645), and the king himself (1649), along with mass demonstrations throughout the land and a military coup in London as the New Model Army occupied the city and purged Parliament of over forty members, radical women added powerful voices to the rhetoric of dissent. Though publicly repudiated by the minister of her parish at Stroud in Kent, Dorothy Burch makes her Catechisme of the Severall Heads of Christian Religion (1646) a public embarrassment of this cleric; she presents herself as ‘not worthy to be one of them which he so vilifies, which are a knowing people, and precious in the sight of God.’199 In addition, she proves her knowledge in the extensive answers of this catechism, often unbuttressed by biblical citations. The three letters of Elizabeth Avery’s Scripture-Prophecies Opened (1647) predict the fall of Babylon, by which she means ‘this present State and Church of England,’ and the salvation of the Saints, ‘those which shall overcome, which shall sit down with Christ in his throne.’200 Avery’s images of reversal are bold and unsettling: the feet and toes of the ‘Great Image’ have more excellency than the golden head because they ‘were partly of potters clay ... [and] have mixed themselves with the seed of Men’ (10). So daring was her imagery that Avery’s brother,Thomas Parker, pastor of the Church at Newbury in New England, published a twenty-page repudiation, The Copy of a Letter (1650), expressing his shock at the ‘horrid things in your Book’ and ‘your monstrous heresies,’ the products, he claimed, of ‘the Pride of Women.’201 Women’s prophecies, warnings, and commentaries underscored with spe183

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cial pungency the burdened nature of the times. Comparisons between the state of the country and labour pains were common. Avery described the ‘sad condition’ of the Church of God, ‘for the sorrows of a travelling woman are come upon [the Church] ... and the pangs of death are upon her’ (28). In An Alarum of War (1649) Elizabeth Poole compared her appearance before the General Council ‘foretelling the judgements of God ready to fall upon them for disobeying the word of the Lord, in taking away the life of the King’ to her experience of ‘the pangs of a travelling woman, ... the pangs of death ofttimes panging me, being a member in her body, of whose dying state I was made purely sensible.’202 Poole’s second Alarum of War discloses that the Army’s Council was so incensed by what she had said that they ‘pursued [her] with their weapons of warre, to shoote [her] to death, ... not regarding the Babe Jesus in [her]’ (1). Gendered and sexualized analogies are very mobile in Poole’s text: she appropriates the anxieties of the woman in labour as easily as she labels the body politic the wife of the King, ‘as offended by him, as contending with him’ (8–9). The language of radical, godly women is blunt and forceful, pulsing with a sense of legitimacy and righteous indignation. A Petition of Women, Affecters and Approvers of the Petition of Sept. 11, 1648, circulated at the end of April 1649 and likely the work of Katherine Chidley, based its claim for the freeing of John Lilburne and three others imprisoned for treason on the equality of women and men before Christ. The Petition’s questions – ‘Have we not an equal interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right?’ – are calculated to confront the Presbyterian-dominated Parliament. As Katharine Gillespie observes, ‘the female petitioners claim their right as wives and mothers to leave the violated private sphere of the house and enter the public sphere of debate,’ with their taunting question: ‘Would you have us keep in our houses, when men of such faithfulness and integrity as the four prisoners, our friends in the Tower, are fetched out of their beds and forced from their houses by soldiers, to the affrighting and undoing of themselves, their wives, children and families?’203 The contrast to such choric vocalism is individual catatonia. Though struck dumb by the ordeal of being hindered by her husband from going from their home in Cranley, Surrey, to London to speak to Cromwell, Elinor Channel did in fact journey to court in April 1653 where, as A Message from God [By a Dumb Woman] To his Highness the Lord Protector (1654) relates, ‘she wandered up & down to see if she could get any body to take it from her mouth.’204 The Welsh mystic and printer Arise Evans functioned as the male midwife who delivered and circulated Channel’s message, though he transformed her warning that ‘the sword must be stayed’ (3) into a Royalist apology. No intermediary or agent dilutes the ferocity of condemnation from Quaker women. Elizbeth Hooton, in prison in York Castle in August 1652, 184

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addressed a letter to her accuser ‘Edward Bowles Priest’ as ‘a great deceiver’ and ‘a greedy dogge.’205 Mary Howgill’s attack of Cromwell was searing; having been imprisoned in Exeter in 1656, she cedes no quarter in A Remarkable Letter (1657), lambasting him as ‘a stinking dunghill’ who ‘hast strengthened all the wicked’ and whose ‘souldiers are in the abomination with thy self, ... treading amongst simple and harmless people.’206 Quaker prisoners Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, who wrote To the Priests and People of England (1655) from the ‘Exeter gaol for the word of God,’ are equally excoriating, assigning priests to ‘Cains race’ and rulers to dominion over Sodom and Gomorrah, while aligning themselves with Mary and Susanna, whom the accusers of Cotton and Cole would call ‘silly women,’ but who ‘know more of the Messiah then all the learned Priests and Rabbies.’207 Esther Biddle’s jeremiads against the corruption of Oxford, Cambridge, and London, of which A Warning from the Lord God of Life and Power, unto Thee O City of London, and to the Suburbs round about thee (1660) is one example, trumpets ‘the fury of the Lord’ and the imminent ‘hour of Visitation’ for a city that ‘should be as a nursing Mother unto thy Nation and a Patterne and Example unto all Nations’ but is instead overrun by ‘dumb idle shepherds’ and ‘greedy dumb dogs.’208 Biddle’s texts spiral around biblical passages to create an ‘ever more complicated, angry and triumphant’ argument. Periods of imprisonment, moreover, did not diminish her zeal, evident in Biddle’s remarkable missionary visits to Holland, Newfoundland, and the Barbados between 1656 and 1657.209 Radical women used writing to retaliate against physical and spiritual imprisonment and scurrilous accusations. Quaker Sarah Blackborrow’s A Visit to the Spirit in Prison (1658) is another sound reproof of those whose spirits are in prison, ‘who preach for hire and persecute, and throw into prison if you have it not.’210 Susanna Parr’s lengthy (114 pages) vindication of her excommunication from an Independent congregation in Exeter, Susanna’s Apologie against the Elders (1659), displays the viciousness of disagreements within a community. The death of Parr’s child coincided with her conviction of ‘this Sin of Separation ... [as] no other then a wounding of Christs body, which is his Church.’ The ‘grosse discourse’ of her accusers, and especially the Independent minister Lewis Stucley, ‘led captive by ambition and covetousness,’ construes Parr’s disagreements as adultery, ‘alleadging that I might as well delight in another man that was not my husband.’ Parr turns the tables on the argument about women’s struggles to speak by maintaining that ‘the liberty of speaking was not only given me, but the liberty of being silent was denied me’ and hence, she concludes, ‘the liberty of dissenting was denyed.’211 Seventeenth-century dissent – in speech and dumbness, in ecstatic utterance and logical argument, in domestic and missionary activity – was in fact multifarious. Quaker women and Fifth Monarchists were visionary activists; 185

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their proselytizing, however, often took different forms. A network of meetings, letter writing, and missionary activity, along with a shared conviction to eschew the intellectualism of biblical exegesis in favour of an idiosyncratic (though biblically informed) language characterized and unified Quaker communities. The discourse of the Fifth Monarchist sect, who cited and paraphrased the scriptures to argue for the advent of the Kingdom of Jesus, was more divergent and heterogeneous. Margaret (Askew) Fell, later Fox (1614–1702), commonly referred to as the nursing mother of early Quakerism and its archetypal mother in Israel, and the Quaker missionaries Katharine Evans (?-1692) and Sarah Cheevers, who were imprisoned by the Inquisition in Malta for three and a half years, unfold the range of symbols and stories of Quaker discourse. Wife of Judge Thomas Fell of Swarthmoor Hall and mother of nine children, Margaret Fell experienced the convincement of Quakerism through her meeting with its founder, George Fox, in 1652; in 1669, eleven years after her first husband’s death, she married Fox. Her tracts blend capacious sympathies and tart criticism. False Prophets, Antichrists, Deceivers (1655) sends ‘some relief to them who doth suffer by the Papists Wills, Laws and Inventions in other nations, that the sufferers bowells may be refreshed,’ while A Testimonie of the Touch-Stone (1656) upbraids ‘carnal professors,’ especially Ranters, whose profession ‘stinkes in the Lords nostrils ... and shall be spread as dung upon [their] faces.’212 The Citie of London Reproved (1660) calls the ‘Bloody City’ to repent, characterizing the rulers of the Civil War and the Commonwealth as ‘deceitful and dissembling Hypocrites, Time-servers, and Men-pleasers, [who] have used your wit and Policy ... that the most part of you have kept your selves out of sufferings all these times of suffering, which have been nigh twenty years.’213 During her first and lengthiest period of imprisonment at Lancaster, from 1664 to 1668, for refusing the oath of allegiance and participating in illegal meetings, Margaret Fell wrote her most famous tract, Womens Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (1666).214 She buttresses her claim about the mission of women ‘that have the Everlasting Gospel to preach, and upon whom the Promise of the Lord is fulfilled’ with an impressive, discursive account of Old and New Testament women – from Hulda, Miriam, Hannah, Hester, Judith, and Ruth to the Samaritan woman, the Magdalen, the women at the foot of the Cross and at the Sepulchre, and the catechist Priscilla. As perverters and distorters of the evidence, she blames the blinded ‘men of this Generation,’ hemmed in by ‘the spirit of Darkness ... in this night of Apostacy,’ for endeavouring ‘to stop the Message and Word of the Lord God in women, by contemning and despising of them.’ Margaret Fell’s A Declaration and an Information from us the People of God called Quakers (1660) presents her co-religionists, ‘who are hated and despised, and every where spoken against, as people not fit to live,’ as an abused 186

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people.215 The annals of seventeenth-century Quakerism are full of stories of torments endured, especially by female missionaries. Upon their arrival in Boston in 1656, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher were stripped and imprisoned as witches. When Mary Dyer, whose stillborn child had been exhumed in a sensational Massachusetts Bay Colony case of 1638 connecting deformity to dissent because of Dyer’s association with the excommunicated midwife Anne Hutchinson, dared to re-enter Boston in 1657, she was whipped and hanged.216 The sufferings of Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers, who on their journey to Alexandria paused at the city of Malta, ‘in the island of Malta where Paul suffered shipwrack,’ as they observe in A Short Relation, testify to the ‘unkindness’ and ‘barbarous’ treatment inflicted by ‘those that profess themselves Christians.’217 The women are interrogated separately by a magistrate and two friars. Their books and papers confiscated, scorned because of their inadequate knowledge of Latin, Evans and Cheevers are confined in an airless, insect-filled cell. They refuse to be separated, with Evans invoking a marriage vow in her declaration ‘The Lord hath joined us together and wo be to them that should part us’ (13–14). When the friars show Evans a picture of the Madonna and Child, her reaction is quick and angry: ‘I stampt with my foot and said, Cursed be all Images and Imagemakers, and all that fall down to worship them’ (39). Evans composed hymnlike couplets about captivity, observing, ‘My love to truth doth me constrain / In prison ever to remain’ (48), while both women addressed affecting prose letters to their husbands and children. Two additional versions of their prison experiences, A True Account of the Great Tryals and Cruel Sufferings (1663) and A Brief Discovery of Gods Eternal Truth (1663), stress the critical, prophetic insight of these inmates. A True Account relates a dream forecasting defeat for the knights assembling in Malta to launch their crusade against the Turks. Evans’s verse contributions to A Brief Discovery indicate another source of Quaker strength, a mental digest of biblical allusions and language that sustains her when the actual text is confiscated. Although that they my Bible keep from me, That I the holy Scriptures cannot see, The precepts pure that are upon record, That were giv’n forth by th’ Spirit of the Lord; Yet, a small Book hid in a secret place Have I, where I can reade the Words of grace: And in the same I can discern The bastard from the perfect born. (51)

In the discourse of Fifth Monarchists the Bible served a more precise and present strategy. A comparison of the extensive works of Fifth Monarchists 187

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Mary Cary, later Rande (ca. 1621–after 1653), and Anna Trapnel (fl. 1654) reveals the different modalities through which they used biblical exegesis as platforms for revolutionary history to usher in the reign of King Jesus. Cary devoted her six radical works,218 spanning the period from the establishment of the New Model Army to the proclamation of the Protectorate, to the building up of a new order, a holy city, a New English Jerusalem. Trapnel, who preached to both Fifth Monarchists and Quakers, produced four tracts in one year relating her ecstatic utterances in London and Cornwall. Styling herself ‘the meanest of the servants of Jesus Christ’ (A Word in Season [1647]), ‘a Minister ... of Jesus Christ, and of all his Saints’ (The Resurrection of the Witnesses [1648]) and ‘an admirer and adorer of the good providence of God, in making such happy changes in these Nations’ (Twelve Proposals [1653]), Cary provides an intellectual scaffolding that includes defences of civil war and regicide along with pictures of material bounty and ease. Her two shorter tracts bracketing four lengthy millenarian commentaries illuminate a capacity for sustained, logical argumentation, thoughtfully digested study of the scriptures, and knowledgeable awareness of the deliberations of the Short, Long, Rump, and Barebones Parliaments. For Phyllis Mack Cary is ‘the most radical woman prophet of the 1640s’; for Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, ‘an intellectual theorist’; for Christopher Hill, ‘one of the most interesting and least studied of the Fifth Monarchists’; and for Stevie Davies, ‘one of the most penetrating analytic minds of her generation.’219 Her hermeneutic intensity exemplifies the key feature that Christopher Hill has identified as characteristic of seventeenth-century millenarianism: its basis in ‘new scholarly approaches to the Bible’ that wrestle with ‘mathematical as well as historical and linguistic problems.’220 Her forecasted overthrow of the Antichristian Royalist forces, establishment of the rule of saints, heralding of the thousand-year reign of Christ, and extirpation of the mystical Babylon of papistry rely on biblical prophecy and predication. Rooted in her sense of the parallels between Civil War realities and Israelite history, Cary presents the Commonwealth as biblically modelled space; she blends the executions of the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud, revolts in Ireland, the string of Commander Fairfax’s victories, and the Army’s control of London with the fates and visions of ancient kings and prophets. Her millenarial prophecies, inclusive and communal, invert pyramids of power; as she forecasts, ‘the Saints shall be abundantly filled with the Spirit; and not onely men, but women shall prophesie; not onely aged men, but young men; not onely superiours, but inferiours; not onely those that have University learning but those that have it not; even servants and handmaids.’221 She cites the example of the early church as the model for an apostolate of engaged believers; she challenges readers to recall that ‘Prophesying, and Evangelizing, and feeding, and teaching, and building up one another, was 188

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com to all in the Church.’222 Her city is a theological construct, whose traits she sketches in A New and More Exact Mappe together with The Little Horns Doom & Downfall (1651): ‘to make this present age more sensible of the late past and present footsteps of God in the world, in order to the setting up of the kingdom of our Lord Jesus’ (‘Epistle Dedicatory’). Cary’s sanctified, restructured urban space is firmly anchored in the 1640s and 1650s. She acknowledges powerful protocols, in addressing A Word in Season to Parliament, ‘to you Chaire-men (that is to say) you that sit at the Sterne, you that are the heads and rulers of the people, and are in places of authoritie: for you are to act for the whole kingdome’ (A2), and The Resurrection of the Witnesses to two specific MPs. She sharpens this awareness in dedicating A New and More Exact Mappe and The Little Horns Doom & Downfall to ‘the vertuous, Heroicall and Honourable Ladies,’ Elizabeth Cromwell, Bridget Ireton, and Margaret Role, the wives of the most prominent Parliament men.223 The title of her Twelve Proposals specifies the main audience: the Supreme Governours of the three Nations now assembled at Westminster. Cary’s presence as a publishing woman in the urban space of London in the 1640s was noticed. Commendations of three Cambridge-educated divines preface A New and More Exact Mappe and The Little Horns Doom & Downfall. They are a mixed blessing, whose back-handed compliments make the reader even more appreciative of Cary’s analytical precision. Hugh Peters, Puritan minister and regicide, considers himself a ‘worthless worm, ... unfit ... either to write books, or to judge of others writing’ (A). He compares his ‘countrywoman’ and her ‘best language’ (A2) with the learning of Elizabeth of Bohemia and Anna Maria van Schurman, yet he also indulges in the condescending observation that here are ‘Scriptures cleerly opened, and properly applied: yea, so well, that you might easily think she plow’d with anothers Heifer’ (A2). Henry Jessey, who also published the sayings of the ecstatic sufferer Sarah Wight and who became one of Cromwell’s triers and expurgators, offers a more commonsense endorsement of knowing the worst. Christopher Feake tries half-heartedly to protect Cary from the ridicule directed at ‘illiterate men and silly women who pretend to any skill in dark Prophecies’ (A4). The reaction Cary provoked from overt critics is more revealing than the praise of her so-called apologists. The Resurrection of the Witnesses prompted one reader to query her citation of the year 404 as the beginning of the power of the popes and the date 5 April 1645 as the formation of the New Model Army. Citing eight exceptions to her argument, the author of The Account Audited; or, the Date of the Resurrection of the Witnesses, pretended to be demonstrated by M. Cary, Minister (1649), who remains anonymous (but was without doubt masculine), delights in taking ‘this female Minister’ to task, apparently lamenting the ‘pity that a woman of her parts should build with so much confidence upon so rotten a foundation.’ His quibbles over the date for the 189

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army rely on a ‘large book,’ Englands Recovery, by Joshua Sprigg,224 ‘a man likely to know more of the passages of the army then M. Cary’ (13). He also questions her references to Emperor Phocas and Pope Boniface to disable her calculations. This criticism evidently stung, for Cary included a postscript and corrigenda to The Newe and More Exact Mappe; these do not change but rather confirm her dates and scheme for the persecution of saints ‘by the Popish crew.’ Not only does Cary refuse to back down, she also makes the appropriate adjustments to keep her calculations pertinent and viable. Cary has all the disputational talents of a formidable debater: intellectual agility, a reflective analysis of the events of her day, a skill in combining past and present momentous realities, along with a candid grasp of internal criticism. A Word in Season, her defence of Christian toleration, recognizes that not all Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Independents, Brownists, or Seekers are saints. She goes so far as to suggest extra ammunition for Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646), a vituperative catalogue of errors and malpractices. Milton had labelled Edwards ‘shallow’ (‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,’ line 12), and Cary seconds this judgment, noting a preference for temperateness over bias: ‘the author of Gangraena might have had as plentifull instances of scandalous persons among those as any of the rest, and that upon unquestionable evidences, had he dealt impartially in that work’ (11). In The Little Horns Doom & Downfall she underscores the protocols of authority and judgment invested in and executed by the saints. The work composed seven years later, A New and More Exact Mappe, supplies a detailed outline of English history and millenarial forecasting to 1701. Although The Little Horns Doom & Downfall was withheld from publication until 1651, the two commentaries dovetail nicely. A New and More Exact Mappe interrogates and ultimately endorses the issue its title-page pinpoints, ‘whether it be lawfull for Saints to make use of the materiall sword.’ She defends the regicide. Advocating the reverse of the change of swords into ploughshares, in beating ‘instruments of husbandry into instruments of war’ (77), as an echo of Joel 3.10, Cary tempers visions of bloodshed with images of modest ornament and earned splendour. She envisions ‘holy women adorned with Bracelets, and Rings, and Jewels’ (270) and pictures the material prosperity of saints enjoying ‘commodious Houses and Gardens’ (300). Cary, now Rande, marshals her most trenchant criticism of the current state of the Commonwealth in Twelve Proposals, pithily itemized suggestions for the formation of a just society, a holy, God-fearing community. She calls for civil, ecclesiastical, and educational reform. Rande advocates the abolition of tithes, the merging of parishes and, without restrictions of class or gender, a greater liberty in allowing ‘gifted brethren,’ ‘godly Presbyterians,’ ‘all other godly Preachers,’ ‘magistrates and others that are gifted and of holy and godly 190

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conversations’ (5–6) to preach. Her shake-up of the universities, attacking fellowships as a sinecure, champions the early modern role of the public intellectual, in contrast to ‘many of those that they call fellows [who] for love of their fellowships, continue in the Universities all the dayes of their lives (some of them being ancient gray-headed men) living there an idle life, and never coming abroad to set themselves to any imployment wherein they may be usefull to church or Commonwealth’ (7). In addition to their acumen, what is remarkable about Rande’s proposals is their foresight – in fact, their clairvoyance. She proposes bursaries for needy scholars. She anticipates the levying of a fee or ‘portage’ on ‘inland letters’ and the employment of ‘some faithfull men to mannage that business’ (9). The benefits of this proto-postoffice, like the appointment of notaries public and local, residential commissioners, the capping of salaries for public officials, and the prohibited sale of lands forfeited to the Commonwealth, would accrue to the poor. The Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel, whose voice, unlike Cary’s, was confessional and rhapsodic, suffered scorn and imprisonment. If Cary’s dramatic mode was passionate rhetoric, Trapnel’s was the visionary monologue. 1654 was a banner publication year for Trapnel, with the appearance of four texts ascribed to her.225 The Cry of a Stone: or, A Relation of Something Spoken in Whitehall and Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall: or, The Mighty Visions Proceeding from Mistris Anna Trapnel relate the trance and visions she experienced while attending the trial of another Fifth Monarchist, Vavasour Powell, at Whitehall. Report and Plea and A Legacy for Saints concern her mission to Cornwall to speak to like-minded people, her arrest and trial, in which she stands her ground against Cornish magistrates, and her resultant imprisonment in Bridewell. Such a publication history distinguishes the personally inflected, ex tempore nature of her writing from Cary’s strategically argued studies and proposals. The title-page of Strange and Wonderful Newes clarifies the exceptional and ventriloquistic circumstances of her comments on Cromwell, the dissolution of the Barebones Parliament, the anticipated accession of King Jesus, and the exhortation of backsliding soldiers and clergy: ‘how she lay eleven dayes, and twelve nights in a Trance, without taking any sustenance, except a cup of small Beer once in 24 hours: during which time, she uttered manythings herein mentioned, relating to the Governors, Churches, Ministry, Universities, and all the three Nations; full of Wonder and Admiration, for all that shall read and peruse the same.’ Unlike Cary, Trapnel takes pains to outline her background, qualifications, and character references in explicit detail, as she testifies in The Cry of a Stone: I am Anna Trapnel, the daughter of William Trapnel, Shipwright, who lived in Poplar, in Stepney Parish; my father and mother living and dying in the profes-

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Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England sion of the Lord Jesus; ... I was trained up to my book and writing, I have walked in fellowship with the Church meeting at All-hallows (whereof Mr. John Simpson is a Member) for the space of about four years; I am well known to him and that whole Society, also to Mr. Greenhil Preacher at Stepney, and most of that society, to Mr. Venning Preacher at Olaves in Southwark, and most of his society, to Mr. Knollis and most of his society, who have knowledge of me, and of my conversation; if any desire to be satisfied of it, they can give testimony of me, and of my walking in times past. (3)

Certainly Henry Jessey would have been able to testify to her behaviour and its similarities to that of another entranced speaker, the teenaged Sarah Wight, about whom he had written in The Exceeding Riches of Grace (1647). In contrast to Jessey’s endorsement of Cary’s prophecies as a sensible acquaintance with ‘the worst before it overtake us unaware’ (The Little Horns Doom & Downfall, A4), he would have recognized the similarities between Sarah Wight’s troubled history of inedia and self-mutilation and Trapnel’s admissions. Trapnel disclosed that she ‘was forced to lye in ditches frequently’ until someone led her home and that she ‘took knives to bed with [her], to destroy [her] self ’ and ‘durst not eat nor drink for four days together’ (The Cry of a Stone, 8). In introducing and speaking for the dumb Elinor Channel, Arise Evans characterized her message as more substantial than ‘Hana Trampenels songs or sayings,’ which he belittled as the utterances of ‘the Diana of the English’ (Acts 19:34).226 Unlike ‘the great goddess Diana’ (Acts 19:35) whom the Ephesians worshipped and from whose temple they strove to bar Paul, Trapnel sets herself up as neither a goddess nor a blasphemer. Her role as prophet, however, involves the acknowledgment of a particular state of grace, which is for Trapnel inherently embodied. As she relates in A Legacy for Saints, her longing for release from bodily affliction leads to a renewed understanding of the power of grace: ‘I desired rather to be out of the body then in it, and when I breathed forth to God how I should live in the body, it was answered to me, to the glory of thy god, is not my grace sufficient for thee? And art thou afraid to live in the body for fear of the strength of corruptions? Sin shall not have dominion over thee, for thou art not under the Law but under Grace’ (28). Her exuberance about the liberating, re-sensitizing capacities of grace is palpable and engaging: ‘Oh let sinners admire free grace with me, that hath freed me from as stony, as seared, benummed, sensless a condition, as any could or can be in’ (7). Hilary Hinds observes that ‘the body itself hereby comes to have a kind of divine signification, not just as an earthly hindrance that crumbles away, but as yet another marker of the power of God’s grace to transform and transvalue.’227 Trapnel’s writing pulses not only with this troping of free grace as a state of 192

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desire and satiation, but also with searing indictments. She minces no words in relaying her disappointment with, her sense of betrayal by, Cromwell. As a woman prophet feeding upon Christ, Trapnel’s forceful judgements on Cromwell make trances ‘a form of eating.’228 During Cromwell’s campaign in Scotland Trapnel figured him as Gideon, ‘blowing the trumpet of courage and valour’; but with the dissolution of the Barebones Parliament she perceives ‘the deadness of Gideons spirit toward the work of the Lord shewing [her] that he was laid aside’ (The Cry of a Stone, 6, 10). Her vision, combining elliptical prose and hymnlike verse, pictures Cromwell as a fawned-upon yet horned leader of ‘a great company of cattel’ who becomes a persecutor of saints. Equally fierce condemnation and lament inform her visionary judgment of Cromwell. She longs ‘that he might be recovered out of that vain glorious Counsel, out of their Traps and Gins’ and that his councillors imitate Mordecai not Haman: ‘let them be faithful and say unto him, thou art but a man that doth thus’ (22). Did Cary, for whom there is no record of writing after 1653, agree with this scathing assessment of Cromwell, in whose leadership and capacity to effect political, religious, and educational change she placed such biblically corroborated trust? Some readers might see Cary’s precise argumentation as a safer option than Trapnel’s ecstatic utterances. That Cary’s forecasted new order did not materialize should in no way negate the insight of her theorizing. Nor should Trapnel’s rhapsodies be dismissed as mere babble. And what of our assessment of the value and insights of the interlaced genres of early modern Englishwomen’s writing? If we prize Mary Cary for the acumen and logic of her tracts and discount the elliptical prophecies of Anna Trapnel, then I believe we are only seeing a small part of the large project. We are also valuing one prophet/activist to denigrate another. The writing of all radical women forcefully reminds us, as Sharon Achinstein has noted, that ‘this political vision is bloodstained.’229 Similarly, if we concentrate only on what appears to be the abject acceptance of suffering and death in the mothers’ advice manuals, we muffle the energizing register of earnest female voices wishing to be heard by their children. If our concept of early modern drama and the dramatic is limited to the professional theatre, we discount both the private family theatricals and mental exercises of women’s closet drama and radical women’s street-smart polemics. If our reading of early modern poetry is informed only by the canonical continuum from Wyatt, Spenser, and Donne to Crashaw, Milton, and Vaughan, we miss the interstitial perspectives and parallel commentaries on the influences of family, belief, sexuality, and statecraft that shaped the selfhood of Elizabethan, Jacobean, Caroline, and Protectorate women poets. However antique or remote their expressions of faith and yearning, early modern women’s meditations, prayers, 193

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letters, and diaries colour, amplify, and literally flesh out our understanding of family tensions, daily activity, practised belief, and female networks of communication. An expanded grasp of the contributions of early modern women – royalty, aristocrats, and commoners – to the celebration of idiomatic English in their path-breaking translations, which dare to personalize theology, defend the Anglican Church, and approach classical drama and the Psalter as grounds of experimentation, inevitably enlarges our vision of early modern literature and the development of a native language. In the intersecting axes of cultural association which the diverse, nuanced, and complex writing of early modern Englishwomen provides, do we discern a faithful mirror of Tudor, Stuart, and Commonwealth England or a refracting glass? I suggest that their work encourages us to be more alert to mobile perspectives, counter-narratives, and hidden transcripts. Not only does it offer us access to unique micro-environments with ways of life and speech that together form a human unity, but it interpellates any completely maledominated view of early modern literary culture. What I have acquired in the process of building this overview is an evergrowing respect for the tenacity, initiative, and ingenuity of these artists. Facing the vitriol of critics and the occasional condescension of apologists, they produced a significant body of work. Our increasing awareness of their accomplishments as translators, poets, dramatists, polemicists, composers of meditations, prayers, letters, diaries, and advice books surely expands our understanding of the early modern English world by including the views of half of its inhabitants. These views complicate any facile or monolithic concept of agency, subjectivity, voice, and selfhood. The accretive value of their work, disturbing certainties about early modernity while affording new constructs and venues through which to discuss its multiplicity, reminds me of the creative, constructive borrowing of Esther Inglis as she blended Georgette de Montenay’s verse and Pierre Woeiriot’s engraving to create her own image of the wise woman building her house (Sapiens mulier aedificat domus). What early modern Englishwomen’s genres of writing offer, it seems to me, is much more than a subdivision or a suburban vista. They provide an alternative but as yet incompletely mapped metropolis.

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CHAPTER 4

Six Major Authors

This chapter examines in detail the work of six authors as poets, dramatists (creators of comedy, tragedy, and tragi-comedy), and romantic fiction writers. As well as presenting a range of formats, from published, identified, vendible texts to privately circulated manuscripts, and a chorus of voices blending privately coded discourse and public manifestos, this grouping also illustrates filiations of sanguinity, literary inspiration, and artistic defence. Although a generation separates the Countess of Pembroke from her niece, Mary Wroth, and from Aemilia Lanyer, both younger women pay homage to her inspiring example. Margaret Cavendish defends Mary Wroth from a previous generation’s infamy. Scandal, slander, or gossipy curiosity was attached to each of these women, but in no case was it a deterrent to writing. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621) As translator (of Robert Garnier, Philippe DuPlessis Mornay, Petrarch, and the Psalms), poet (eulogizing her brother and presenting a literary gift to Elizabeth), editor (of her brother’s extensive manuscript collection of work), patron, and reader (acknowledged by dedications and recognitions from a broad spectrum of writers, including Nicolas Breton, Samuel Daniel, John Davies of Hereford, John Donne, Abraham Fraunce, Aemilia Lanyer, Henry Lok, Edmund Spenser, and John Taylor), Lady Mary Sidney Herbert qualifies on several counts as a major writer and singular promoter of literary culture in early modern England. Although both the countess and her poet-courtiersoldier brother, Sir Philip, now inhabit the pantheon of canonicity, with separate Clarendon editions of their works, until a few decades ago the countess had been assigned the role of agent and votarist in the Sidney legend, supervising the publication of his Defence and the first complete edition of Astophil and Stella, and overseeing the publication of The Countess of Pembroke’s 195

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Arcadia, a composite folio consisting of the New Arcadia. My examination will concentrate on her major creative roles as translator and poet. Pembroke was a more practised translator than her brother. In 1592, two years after completing the translations, she published under her own name an English version of Robert Garnier’s Senecan drama, Marc Antoine (1578), as Antonius, along with a prose translation of the Christian-Stoic treatise on death, Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort (1576) by the family friend DuPlessis Mornay, as A Discourse of Life and Death. Garnier (1544/5–90), a barrister, magistrate, and chief justice of Le Mans, turned to Roman history and battles for a trilogy of dramas conveying warnings about the wars of religion between Huguenots and Catholics that were splintering France in the second half of the sixteenth century. Porcie (1568) recreates the battle of Pharsalus, Cornelie (1574), the battle of Philippi, and Marc Antoine, the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Foremost for Garnier was the moral lesson about the punishment of transgression by showing ‘the effect of this misfortune on the victim’; in the case of Marc Antoine, Garnier presents ‘a stern warning of the destructive power of passionate love.’1 Although the tragic consequences of warring factions is an overarching theme, Garnier’s Cleopatra is more determined, loyal, and stoic than the dissolute, self-pitying Antony. As well as showing the way for the history plays of Shakespeare and Daniel, Pembroke used Garnier’s linkage of Greco-Roman strife and contemporary tumult in France to advance her own ‘crusade on behalf of the Huguenots [in] an unpretentious Protestant rhetoric.’2 In transforming Garnier’s alexandrine couplets into ten-syllable blank verse lines, Pembroke achieves a precise, often stark, contrastive emphasis which is all the more remarkable because it is not set off by mellifluous rhyme. Despite the fact that Antony and Cleopatra exchange no words face to face in this play, the reader has a powerful sense of their differences and dilemmas. Antony’s opening complaint that Cleopatra ‘only hast my freedome servile made’ (33) sharpens Garnier’s idea of freedom subjugated – ‘Toy seule as ma franchise asservy sous ta loy’ (32) – by having ‘freedome’ butt against ‘servile.’ Antony’s exclamation about ‘the daies of losse that gained thee thy love!’ (53) collapses the more opaque description of ‘le jour malencontreux que te gaigna l’Amour!’ (52) into the blunt contrast of loss and gain. His selfaccusation, ‘Cag’d in thy holde, scarse maister of thy selfe’ (130), conveys the disgust and ironic despair of ‘T’enferme dans ta ville, où à peine es-tu maistre / De Toy’ (129–30) with a pithy economy. Ironically, Cleopatra embodies most strength when absorbing most blame. Changing the matter-of-fact copula verb of Garnier’s Cleopatra, ‘Ma beauté trop aimable est nostre adversité’ (430), Pembroke’s heroine admits an active, causative connection between her looks and her state: ‘My face too lovely

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caus’d my wretched case’ (437), an excoriation she revisits a few lines later with the precisely translated but nevertheless resonant statement, ‘I am sole cause: I did it, only I’ (455). This Cleopatra does not follow Antony, as the Garnier heroine’s ‘Je te suivray par tout’ (539) implies; rather, Pembroke’s Egyptian queen declares, ‘I am with thee’ (546). She also colours her explanation to Charmion of ‘this ever-lasting love’ (554) by adding emphatic repetition and an optative determination to the reply, ‘Help, or help not, such must, such ought I prove’ (555), a forceful reconfiguring of ‘Qu’elle serve, ou soit vaine, elle doit estre telle’ (548). The central feature of Pembroke’s version is the preciseness of the contrastive states. Antony’s regret about having ‘Falne from a souldior to a Chamberer’ (1164) sharpens the before-and-after observation of Garnier’s ‘estant d’homme guerrier / Dès le commencement, devenu casanier’ (1151–2). The repetitions in Cleopatra’s death wish, ‘To be in one selfe tombe, and one selfe chest, / And wrapt with thee in one selfe sheete to rest’ (1989–90), not only intensify the sameness between this tragic couple, which Garnier had underscored with the use of ‘mesme’ in ‘Et d’estre en mesme tombe et en mesme cercueil, Tous deux enveloppez dans un mesme linceul’ (1966–7), but actually promote the understanding that her ‘self ’ is made and completed in union with Antony. The singularity of the grief and torment also emerges from contrasts. Unlike ‘Phaetons sisters’ (1919) whose grief turned them to trees, Cleopatra laments ‘For me, I sigh, I ceasles wepe, and waile, / And heaven pittiles laughes at my woe’ (1923–4) – a complaint whose pauses and unrhymed endings convey emotional distress with greater immediacy than the regular stresses and measured beats of ‘Moy, je pleure, et lamente, et soupire sans cesse, / Et le ciel impitieux se rit de ma tristesse’ (1900–1). Cleopatra’s are the last, resonant words; Pembroke makes the farewell of Antony’s ‘wife’ and ‘frend’ (1973) powerfully memorable in its very evocation of weakness and fainting as she kisses Antony’s body: ‘That in this office weake my limmes may growe, / Fainting on you, and fourth my soule may flowe’ (2021–2). The sense of intermingled spirits with which Pembroke closes the play is a moving rendering of ‘mon ame vomissant’ (1999). Although Pembroke had earlier translated the literal meaning of Antony’s ‘Je vomisse la vie et le sang au milieu’ (1090) as ‘My bodie ... / Had vomited my bloud’ (1100–1), here she not only avoids the indelicate literalism but underscores the union of souls. Pembroke’s decision to publish Antonius, finished as the text testifies in November 1590, with the translation of DuPlessis Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death, completed six months earlier in May 1590, points to their shared preoccupation with the art of dying. The prose meditation draws on Senecan epistles and essays and biblical pericopes to examine the theme of dying to

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live and living to die. Diane Bornstein, the first modern editor of Pembroke’s Discourse, notes how the countess’s ‘smooth idiomatic English’ improves the original ‘by making it more concise, more specific, and more metaphorical.’3 Pembroke’s English marches ahead with a clear logic, anxious to carry the reader along with the argument. Her depiction of death, for instance, though it forecasts Lady Macbeth’s tart reprimand to her horror-struck husband that ‘’tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil’ (Macbeth, 2. 2. 53–4), also attends to the mystery of painted masks and hideous representations. ‘Behold, now comes Death unto us: Behold her, whose approach we so much feare. We are not to consider whether she be such as wee are made beleeve: and whether we ought so greatly to flie her, as commonly wee do. Wee are afraid of her: but like little children of a vizarde, or of the Images of Hecate. Wee have her in horror: but because wee conceive her not such as she is, but ougly, terrible, and hideous: such as it pleaseth the Painters to represent unto us on a wall’ (676–81). In stripping death of what Donne would later call its pride and in apprehending living as ‘but continuall dyeng’ (734), A Discourse of Life and Death upholds the Christian doctrine – since ‘We say we are Christians’ (797) – of immortality; yet it remains mindful of the weaknesses of mortality. So popular was Pembroke’s version of Mornay that it was reprinted three times (1600, 1606, 1608) during her lifetime. Pembroke’s facility and grace in translating Italian are evident in the two chapters of The Triumph of Death (ca. 1593). She may in fact have translated more of Francesco Petrarca’s (1304–74) six-part dream vision in terza rima, I Trionfi, which relates the successive triumphs of love over the poet (Trionfo d’Amore), chastity over Cupid (Trionfo della Castita), death over chastity (Trionfo della Morte), fame over death (Trionfo della Fama), time over fame (Trionfo del Tempo), and eternity over time (Trionfo della Divinita), but Pembroke’s The Triumph of Death is the only portion of this manuscript work extant. The Trionfi was ‘probably the most influential poem of the Renaissance’:4 there were eighty-five fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts, and by 1500 at least twenty-five combined editions of the Canzoniere and Trionfi were in print. Although Pembroke may have been aware of the translations of two countrymen, Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke (1554) and William Fowler’s 1587–8 manuscript, deposited by Drummond of Hawthornden in the University of Edinburgh library in 1627, her work is vastly superior to these clumsy, graceless precursors. Retaining the rhyme scheme of Petrarch’s terza rima in her English iambic decasyllables, Pembroke concisely captures the emotion of the Italian original, which acknowledges Laura’s death and discloses her faithful yet passionate love for the poet. The death of Laura, associated ‘with chaste heart, faire visage, upright thought, / wise speache, which did with honor linked goe’ (8–9), appears to leave the mourning ladies without a champion or exemplar: 198

Six Major Authors Vertue is dead; and dead is beawtie too, And dead is curtesie, in mournefull plight, The ladies saide: And now, what shall we doe? (145–7)

Yet the revelations of the second chapter reveal the intensity and ardour of Laura’s love – ‘Never were / Our hearts but one, nor never two shall be’ (88– 9) – which was only tempered by what she calls her ‘cheere’ (90). Laura’s understanding of the poet’s quick declarations of love allows her to direct and moderate his more impulsive, facile expressions. Her ‘zeale’ (136), though it ‘distempreth’ (136) or frustrates the poet, brings about their unity: ‘Our concord such in everie thing beside, / As when united love and vertue be’ (137–8). Sixteenth-century editions of the Italian, as Pembroke’s Oxford editors note, alternated in presenting the noun as zelo (zeal) and gelo (frostiness). The remarkable feature of Pembroke’s translation is its ability to blend a religious (and possibly cooling) ideal with the passionate desire of the Petrarchan mistress. Her most creative and daring accomplishment is the project of the Psalms, in which, through a range of poetic experiments, she translated Psalms 44– 150 and revised and regularized some of the metrics in Sir Philip’s earlier work (Psalms 1–43). In addition to sharing Protestant sympathies and sources, Sidney and Pembroke concurred on the artistic value of the Psalms, delineated in the Defence as ‘a divine poem’ which was ‘nothing but songs’ imitating ‘the unconceivable excellencies of God’ and making David ‘as in a glass [to] see his own filthiness.’5 Despite John Donne’s praise of ‘this Moses and this Miriam’ (‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister,’ line 46), some contemporaries found the fact that a woman completed the lion’s share of this work a hard pill to swallow. Sir John Harington – his lament about the ‘unpublyshed’ state of the manuscript notwithstanding – doubted that the translation could have been Pembroke’s, since ‘it was more than a woman’s skill to express the sence so right as she hath done in her verse, and more then the English or Latin translation could give her’ (Nugae Antiquae 1: 173).6 Pembroke’s reputation has teetered on a balance beam, with threats of adulation or faint praise on either side. Students of Sidney have viewed her as ‘an inveterate tinkerer,’ whose ‘unavoidable makeshift’ contrasts with his ‘precise architectonic skill.’7 As a devotional poet she has been found ‘uneven,’ failing ‘to measure up to the level of the truly second- or third-rate poems written in the Nineties,’ and overornamented, thereby losing ‘control of the larger imaginative infrastructure of her own psalm imitations.’8 To rebut these criticisms I propose to examine Pembroke’s metaphrase of Psalm 51. The Penitentials (Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143) enjoyed a remarkable vogue in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries.9 In Pembroke’s most famous 199

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Penitential, Miserere Mei, Deus, she experiments with an array of amplifying techniques: stanzaic patterns, word plays, figurative language, assonance, internal rhyme. Contracting the ‘heart-broken soule’ to ‘build up Salems wall’ (49, 52), her Penitential is characterized by adroit repetitions, proleptic extensions of biblical metaphors, and simultaneous breathlessness and assurance. In sifting through Huguenot commentaries, Pembroke aligns herself with many of their devotional stances but retains an independence of expression and form. Théodore Bèze’s Argument to Psalm 51 posits that the penitence here demonstrates ‘how great weaknesse there is euen in the best and most excellent men’; David’s ‘publique confession,’ which ‘though he were a king of great power yet he willingly submitteth him selfe vnto,’ distinguishes him ‘from the dainty men of our age.’10 The emphatic, rhetorically ornamented force of Pembroke’s opening stanza, O Lord, whose grace no limits comprehend: Sweet Lord, whose mercies stand from measure free; To mee that grace, to mee that mercie send, And wipe O Lord, my sinnes from sinfull mee O clense, o wash my foule iniquitie: Clense still my spotts, still wash awaie my staynings, Till staines and spotts in me leave no remaynings (1–7),

extends the deliberateness of Bèze’s plea: ‘wash me therfore O my God againe and againe and often times, whiles the filth of so great wickednesse be vtterly washed away.’ Pembroke’s rhyme royale supplies a veritable catalogue of rhetorical devices: antimetavole, or the counterchange, in lines 1–3 and 6–7; antistrophe, or the ‘counter-turne’ turning counter ‘in the middest of euery meetre,’11 in line 3; epanalepsis, or the echo sound, in line 4; and ecphronesis or the outcry, in lines 4 and 5. Her allusions to the privacy of the penitent’s schooling, ‘And inward truth which hardly els discerned, / My trewand soule in thy hid schoole hath learned’ (20–1), may owe some debt to Bèze’s declaration, ‘I confesse that thou hast taught me that thy wisdome, not as thou hast done euery one, but as one of thy houshold, priuately and most familiarly.’ Another possible influence is Calvin’s commentary on the sinner who has been ‘taught by God as one of his household’ and ‘become a froward scholer.’ Equally possible as a conscious and ironic (or, unconscious and embedded) source of the description of the ‘trewand soule in thy hid schoole’ is Sidney’s image of taking up his ‘trewand pen’ at the conclusion of the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella. Pembroke’s ecstatic – almost aerobic – imploration ‘That brused bones maie daunce awaie their sadness’ (28) differs from Bèze’s staid conclusion, in keeping with the Genevan practice of excising any reference to dancing: ‘So 200

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shalt thou soudenly refresh the bones which thou hast worthily broken.’ The idea of sudden refreshment may have triggered the demonstrable proof of dancing for a woman as experienced with court culture as Pembroke. Her imagery contrasts tellingly with another contemporary woman’s verse meditation on the Miserere. Anne Lock’s sonnet ‘Sinne and despair have so possest my hart’ dwells on the weight of sin, while petitions to cancel sins’ register impart a more buoyant mood to Pembroke’s metaphrase. Pembroke never suggests that God caused the ‘brused bones’; not content with inward cheer, these revivified bones will show their new life by dancing ‘awaie their sadness’ (28).12 Despite metaphorical flashes and idiosyncratic coinages, Pembroke’s expression of joy and sorrow is always temperate, above the white heat of the Reformational fray. Pembroke borrows from Calvin in his logically meditative moods. His commentary on the Miserere furnishes atmospheric linkages with Psalm 51, in which she develops his schemes of ‘a couert matching of contraries’ and of interiority whereby David ‘feeleth ... his sinnes within.’ As sins are figured as ‘filth and unclennesses that defile vs, and bestaine,’ so ‘remission of them is aptly termed a washing away.’ Invoking the medicinal, absorptive, spiritually purifying qualities of hyssop so prominent in the Pentateuch (Exodus 12:12; Leviticus 14:4–6, 49–52; Numbers 19:18), Pembroke’s speaker petitions: Then as thy self to leapers hast assign’d, With hissop, Lord, thy Hissop, purge me soe: And that shall cleanse the leaprie [leprosy] of my mind. (22–4)

Interiority, ‘the fittest remedie’ according to Calvin, means entering ‘into our selues, to gather all our wits vnto God,’ washing ‘our consciences inwardly with the blood of Chryst,’ recognizing that ‘the temple unbuilded ... was but as a cotage,’ and having ‘not a respect for the outward buylding only, but ... cheefly vpon Gods spirituall sanctuarie.’ With a similar understanding of Providential architecture and engineering Pembroke’s penitent concludes: Lastly, O Lord, how soe I stand or fall, Leave not thy loved Sion to embrace: But with thy favour build up Salems wall, And still in peace, maintaine that peacefull place. (50–3)

While Pembroke likely appropriated from Bèze and Calvin, she offers her own insights into sin which shames and disgusts. She acknowledges through epizeuxis ‘My filthie fault, my faultie filthiness’ (9). Pembroke also emphasizes a subtle theological bond between the reformativity of forgiveness and the 201

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creativity of grace. As well as the brachiologia of a staccato string of adjectives, in ‘a pure, cleane, spottless hart’ (31), her rendering of verses 10–12 blends pre- and post-lapsarian moments, connecting the desire for a divinely created cleanness to ‘breathing grace’: Create in me a pure, cleane, spottless hart: Inspire a sprite where love of right maie raigne. Ah! cast me not from thee: take not againe Thy breathing grace! againe thy comfort send me, And let the guard of thy free sp’rite attend me. (31–5)

And what of Pembroke’s own breathing grace? Acceptance or rejection of her metrical invention and value in her own right continues to determine critical responses. Pembroke’s psalms are clearly at the opposite pole to the common metres and ballad stanzas of Sternhold and Hopkins. Surrounded as she no doubt was by contemporary psalm paraphrases – from the Latin text of George Buchanan and the metrical versions of Anne Lock’s nephew, Michael Cosworth, to the hexameters of her patronee Abraham Fraunce – she stamped the psalter with a subtle individuality. Although large issues and a commonality of texts join brother and sister, Sidney and Pembroke remain individual interpreters, with their own locutions and cadences and with understandings of paraphrase and translation that range from the spare to the baroque. I find Pembroke the more daring and inventive of the duo. Her poetry opens innumerable pathways to devotion and ambition. Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645) Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611),13 her single extant published work with its boldly acknowledged woman-centred focus, illustrates and complicates many of the conditions of early modern women’s writing. It is a three-part poem consisting of eleven dedicatory pieces (of poetry and prose), 230 ottava rima stanzas revisiting the biblical Passion narrative, and a concluding house poem, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham,’ about the country manor occupied by Margaret Clifford, Countess Dowager of Cumberland, and her daughter, Anne Clifford. Among the pivotal issues in this work of a non-aristocratic, non-gentry Londoner of Venetian Jewish origins are the interplay of patronage and class, authorship and gender, and devotion and disruption. Lanyer addresses dedicatory poems, which occupy approximately onethird of her text, to Queen Anne, Princess Elizabeth, ‘all vertuous Ladies,’ Lady Arbella Stuart, Lady Susan Countess Dowager of Kent, the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Lucy Countess of Bedford, Lady Katherine Countess of 202

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Suffolk, Lady Anne Countess of Dorset, and prose dedications to Lady Margaret Clifford and ‘to the Vertuous Reader.’ Lanyer searches for patrons at the same time as she creates cachet. In contrast to the ‘celebrity endorsements’ she hopes to secure through her addresses to aristocrats, which invoke a ‘loosened form of patronage,’ the less conventional, more radical prose letter ‘to the Vertuous Reader’ suggests an ‘egalitarian relationship’ with the readerbuyer, a relationship enabled by ‘a proto-capitalist print culture.’14 She wants to be considered part of an elite coterie, yet she purports to know her social place and the tolerances of the marketplace. Lanyer is ‘something of a Renaissance Lily Bart.’15 And, like the career of Edith Wharton’s socialclimbing heroine, Lanyer’s text had an ironic history; despite the announcement of her name and position on the title-page and her evocation of enlightened female cooperation, Lanyer ‘appears to have been totally neglected.’16 Among the reasons Graham Parry adduces to explain her vanishing from the literary scene is the perceived impertinence of her unbidden epistles. Lanyer showcases a broad knowledge of aristocratic and more generally literate culture. Displaying an insider’s familiarity with the manuscript circulation of Pembroke’s translation of the Psalms, she supplies an enthusiastic encomium: Those rare sweet songs which Israels King did frame Unto the Father of Eternitie; Before his holy wisedom tooke the name Of great Messias, Lord of unitie. Those holy Sonnets they did all agree, With this most lovely Lady here to sing; That by her noble breasts sweet harmony, Their musicke might in eares of Angels ring. (‘The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countess Dowager of Pembrooke,’ 117–32)

Lanyer uses her credentials as a reader to seize an opportunity, making ‘this bold attempt’ (209) to offer ‘these unlearned lines beeing my best’ (203), with the hope of a receptive audience for her admitted lowliness. Lanyer also takes pains to identify the special honey or native value of her ‘little booke, for the generall use of all virtuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of this kingdome; and in commendation of some particular persons of our owne sexe, such as for the most part are so well knowne to my selfe’ (‘To the Vertuous Reader,’ 6–9). To this enlarged female readership she offers the central, controlling contrast of ‘evill disposed men’ (19) and the divine gift of ‘power to wise and virtuous women to bring downe their pride and arrogancie’ (32–3). 203

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Lanyer’s provable relationship to a nurturing aristocracy, notably in her claims that Lady Susan Bertie, Countess Dowager of Kent, is ‘the Mistris of my youth, / The noble guide of my ungovern’d dayes’ (‘To the Ladie Susan,’ 1–2) and her description of an Edenic interlude spent in the company of the Clifford women at Cooke-ham, is the subject of considerable critical debate. Although he does not go as far as to challenge Lanyer’s honesty, Leeds Barroll urges readers to contextualize her friendships, noting that Lanyer, the fiveyear-old daughter of a court lutenist during the widowhood of Lady Susan Bertie, may have accompanied her mother to work at the countess’s household. He cautions against credulity, noting that she may have used the dedicatory verses ‘for self-aggrandizing purposes.’17 While Barroll sees Lanyer as a ‘seriously handicapped ... player in the Court game,’ Lisa Schnell conjectures that ‘the only relationship Lanyer had with any patroness occurred in the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy.’18 Whether puffed and pragmatic or disrupting the expected relationships between client and patron,19 Lanyer’s invitations to nine titled women to attend the banquet of her biblical recasting enable her to speak in innovative, authoritative ways. To Queen Anne Lanyer holds up her poem, ‘this Mirrour of a worthy mind’ (37), as an exercise in creation and interpretation: ‘For here I have prepar’d my Paschal Lambe, / The figure of that living Sacrifice’ (85–6). After invoking the princess’s namesake, Elizabeth I, Lanyer presents Princess Elizabeth with this ‘first fruits of a womans wit’ and thus ensures royal ‘favour in accepting it’ (13–14). She appeals to Lady Arbella Stuart’s abjection in requesting that she ‘cast [her] eyes upon this little Booke, ... upon this humbled King, who all forsooke’ (9, 12). She draws connections between the ‘dang’rous travells’ (20) of Lady Susan Bertie’s mother, the Duchess of Suffolk, who with her daughter left England during Mary’s reign, and Lady Susan’s ‘noble Virtues’ (45) which provide ‘the ground [she] write[s] upon’ (46). Divine power, Lanyer affirms to Lady Katherine, Countess of Suffolk, ‘hath given me powre to write’ (13). She puts her formidable knowledge of the Reformation exegetical tool of typology to work, as Marie Loughlin demonstrates, ‘to bolster her patronage claims, without invalidating her spiritual claims for the apocalyptic destiny of the female sex’; Loughlin clarifies how Lanyer’s use of the typological structures of promise and fulfilment parallels ‘a similar pattern of material inheritance and lineage through which so many of Lanyer’s dedicatees define themselves.’20 Lanyer is acutely aware both of the imaginative rewriting of her exegesis and of the class cleavages which her dedicatory epistles attempt to reduce. She commissions Lady Anne, Countess of Dorset, to ‘view this Lambe, that to the world was sent, / Whom your faire soule may in her armes infold’ (117–18), while she strives to mitigate the disparities in their rank by claiming that ‘God makes both even, the Cottage with the Throne’ (19). The addressee and principal patron she hopes to 204

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influence most and with whom she seeks the closest bond is Lady Anne’s mother, the Countess Dowager of Cumberland. To Lady Margaret she discloses her hopes for a literary legacy, through the wish that her offering, ‘the inestimable treasure of all elected soules, ... be perused at convenient times ... [and] may remaine in the world many yeares longer than your Honour, or my selfe can live, to be a light unto those that come after, desiring to tread in the narrow path of virtue’ (29–34). In addition to securing or appropriating influential readers, some of whom are celebrated patrons, Lanyer addresses acknowledge the ‘emotional toll’ of the enforced social mobility of aristocratic women (as with Lady Susan Bertie, the Duchess of Suffolk, and, as becomes clear in ‘Cooke-ham,’ the Clifford women themselves), making ‘the exogamic experience of these women,’ in William Kennedy’s argument, ‘a paradigm for a newly defined, generically transportable brand of national sentiment,’ a commitment to ‘loyalties that transcend narrowly provincial contexts and fuel the hybrid identity of the nation.’21 The four-part biblical narrative, containing – as the title-page enumerates them – the Passion of Christ, Eves Apologie in defence of women, the Teares of the Daughters of Jerusalem, and the Salutation and Sorrow of the Virgin Mary, is itself a hybrid of borrowings and influences. It establishes Lanyer’s credentials as a devotional poet focused on the cogent thesis of assembling women-centred constructions.22 Esther Richey argues forcefully that Lanyer uses her direct or indirect knowledge of Cornelius Agrippa to revise ‘out of existence’ any Pauline hint of patriarchal secondariness for women and to reflect and re-present women’s mirroring of ‘the glorie of the Lorde.’23 Lanyer’s familiarity and originality with biblical exegesis locate her as a knowledgeable reader of Robert Southwell and Fulke Greville and an informed contemporary of John Donne and George Herbert. Her poetic voice is ‘outside the center of worldly power, [but] inside the center of female virtue.’24 Lanyer’s adroitness in weaving biblical texts into her poetry, making them a distinctive feature, also works to credit the seriousness, propriety and, in fact, orthodoxy of her claims. Such a positive assessment of Lanyer’s relationship to scripture corroborates Suzanne Trill’s re-reading of the Salve Deus as ‘a profession of faith.’25 The Jesus Lanyer presents is both the Lord and the crucified victim. In the opening and closing sections surrounding the Passion narrative itself, God is clearly ‘male’ and ‘judgmental’; throughout the Passion her Christ is ‘mild, peaceable, and submissive to higher male authorities.’26 Lanyer’s impeccable biblical allusions substantiate and unify this composite portrait. Near the outset she invokes a majestic, omniscient Christ through descriptions almost wholly derived from the Psalms. Each statement in the following excerpt, as my inserted parentheses27 strive to clarify, is adapted from the Psalter: 205

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England With Majestie and Honour is He clad, [Psalm 93.1] And deck’d with light, as with a garment faire; He joyes the Meeke, and makes the Mightie sad, [Ps. 147.6] Pulls downe the Prowd, and doth the Humble reare: Who sees this Bridegroome, never can be sad [Ps. 19.5] None lives that can his wondrous workes declare: Yea, looke how far the East is from the West, [Ps. 103.12] So farre he sets our sinnes that have transgrest. He rides upon the wings of all the windes, [Ps. 18.10] And spreads the heav’ns with his all powrefull hand: Oh! who can loose when the Almightie bindes? [Ps. 105.20–2] Or in his angry presence dares to stand? He searcheth out the secrets of all mindes; [Ps. 44.21] All those that feare him, shall possesse the Land: He is exceeding glorious to behold, [Ps. 104.31] Antient of Times, so faire, and yet so old.

The soon-to-be-crucified Jesus reacts to His male captors with ‘great Humility’ (473), purging their pride, offering no resistance, making only gentle demands. A figure of ‘faire Obedience’ (529), He is characterized as ‘one siely [innocent], weake, unarmed man’ (551). His ‘mild Majestie’ (697), ‘harmelesse tongue’ (699), ‘holy march, soft pace, and heavy cheere’ (947) emphasize the brutality of His accusers. In the midst of this presentation of a feminized, silent, sacrificial victim, it is Pilate’s wife who speaks on behalf of Eve, womankind, and Jesus. Procula’s argument positions the ‘simply good’ (765), ‘deceav’d’ (773) Eve above Adam, who ‘did discretion lacke’ (795) and who stole knowledge ‘from Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke’ (808). The defence of Eve centres on the psychomachia between credulity and criminality: Her weaknesse did the Serpents words obay; But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray. (815–16)

A class-action climax, in which ‘thy wife (O Pilate) speakes for all’ (834), closes the defence: Then let us have our Libertie againe, And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie; You came not in the world without our paine, Make that a barre against your crueltie; Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine

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The remaining portions of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum develop the reversals and transpositions. The resumed Passion narrative invests the symbols of humiliation, the crown of thorns, and the tunic, with inimitable royal significance. By contrast, Pontius Pilate is merely ‘a painted wall’ (921) since ‘water cannot wash thy sinne away’ (928). The understanding encounter with the daughters of Jerusalem elevates the devalued importance of women’s compassion at the same time as it denigrates male misprision: Most blessed daughters of Jerusalem, Who found such favour in your Saviors sight, To turne his face when you did pitie him; Your tearefull eyes, beheld his eies more bright; Your Faith and Love unto such grace did clime, To have reflection from this Heav’nly Light: Your Eagles eyes did gaze against this Sunne, Your hearts did thinke, he dead, the world were done. (985–92)

The titles Lanyer accords to Mary, ‘Making thee Servant, Mother, Wife and Nurse / To Heavens bright King, that freed us from the curse’ (1087–8), transform Mary’s ‘poore degree’ (1086). Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, in its exultant invocation of the King of the Jews, values female constancy, devotion, and insight while exposing the inadequacy of male brutality and misunderstanding. The appended ‘Description of Cooke-ham,’ assumed to have been written before Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst,’ celebrates a country idyll among a community of three ladies at a Berkshire estate. Without lords, servants, villagers, or visitors, Cookham is a ‘lost female paradise,’ ‘a female conception of an idealized social order.’28 Speaking of recollected, vanished experience, the poem is a sketch of the potentiality of this female retreat (an early draft, perhaps, of Mary Astell’s ‘Religious Retirement’)29 and a reminder of the transience and emotional tolls of patrilineal inheritance, the effect of jointure properties on the widow, and the common law guarantee of dower. Cookham, a royal manor leased to the countess’s brother, was occupied by Lady Margaret during periods when she was estranged from her husband before his death in 1605; at George Clifford’s death, Cookham reverted to Francis Clifford, not to his widow or daughter, his only living child. Rental property rather than family seat, Cookham pictures what might be, but recognizes the impermanence of this construct. The estate, which the Clifford women had to vacate 207

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(Lady Margaret to her dower residences in Westmoreland and Lady Anne to marry Richard Sackville and become Countess of Dorset), emblematizes what seems to me to be the double bind of Lanyer’s project: arguing for female autonomy through emphatic and insightful retelling of biblical narrative, yet acknowledging the barriers of class, inheritance manoeuvres, and gendered custom that subvert these designs. Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland (1585–1639) Elizabeth Cary’s work – as Senecan dramatist, proposed poetical historian, translator of Abraham Ortelius and Cardinal Du Perron, writer of letters and of undiscovered hagiographic verse – illustrates the prodigious, though often lost or muffled, accomplishments of early modern women authors. A prime source of information about Cary is The Lady Falkland: Her Life written between 1643 and 1649 by one of her daughters.30 Although this version of ‘the Elizabeth Cary appropriated and celebrated by English Catholics as a recusant heroine’ is valuable, it is also necessary to situate Cary’s work in ‘vital interplay with other texts of the period.’31 Chapter 3 addressed Cary’s work as a translator (94–5); the discussion here will concentrate on her original play, The Tragedy of Mariam, and the prose and verse History of ... Edward II. Born at Burford Priory in Oxfordshire, the only child of Elizabeth Symondes and Lawrence Tanfield, a lawyer who rose to become lord chief baron of the Exchequer, Elizabeth Tanfield as a child ‘spent her whole time in reading’ (189), according to the Life; she learned languages quickly and early, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew, and was also an accomplished, self-taught needleworker. Her mother, of a higher social status than her father, was exacting and ‘never kind’ to her daughter, who knelt to speak to her; Elizabeth Symondes Tanfield ‘forbid her servants to let her [daughter] have candles’ and thus young Elizabeth ran up debts to these servants because she ‘frequently read all night’ (Life, 199, 187). Elizabeth Symondes Tanfield was cultured and literary – a ‘Portrait of a Lady in Masque Dress, Said to be Lady Tanfield’ hangs in the Tate Gallery – but severe. Engraved with verses by Elizabeth Symondes Tanfield, the canopied, vaulted tomb of Sir Lawrence and Lady Tanfield, in St John the Baptist Church, Burford, Oxfordshire, features an effigy of their child at the head of the bed on which the aristocratic couple lies and of Elizabeth’s first son, Lucius Cary (1610–43), second Viscount Falkland, secretary of state and casualty of a Civil War battle, at the foot; in the summer of 1999, no information about Elizabeth Cary’s original drama was included in the parish’s version of the Tanfield/Cary legend. At the age of fifteen Elizabeth Tanfield was married to Sir Henry Cary. The Tanfields were prosperous and upper-middle class; the Carys, impoverished 208

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nobility. ‘Elizabeth Cary was herself the product of a similar union.’32 For the first year of her marriage Cary lived with her mother-in-law, an apparently vengeful woman who ‘took away all her books’ thus forcing Cary, according to the Life, to ‘set herself to make verses’ (189). After seven childless years, Cary bore eleven children. Her firstborn son, Lucius, was her father’s favourite; he ‘took [the child] from her to live with him from his birth’ (192). Four daughters, including her biographer, became Roman Catholic nuns. Elizabeth and Sir Henry quarrelled about religion and money, and following the birth of her last child, Henry Cary, in 1625, Viscountess Falkland lived apart from her husband, who was serving as lord deputy of Ireland, and converted publicly to Roman Catholicism, at which point her father disinherited her in favour of Lucius. The Tragedy of Mariam the Fair Queen of Jewry, the first extant original English drama written by a woman, was composed in the early years of Cary’s marriage, probably between 1602 and 1604, but not published until 1613 – perhaps at the prompting of Sir John Davies’s dedicatory poem in The Muses Sacrifice (1612), jointly addressed to the Countess of Pembroke, Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford (a prominent patron), and Cary, encouraging them to enter the public world of print. Davies actually refers to two plays by Cary, but the one set in Syracuse is lost. Her principal source for the closet drama that survives, set in Palestine, about the murderous jealousy of the Idumean (half-Jewish) King Herod for his second wife, the noble Maccabean Princess Mariam, is Thomas Lodge’s English translation of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews published in 1602. Not only is Cary’s original drama distinct from Lumley’s Iphigenia and Pembroke’s Antonius, as well as Pembroke’s pastoral dialogue Thenot and Piers in Praise of Astrea, Mariam also extends and amplifies Josephus. Cary creates a new character (Graphina), probes the lovehate dynamics of the royal marriage, reverses the condemnation of the queen, develops the figure of Herod’s sister, the divorcée Salome, as more than an antitype to Mariam, and attends throughout to the public and private registers of the female voice. The five-act tragedy, acknowledging neoclassical unities of time and place and concluding each act with a conventional choric summary, purports to be, in the Chorus’s words, a ‘school of wisdom’ (V. 294). If this description fits, the drama’s lessons are complex. Mariam is a hybrid: its stylized neoclassical declamations and often intricate syntax are fused with elements of highly theatrical performativity. Cary contextualizes her knowledge of Josephus with an awareness of the domestic tensions created by differences in class and with allusions to Shakespeare. A growing body of scholarship positions Cary within an early Jacobean context and attends to the representation of domestic tensions within the closet drama genre.33 Cary’s relationship to Shakespearean, Elizabethan, and Jacobean drama is another well-developed 209

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topic, with parallels in her work suggested to Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, and Arden of Faversham.34 Mariam, with its proto-operatic elements, explores the narrow divide between love and hate. When King Herod, who has been presumed dead for three acts, returns to Jerusalem from Rome, his first thoughts are for Mariam; when he is with her ‘time runs on, / Her sight can make months minutes, days of weeks’ (4.1.17–18). Before they see one another, Herod refers to Salome as Mariam because, as he explains, ‘The thought of Mariam doth so steal my spirit, / My mouth from speech of her I cannot wean’ (4.2.85–6). Their first meeting is far from joyous, however; it confirms the divisions of mistrust which have been alluded to in Herod’s absence and discloses the veneer of their affection. Upset by the coolness of the welcome from his ‘best and dearest half ’ (4.3.2), Herod seeks the cause of Mariam’s ‘discontent’ (94). From the man who has ordered the murders of Mariam’s brother and grandfather to advance his own rule, whose ‘violent affection’ had commanded that Mariam be slain if he did not return from Rome, this inquiry is more than a little disingenuous. In the movement from seeming solicitude to bombast, his address to Mariam reveals the brutal possessiveness and venality of his affection. To be by thee directed I will woo, For in thy pleasure lies my highest pride. Or if thou think Judea’s narrow bound Too strict a limit for thy great command: Thou shalt be empress of Arabia crown’d, For thou shalt rule, and I will win the land. I’ll rob the holy David’s sepulchre To give thee wealth, if thou for wealth do care: Thou shalt have all they did with him inter, And I for thee will make the Temple bare. (99–108)

Posing as the protector but disclosing more and more the identity of the uxorious, covetous tyrant, entertaining the sacrilege of plundering a royal grave, and stripping the Temple to satisfy his ‘dearest Mariam’ (94), Herod protests too much – to the point of making his declaration of ‘love’ a curse: How oft have I with execration sworn: Thou art by me belov’d, by me ador’d. (109–10)

Credulous enough to be swayed by the slanderous story that Mariam is planning to poison him, he lashes out: ‘Even for love of thee/ I do profoundly hate thee’ (4.4.200–1). Showing a disorientation comparable to Othello’s distracted interrogation of Desdemona, during which the Moor concludes 210

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‘Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell’ (Othello, 4.2.38), Herod vows: Thou shalt not live, fair fiend, to cozen more, With [heav’nly] semblance, as thou cozen’dst me. (213–14)

Before Herod’s appearance Cary’s play has been preoccupied with the meshing of love and hate. Mariam dramatizes a cat’s cradle of entangled obstacles for Mariam, the wife, and Salome, the sister-in-law. As alternate rhyme intensifies the drumroll of emotional states, Mariam’s opening soliloquy acknowledges ‘both grief and joy’ (1.1.10) at the news of Herod’s death: When Herod liv’d, that now is done to death, Oft have I wish’d that I from him were free: Oft have I wish’d that he might lose his breath, Oft have I wish’d his carcass dead to see. Then rage and scorn had put my love to flight, That love which once on him was firmly set: Hate hid his true affection from my sight, And kept my heart from paying him his debt. (15–22)

Salome’s first soliloquy, by contrast, never admits remorse or vulnerability. A serial polyandrist who has been compared to Vittoria Corombona and Lady Macbeth,35 Salome bears an ‘earnest hate’ (1.4.301) towards her husband (Constabarus) and plots his death so that she may enjoy another (Silleus). Styling herself ‘the custom-breaker ... to show my sex the way to freedom’s door,’ she dares to ask the question, ‘can not women hate as well as men?’ (308–10). Taunted by Mariam as ‘parti-Jew, and parti-Edomite ... mongrel’ (1.3. 235–6), Salome does not suffer Mariam’s pangs of hypocrisy (3.3.152). Although Mariam has ‘forsworn’ Herod’s bed (3.3.134) and refused ‘to live with him [she] so profoundly hate[s]’ (138), she confides to the counsellor Sohemus her awareness of her own Cleopatralike charms: I know I could enchain him with a smile: And lead him captive with a gentle word. (163–4)

Moreover, her repeated protestations to be different because of virtue from Cleopatra – ‘Not to be empress of aspiring Rome, / Would Mariam like to Cleopatra live’ (1.2.199–200) – serve to underscore the intimate connection between beguilement and power. Mariam eschews power, answering Herod’s later offer of splendour and the title of empress, ‘I neither have of power nor riches want’ (4.3.109); yet her preference for ‘innocence [as] hope enough’ (3.3.180) over being ‘commandress of the triple earth’ (175) recalls the power 211

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of Cleopatra’s hold over Antony, in which ‘the triple pillar of the world [was] transform’d / Into a strumpet’s fool’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.1.12–13). The very vehemence of Mariam’s claims of ‘innocence’ (171, 180) prompts Sohemus to remark both about the ‘guiltless queen’ (181) and ‘unbridled speech [as] Mariam’s worst disgrace’ (183). Ironically, the guiltless queen is beheaded, and custom-breaking Salome is unpunished. What is disgraceful or unbridled about Mariam’s speech? The text of the play presents at least three answers: from Mariam herself, from the contrastive linguistic patterns of Salome and Graphina, and from the hyperbolic eulogy of Herod mourning the silenced queen. In her opening words Mariam censures her own ‘public voice’ (1.1.1) and ‘too rash a judgement in a woman’ (6). Yet she insists on speaking her mind, assuring Herod, who tries to coax a smile from his critical queen, ‘I cannot frame disguise, nor never taught / My face a look dissenting from my thought’ (4.3.145–6). Chaste but not silent, possessing what Herod admits is ‘a world-amazing wit’ (4.7.428), Mariam ‘assumes full responsibility for her language; it is an essential part of her identity.’36 Mariam’s transgression involves both speaking too freely and refusing to give her body to Herod. ‘She censors the wrong thing: his phallus rather than her tongue.’37 Herod’s false accusation of promiscuity against his wife, whose ‘mouth will ope to ev’ry stranger’s ear’ (4.7.434), equates unchastity with verbal licence. The contrasts to Mariam’s candour are Salome’s strategic speech, in which she can go as far as to ‘curse [her] tongue’ (1.3.320) for having at one time intervened to save Constabarus’s life and reply to Mariam’s ‘fumish words’ with ‘scorn’ (229–30), and Graphina’s diffident, timid ‘fear / That I should say too little when I speak’ (2.1.49–50). Although Pheroras, Herod’s brother, encourages his beloved to ‘move [her] tongue, / For silence is a sign of discontent’ (2.1.41–2), Graphina, a slate on which the patriarchal culture can write, offers only a ‘lowly handmaid’s steadfast love / And fast obedience’ (70–1). Salome requires no prompting to suggest modes of execution for her sister-in-law – ‘let her be beheaded, ... drown her then, ... let the fire devour her’ (4. 7. 361, 371, 377). In the guise of a truth teller (‘ “’Tis time to speak”’ [419]), she discounts the truth of Herod’s talk of Mariam’s wit and reminds him instead of his wife’s hidden treachery and seductiveness; She speaks a beauteous language, but within Her heart is false as powder; and her tongue Doth but allure the auditors to sin, And is the instrument to do you wrong. (429–32)

In the final scene Herod’s lament for Mariam, whose beheading he ordered, combines the familiar Petrarchan conceits in praise of her speech – ‘Each 212

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word she said / Shall be the food whereon my heart is fed’ (5.1.71–2) – and her value as an exquisite piece of merchandise, an ‘inestimable jewel’ (119), for the male gaze. Even in death Mariam is the reified woman, metaphorically materialized as the private treasure. Cary’s tragedy is rich with topical and biblical as well as Shakespearean allusions. The charges of adultery levelled by Herod’s ex-wife Doris against Mariam (4. 8. 575–9) recall the accusations against Anne Boleyn (whose older sister, Mary, had married Henry Cary’s great-uncle). Biblical parallels, such as the Judaslike hanging of the Butler (5.1.105–10), who had lied to Herod and thus precipitated Mariam’s death, and Herod’s image of himself as worse than Cain ‘that stain’d the virgin earth with brother’s blood’ (5.1.250) are powerful but delayed expressions of male remorse. The allusions to the Resurrection in the Nuntio’s account of Mariam’s last words, ‘“By three days hence, if wishes could revive, / I know himself would make me oft alive”’ (5.1.77–8), are doubly ironic, emphasizing the huge disjunction between biblical typology and dramatic reality. In attempting to redefine what constitutes acceptable public speech within the play’s patriarchal school of wisdom, Mariam is as much a grisly warning as a lesson by positive example. Although not published until 1680, both texts of Edward II – the longer folio The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II ‘written by E. F. in the year 1627 and printed verbatim from the original’ and the shorter octavo The History of the Most unfortunate Prince Edward II – have been attributed to Cary. ‘E.F.’ has been understood to refer to Elizabeth Falkland, and the combination of prose and blank verse poetry about the favourites Gaveston and Spencer at Edward’s court has been read as a commentary on the behaviour at the court of Charles I. Most, but not all, critical opinion favours Cary’s authorship of the folio with the acknowledgment that the octavo was a printer’s abridgement. The case has also been made for both texts as forgeries that deal with the Exclusion Crisis of 1680 (the movement to exclude the legitimate heir, James, Duke of York, from succession because he was a Catholic, in favour of Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth) and not with Charles I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, who was Henry Cary’s patron and who, along with the duchess, intervened to secure maintenance from Falkland for his estranged and almost destitute wife.38 However, more recent readings draw attention to the revisionist depiction of Queen Isabel in Edward II, different from the easily seduced character of Marlowe’s Edward II, Samuel Daniel’s Collection of the Historie of England, or Francis Hubert’s The Deplorable Life and Death of Edward the Second, as compelling evidence of Cary’s interest in the situation of the young Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria. Moreover, as part of an argument for a date of composition closer to 1630, the time of Cary’s translation of Cardinal Du Perron, which she dedicated to the queen, readers have proposed ‘an overlap 213

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between Cary’s doctrine of historical change in Edward and Du Perron’s argument as translated by her.’39 Despite The History’s ironic publishers’ puff, with Charles Harper, Samuel Crouch, and Thomas Fox commending its ‘masculine ... style’ (‘The Publisher to the Reader’), one remarkable feature of this blend of descriptive narrative and dramatic speeches is its very richness of metaphorical language. It follows ‘the morning fair, the noontide eclipsed, and the sad evening of [Edward’s] life more memorable by his untimely death and ruin’ (83). The influence of Gaveston is figured as a ‘leprosy’ (85), while Spencer’s corruption of the court and the kingdom is a triumph for sycophancy: ‘The royal treasure is profusely spent without account or honour, being but the fountain that served to water the drought of himself, his herd of hungry kindred, and the swarm of fleshflies that became his creatures’ (157). As for the countervailing power of ‘the old and right way parliamental, ... Spencer knew well enough that such assemblies / Was like a ringworm on the neck of greatness’ (158). Isabel, the cast-aside queen, is, however, a formidable opponent. Spencer finds in her ‘a female wit that went beyond him, one that with his own weapons wounds his wisdom’ (167). The emphasis in the first half of The History is on Isabel’s astute, publicly responsible reaction to distress; her poetic appeal to her brother, the French king, for refuge and support, draws on her roles as abandoned wife, queen of an imperilled country, and mother of an unjustly neglected heir. I have, with a sufferance beyond the belief of my sex, outrun a world of trials; Time lessens not, but adds to my afflictions; My burden is grown greater than my patience. Yet ’tis not I alone unjustly suffer: My tears speak those of a distressed kingdom, Which, long time glorious, now is almost ruined. (173–8)

Isabel acts not as Mortimer’s mistress but as England’s queen. ‘“Infidelity,” in the context, is shorn of its sexual connotations.’40 The History’s Isabel is, moreover, a capable and shrewd organizer of support, securing the assistance of Robert of Artois and Sir John of Hainault, whose daughter her son will marry. But this queen is not without guilt or blame, both of which are prominent in the second half of The History. Although we might read Cary’s Isabel as offering advice to a young Queen Henrietta Maria,41 there is also a negative side to Cary’s queen. The text’s judgment of Isabel’s ignominious vengeance in parading Spencer before his execution is accusatory. ‘While she thus passeth on with a kind of insulting tyranny, far short of the belief of her former virtue and goodness, she makes this poor unhappy man attend her progress, not as the ancient Romans did their vanquished prisoners, for 214

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ostentation, to increase their triumph; but merely for revenge, despite, and private rancour’ (202). Those who are not with Isabel feel the wrath of ‘the incensed queen ... against which was no disputing’ (204); ‘a gallows highly built of purpose’ (204) awaits many of Edward’s supporters. The treatment of the regicide itself underlines Edward’s ordained kingliness in a poignant way. The text addresses the queen’s discomfort, presenting her as ‘highly discontented’ with the executioners, ‘innocent of such foul murder’ (219), and arguing against it on moral as well as strategic grounds. The brunt of the guilt rests with Mortimer, described as ‘a novice to ... that same Italian trick of poisoning.’ The allusion to ‘many bleeding examples [of] this diabolical practice’ now presumed ‘fit for private murderers as statesmen’ (224) is likely an embedded reference to the 1615 Overbury Scandal.42 This sensational case involved the trial of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset and James’s favourite, for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, the character writer (and Carr’s one-time friend), in the Tower. Not intended to shelter or excuse Isabel from Edward’s ‘ignominious execution’ (223), but to explain through dramatic narration how she was ‘guilty but in circumstance, ... an accessory to the intention, not the fact’ (223), The History succeeds in offering a nuanced, insightful interpretation of the queen. The long career of Elizabeth Tanfield Cary testifies to the variety of ways early modern Englishwomen writers navigated passageways in literary space. Though influenced by male-authored sources (Ortelius, Josephus, Du Perron), Cary’s work as translator, dramatist, historian, and apologist shows a courageously independent spirit, remarkable linguistic aptitude, and an awareness of the subtleties of expression. Not only does Cary’s searing imagery imprint historical characters indelibly in our imaginations, as with Gaveston the leper and Spencer the ringworm, but her complex examination of marital and domestic tensions demonstrates – with proleptic insights–the capacities of speech to enchain, enchant, and enrage. Lady Mary Wroth (1587–1653) Lady Mary Wroth’s songs and sonnets, prose romance, and pastoral drama provide a hinge of sorts connecting her work to that of the Countess of Pembroke, Aemilia Lanyer, and Elizabeth Cary. In her awareness of familial and classical literary precedents, Wroth unashamedly announces her ambition, although, unlike Pembroke’s, hers rests largely in a secular, non-sacred realm. Like Lanyer, she is subjected to criticism for sexual liberties, but, unlike Lanyer, she feels the lash of defamation and ostracism not because she attempts to leap class boundaries but because of the perceived libel of her character portraits. Like Cary, Wroth attends to the emotional tug of war of romantic intrigue, but her canvas is vast and international. Her work also 215

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forecasts subsequent major accomplishments. It contains germs of Margaret Cavendish’s utopian adventure and her dramatic experiments, along with Katharine Philips’s probing of the secrets, curiosities, and rites of friendship. Because Lady Mary (Sidney) Wroth encodes her work with possible allusions to a host of characters within the Jacobean court, allusions which deliberately blend personal knowledge and fiction, reading her work and coming to terms with the author mean accepting a shifting economy of erotic restraint and a provocative register of lubricity. Niece to the Countess of Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney, daughter of Sir Robert Sidney, a poet who was appointed Queen Anne’s lord chamberlain, Wroth announced her Sidney genealogy on the title-page of her prose romance. The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621) opens with a spectacular engraving of the narrative’s central emblematic construct, the Palace of Love, executed by the same artist who had portrayed her aunt as the translator of the Psalms, Simon van de Passe. Extending and enlarging family traditions, Wroth accomplished a series of original firsts for early modern Englishwomen writers. She wrote the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the first pastoral drama, Love’s Victory, and, perhaps most sensationally, the first prose romance, the Urania.43 My comments here will concentrate on the romance and the drama. With the charge of Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, that he and his daughter, Honora, and son-in-law, Lord James Hay, had been defamed in the Urania’s episode of the cuckold Sirelius and his violent father-in-law, the printed first part of Urania, which included Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, was withdrawn from sale within six months. Denny’s versified virulence44 characterized Wroth as a ‘Hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster,’ whose wrath ‘conceived an Idell book, ... a foole which like the damme doth look’; his closing insult was the command to ‘leave idle bookes alone / For wise and worthyer women have writte none’ (‘To Pamphilia from the father-in-law of Seralius,’ ll.1–4, 25–6). Wroth’s riposte flung back the insults; her ‘Railing Rimes’ labelled Denny ‘Hirmaphrodite in sense in Art a monster’ whose words show ‘that an ass much like the sire doth looke’ (ll.1–4). Whatever else it reveals about Denny’s desire to keep indiscretions and scandals hidden, and about the sexualized threat of women’s voices, this exchange draws attention to the boldness of Wroth’s hybrid, a deliberate and potentially transgressive grafting of the roman à clef to fiction and fantasy. The romance’s preoccupation with marriage articulates (or adumbrates) many of the brooding, inhibiting, inscrutable aspects of love or attachment which Wroth herself experienced; among the most conspicuous are the understanding of constancy and mutuality and the acceptance of arranged marriages.45 An intricately quilted narrative, composed of simultaneous, overlayed and intersecting events and enacted by an epic cast of characters 216

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with their own sets of false doubles and antitypes, Urania challenges early modern attitudes as well as historical realities. The version of the Holy Roman Empire Wroth’s text presents, with the Prince of Naples, Amphilanthus, unanimously crowned King at Frankfurt and succeeding in forming an international coalition, contrasts strikingly with the situation in Bohemia in 1619–20, presumably the major period of composition for the published romance. Unlike James’s son-in-law, Frederick V, Elector Palatine, who was unable to form the necessary alliances to unseat Catholic rule and disappointed in his bid to assume the Bohemian crown, Wroth shadows the events in Bohemia with ‘a countermyth of a Roman emperor who brings about an era of peace.’46 Wroth filtered her reading of such romances as Amadis de Gaule, translated by Anthony Munday (1618–19); The History of Don Quixote of the Mancha, in Thomas Shelton’s translation (1612, 1620); Sir John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso (1591); and Bartholomew Yong’s translation of Montemayor’s Diana (1583), along with her knowledge of The Faerie Queene and her uncle’s Arcadia. She drew, that is, on a vast reserve of narratological techniques, satirical formulations, iconic scenes, symbolic names, and direct and glancing allusions, and her characters have idiosyncratic realities and roles in addition to intertextual resonances and contemporary parallels. Behind diaphanous veils of fiction, characters often contribute to composite portraits of the members of Wroth’s circle. Wroth herself, the eldest of Robert Sidney’s twelve children, is reflected in Pamphilia, the eldest daughter of the king and queen of Morea, who rejects the love of several suitors but longs for the manifestly unfaithful Amphilanthus; she is also reflected in Bellamira, the widow of Treborius, the ‘Forest Heire’ (387.11), whose only son dies, and in Lindamira, who ‘loved onely one’ (499.39–40) and composes love sonnets about his inconstancy (502–5). William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, Wroth’s cousin and lover, is portrayed in Amphilanthus, Prince and King of Naples, who in searching for his lost sister Urania intervenes to restore kingdoms, win tournaments, avenge murders, and comfort widows; he is linked romantically to Antissia, Lucenia, and Musalina as well as the longsuffering Pamphilia. The roles of the royal foundling raised by shepherds, Urania, who overcomes her disappointment in being jilted by Parselius to find genuine love with Steriamus, reflect some of the biography of the dedicatee, her cousin’s wife, Susan Herbert, Countess of Montgomery; Herbert was raised by her maternal grandfather, Lord Burghley, and made an independent decision about her very successful, secure marriage to Sir Philip Herbert. Dettareus, the reclusive lord of Ragusa, who gives his daughter Bellamira in marriage to Treborius (whose name itself is an anagram of ‘Robertus’), the country bumpkin, could be representations of Sir Robert Sidney and Sir Robert Wroth, respectively. Amphilanthus’s mother, the widowed Queen of 217

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Naples, who is extolled as ‘the rare Lady, ... as perfect in Poetry, and all other Princely vertues as any woman that ever liv’d’ (371.17–18), is a tribute to Wroth’s aunt, the Countess of Pembroke. Wroth’s characterization of the black knight Rosindy, Pamphilia’s younger brother, who frees and wins Meriana, Queen of Macedon, is an anagrammatized and positive rendering of her brother, Sir Robert Sidney, who only managed to marry Dorothy Percy, daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, because her father was imprisoned. One theme linking all four books of the first part of Urania is a quest to understand the wholeness and complexity of female selfhood. The opening scene of the sad shepherdess, ‘Miserable Urania’ (1.28), bewailing her unhappiness in ‘not being certaine of mine owne estate or birth’ and in ‘aspir[ing] unto knowledge’ (1.20–1, 25), announces this quest.47 Urania is among the more fortunate materially and emotionally grounded figures in the romance; materialist semiotics inform her she is a foundling with a prosperous past and a promising future. She knows she was ‘found hard by the sea-side, ... laid in a cradle with very rich clothes ... , a purse of gold ... and a little writing in it’; her fond adoptive parents ‘have delivered [Urania] the mantle and purse, that by them, if good fortune serve, [she] may come to knowledge’ (22.25–31). Her identity is no secret: Parselius, brother of Pamphila and friend of Amphilanthus, whom he is helping find his sister, identifies the ‘faire Shepherdesse’ early on as ‘the lost Princesse’ (23.42). The quest for identity, wholeness, and union with another unfolds in a milieu of jousts and challenges, interconnected tales, and continuous movement. What anchors this narrative of flux, at least for iconic moments, are fantastic architectural and emblematic constructs such as the Palace of Venus, the enchanted Theatre of the Rocks, the Crown of Stones leading to the Tomb of Love, and the Hell of Deceit. Just as in the ‘personalized cosmography’ of this romance geography supplies ‘characterological information,’ so Wroth’s ‘amorous landscape’ is morally multidimensional.48 In one of the entrance-way towers of the Palace of Love, depicted in the frontispiece as more of a promenande than a fortified bridge tower, Urania is imprisoned until the end of the first book. The palace provides an explanatory ideology, yet the structure itself is subject to theatrical transience. Reminiscent of such Spenserean iconography as the House of Alma and the Temple of Venus, the palace, situated atop a hill, impresses the journeyers as ‘some Magicall work, ... hung in the ayre’ (48.4–5). Spanning ‘a pleasant and sweetly passing river’ (48.11), the bridge which provides access consists of three towers, whose functions are explained by an old priest: Desire, for ‘those that are false’ (48.36) is presided over by Cupid; Love, ‘where they suffer unexpressable tortures’ (48.39), is guarded by Venus; Constancy is the third ‘which can be entred by none, till the valiantest Knight, with the loyallest Lady come together, and open that gate, when all these Charmes shall have conclusion’ 218

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Frontispiece of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621). Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

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(48–9. 42.1–2). Wroth is always alert to the different and gendered valences of the discourse of love, offering numerous examples of specifically male misprision and mutability and female constancy, entrapment, and frustration. The narrative interjects the continuous tale of ‘the love wounded Princesse’ (63.23), Pamphilia, between the account of the imprisonment and liberation of Urania. Pamphilia’s reaction to her own love poetry, which she dismisses as ‘folly’ (63.11), and the assessment of her vow of constancy to ‘onely one’ that ‘made her of many to be esteemed proud’ (64.14–17) show the uncertainty of ‘Tyrant Love.’ The faithful lover reproaches herself, while those around her disparage her fidelity. But the freeing of Urania adds another and more favourable turn to fortune’s wheel for the steadfast female lovers. Pamphilia receives the keys to the Palace of Love from Constancy, ‘at which instant Constancy vanished, as metamorphosing her self into her breast’ (169. 33–4). Not only does Pamphilia become the embodiment of constancy, in an episode similar to the vanishing of the statue of Prometheus in Amadis (4:134), but in the midst of this vaporized scene she also confirms her sisterly admiration and affection for Urania, ‘kissing her, [telling] her the worth which she knew to bee in her’ (170.7–8). Such regard is mutual between these cousins, whom many instances of sisterly counsel unite. After they both have undergone more trials in Book III, Urania advises the weeping and sighing Pamphilia: ‘“call your powers together, you that have been admired for a Masculine spirit, will you descend below the poorest Femenine in love?”’ (468.12–14). The countervailing influences and misery of infidelity, weakness, and emotional collapse, as experienced primarily by women, are everywhere on display in this specular narrative of love’s torments and occasional successes. Dolorindus, disinherited son of the King of Negroponte, enjoys the love of a married woman ‘for some yeeres’ (184.23), until the deceit of ‘the jealous and despightfull Melinea’ (187.14), who wants Dolorindus for herself, intervenes. Melinea, driven to her fury by the jealous husband Redulus, causes Selina (Redulus’s wife) to denounce her one-time lover as false and hated. ‘“None but so lucklesse, and unblessed a soule as I was,”’ Selina lashes out, ‘“who did trust you, cruell you, the worst, and falsest of your changing sexe”’ (188.18– 20). Although Liana, Urania’s companion on the island of Pantaleria, has the courage to refuse an arranged marriage, she cannot wean herself of the deceitful lover, Alanius; the growth of their joyless affair, in which ‘“his paine made him discover his love, and that pittie I held over his paine, mixed with mine owne affection, compelld me to yeeld to my misfortune”’ (247.27–9), indicates the strong – if not strangling – hold of their love. Liana repeats ‘“I must ever love him, though he be false”’ (247.30; 253.18). Despair and death colour the narratives of many couples. To avenge the death of Terichillus, his widow Orguelea throws herself off a building (286–7). Inconsolable in her 220

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doomed love of the imposter ‘Amphilanthus,’ Emilina, Princess of Styria, loses her beauty ‘with weeping whole nights’ (298.14). Thinking her lover Alarinus has been killed, Myra ‘brake[s] her heart, and dye[s]’ (595.40). Pining ‘with love and griefe’ (600.18) for Peryneus, Elyna dies of ‘a cruell Feaver’ (600.21). ‘After fourteen years unchang’d affection,’ Lindamira, finding herself ‘cast off contemptuously and scornfully’ (502.2–3), composes seven sonnets of complaint (502–5). Even for women whose fidelity is recognized and to a degree rewarded, suspicion, impermanence, and pain cloud their happiness. The only exceptions appear to be Urania’s marriage to Steriamus and Philistella’s to Selarinus; they live ‘the rest of their dayes in all happinesse and joy’ (512.40). By contrast, Bellamira, daughter of Dettareus, ‘blamd [her] selfe’ (389.9) for accepting the arranged marriage with Treborius; only in commending this country lord’s ‘ordinary talke’ and praising his ‘rude sports’ does she recall her ‘best love, who delighted in those sports’ (389.10–13). Pamphilia defines herself totally in relation to Amphilanthus, without whom she is a mere wraith. ‘“Deere heart,”’ she sighs, ‘when shall I live againe, beholding his loved eyes? can I in possibility deserve ought? he not here, am I alive? no, my life is with him, a poor weake shadow of my selfe remaines, but I am other where’ (318.18–21). Her long-sought union with Amphilanthus at the end of Book Four closes the first part of Urania with unsettling incompleteness. Ceremonies are eschewed as only ‘fit for either false Lovers, that must make up their contents with words, or new or unexperienced Lovers, who talke halfe their time away’ (660.18–20). Although they are preparing for a separation, with Pamphilia only accompanying him to Italy while he journeys on to Germany, the account is full – emphatically too full – of signs of happiness and contentment: All things are prepared for the journey, all now merry, contented, nothing amisse; grief forsaken, sadnes cast off, Pamphilia is the Queene of all content; Amphilanthus joying worthily in her; And (661.11–14)

Perhaps designed to imitate the incomplete last sentence of the New Arcadia and gesturing definitely to the mansucript of the second part, this ending does not close, but rather opens up a series of questions. What happens next? How long will this contentment last? The second part, which remained in manuscript until its first publication in 1999, was likely composed, as Josephine Roberts suggests, ‘over a longer period of time.’49 Both lovers marry other partners, with a ménage à trois involving Amphilanthus, Pamphilia, and Rodomandro, her husband. In addition to more thwarted loves and the birth of natural children, it recounts the death in childbed of Philistella, modelled on Wroth’s younger sister Philip who died in childbirth in 1620. Concerned more with civility than con221

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stancy, it also ends with an incomplete sentence about the quest of a young knight, Fair Designe, to find Amphilanthus. Since William Herbert named his nephew, not his natural son (by Wroth), as his heir in 1626, this date is probably the latest time for the composition of the manuscript. Because my remarks concentrate on the earlier-published portion of Urania, one way of exploring this text’s synthesis of fraught loves and iconic moments is to consider the constructs of Wroth’s architectural imagination. After the Palace of Venus in Book One, the next venue with a developed symbolism is the enchanted theatre in Book Three, which Pamphilia along with her female companions discovers. In its opulence and harmonious sounds the theatre is an enticement which cannot be avoided. This theatre lulls or enchants the entrants into accepting confinement within its walls. ‘Instantly appeard as magnificent a Theater, as Art could frame ... Nay even Pamphilia was inticed to vanity in this kind. In they goe, and venture to ascend the Throne, when instantly the sweetest musicke, and most inchanting harmony of voyces, so overruld their sences, as they thought no more of any thing, but went up, and sate down in the chayers’ (373. 17–25). This is the reality of fairy tale: an enchanted spell to be broken by a single rescuer. There is no pain or resistance, only curiosity and intoxicated languor, similar to the effect of the river water on the journeyers to the Palace of Love. This moment of pleasurable anticipation crystallizes Wroth’s idealization of the loving female’s attitude. Although others are ‘shut up in the inchauntment’ (414.6) of the theatre, the spell is broken not by the intervention of Amphilanthus but, with an emphasis on female agency and female hermeneutics, by Urania’s opening of the book, which takes the place of the vanished chairs, and disclosing her ‘whole story’ (455.34). The theatre vanishes, but enchanted scenes in the Tomb of Love and the Hell of Deceit continue to occur. Love, we realize, has its own kind of sorcery. And these scenes, full of excitement and horror, adumbrate more of Wroth’s sense of the anguish, torment, and wished-for triumph of love. In the underground golden gallery of the Tomb of Love, an ‘ancient gravefull old man’ (519.20) relates the story of incestuous lovers. The visions in the underground chamber of the Hell of Deceit are more frighteningly immediate. Pamphilia sees Amphilanthus ‘with his heart ript open, and Pamphilia written in it’ (583.35–6) and female rivals at his side ready to erase the name. In a parallel scene Amphilanthus sees Pamphilia ‘dead, lying within an arch, her breast open and in it his name made’ (655.33). Despite their ornaments and luxury, these phantasmagoric scenes, along with the concluding poetry collection of complaints, love songs, and labyrinthine sonnets posing unsolvable dilemmas, generate gloomy forebodings for Pamphilia and Amphilanthus. Just as Urania showcases Wroth’s familiarity with the romance tradition, so her drama, Love’s Victory, borrows liberally from the Italian conventions of 222

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pastoral tragicomedy. In all likelihood her library included Tasso’s Aminta (1580) – either in the original or the translation of Abraham Fraunce – and Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (1590). Aspects of Tasso’s chaste nymph Silvia, who is rescued from a satyr’s planned rape by the shepherd Aminta, whose love she eventually accepts, emerge in Wroth’s quartet of couples. The less trammelled romance of Guarini’s Amarillis and Mirtillo is also a potential influence on Wroth’s depiction of at least one couple.We have no precise date for Love’s Victory, which remained in manuscript until its first publication in 1988. This five-act series of exchanges, games and love ploys between articulate shepherds and shepherdesses works through (or, re-works) many of the same conflicts and misgivings about love that inform Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. In fact, it is probable that the play, not intended for public performance but likely designed for private theatricals ‘at the Wroths’ country estate at Durrants in Enfield,’50 was composed around the time of the first part of the prose romance. Yet despite the ironizing, anti-Petrarchan attitude of the play’s rites of love and the nearness to tragedy when two lovers decide to sacrifice themselves rather than acquiesce to an odious arranged marriage, the tone of the piece remains light – a cerebral, Mozartian lightness as opposed to the epic Wagnerian shadows of Urania. The controlling presence of Venus and Cupid, the number of songs and games, and the moralizing conclusion of shaming outright villainy, all contribute to the masquelike lyricism of Love’s Victory.51 Tipping the balance on the side of comedy rather than tragedy, this Arcadian tragicomedy presents an essentially idyllic place.Venus and Cupid set the terms and control the severity of the tests to make ungrateful Arcadians realize their debt of ‘humble homage’ (I.12) to love. Venus commissions her son to provide a lesson, ‘Wound them, butt kill them nott, so they may live / To honour thee, and thankfullness to give’ (I.17–18), which foretells that those tested will be ‘most hapy ere they come to end’ (I.36). This instructive interlude operates on criteria much more positively determined than, say, those of Job or Measure for Measure. With Venus and her priests commenting on the action at the end of each act and with Venus distributing rewards and punishments in the final scene, the divine and didactic aegis of the action is never forgotten. Although he has named his arrows ‘Love, jealousie, malice, feare, and mistrust,’ Cupid forecasts: ‘Harme shalbe non yett all shall harme endure / For some small season, then of joye bee sure’ (I.423, 425–6). In offering their hymn of praise to the goddess and her son, the Priests to Love also supply a pithy warning: Love the king is of the mind, Please him and hee wilbe kind; Cross him, you see what doth come, Harms which make your pleasures tombe. (II.331–4)

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Yet despite Venus’s order for more pain, when she finds that ‘Some are / To slightly wounded’ and others ‘to soon ... blest’ (III. 355–7), she soon asks her son to ‘hold’ his hand and ‘slacken’ his hate since his ‘conquest is sufficient’ (IV.450, 454, 457). The four couples and a scattering of unattached or dissident characters who are taught or conquered in this pastoral have some oblique connection to the Sidney circle. Though they have suspicions and obstacles, the least problematic couple is Philisses and Musella, who could be coded representations of Herbert and Wroth, or of her uncle and Penelope Rich. Musella embodies constancy and commitment. Her beloved is an able poet of love, ‘a paine which yett doth pleasure bring, / A passion which alone in harts doe move’ (II.94–5), but he keeps his love a secret. True to the Wroth pattern of doubting, diffident males, Philisses, who does not declare his love to Musella until Act IV, fears that she actually loves his friend Lissius and for the sake of ‘constant freindship’ (II.275) opts not to let her know ‘I love her more then mine own hart’ (II. 273). The relationship between Simeana, Philisses’ sister, and Lissius, possibly coded characterizations of Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and the physician who may have been a lover in her widowhood, Matthew Lister, or of Susan de Vere, Countess of Montgomery, and her husband Philip Herbert, is much more fraught. Each party has been bruised. Simeana has been ‘constant’ but ‘rejected,’ though she now thinks ‘some hope revives, when love thought dead / Proves like the springs young bud when leavs ar fled’ (III.163–6). For his part, Lissius, deemed ‘cruel’ (III.285) by a rejected lover, considers the sight of a woman wooing ‘the most unfitting’st, shamefull’st thing’ (III.292). Their song about the springlike sweetness of ‘Love’s beginning’ and ‘the storms of Winter’s blast’ at the ending (IV.153–8) heralds the difficulties of scorn and mockery which separate them again, until Musella counsels her friend to ‘mend your fault’ (IV.289) and Simeana apologizes to Lissius ‘for having wrong’d thee with my jealousie’ (IV.300). While female agency, particularly in the roles of Venus and Musella, propels this play, many features also disrupt or challenge the paradigms of coupledom, inclusivity, and empowerment. Silvesta, whose vow of chastity is the result of having ‘her love and paines’ (I.219) rejected by Philisses, enters into a prolonged conversation with Musella about freedom in love. In this instance, it is the counsellor Musella who takes advice from Silvesta. Although Musella realizes that Silvesta’s ‘Chastitie by Love is wrought’ (III.24), Silvesta remarks on the prison of love which holds Musella: I see thou’rt bound, who most have made unfree. ’Tis true disdaine of my love made me turne, And hapily I think. But you to burne

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Six Major Authors In love’s faulse fires yourself, poore soule, take heed, Bee sure beefore you too much pine to speed. (III.26–30)

Not only is Silvesta noble in refusing to compete with Musella for Philisses’ affection (‘Parseaving hee lov’d you, I kild the strife / Which in mee was’ [III.54–5]), she also advises her sensibly about convincing Lissius that she (Musella) does not love him. Musella hails her as ‘saver of two harts’ (III.92). The sincere but unconsummated love of Forester for Silvesta, whom he saves from the flames she is forced to face for having assisted the apparent suicides of Musella and Philisses, augurs well, since Silvesta promises him that in her ‘chast hart ... your desarts [merit] a kind, and thankfull part’ (V.467–8). The fourth couple, Rustic (a possible characterization of Robert Wroth), the unwanted groom, and the coquettish Dalina, are tossed together in the aftermath of the false poisoning of Musella and Philisses, yet both appear happy with this last-minute arrangement. Although the tormenting villain Arcas, who has defamed true lovers as wantons, is condemned with ‘the shame of faulshood printed on [his] face’ (V.565), other figures of torment, who suffer because of their unrequited love – Climeana, who loved Lissius ‘soe longe’ (III.296), and Phillis, whose passion for Philisses ‘can noe comfort give’ (IV.430) – remain outsiders, non-participants in the concluding rings of declared and discovered couples. The songs, fortune-telling, accounts of past loves, and riddles which entertain the shepherds and shepherdesses make the reader’s experience of Love’s Victory one of tight verbal control. The emphasis is on speech, not action. Games, which are talked about and played through words, supply the plot line. The dramaturgic effect is entirely different from the slapstick of Hermia and Helena in the wood near Athens or the double entendres surrounding the disguised Rosalind in the Forest of Arden. The greater polemic tone in Wroth’s tragicomedy protests the institution of arranged marriages, as opposed to the celebration of marriages in Shakespearean comedies.52 Although the control of Venus is never in doubt, Wroth’s pastoral deliberately eschews the sense of participating in an enchanted time set apart from the normal round. The tales recounted and riddles solved are all grounded in everyday experience, often with oblique references to Wroth’s own family. Unlike the rituals which structure Shakespearean comedy, her dramatic pastoral enacts a secular, comedic oratorio on the struggles and occasionally engineered triumphs of love. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) Poet, playwright, autobiographer, philosopher, utopian fantasist, social critic, and scientific speculator, Margaret Lucas Cavendish, the most prolific pub225

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lished female author in early modern England, defies comparison and overturns tradition.53 She appears to be a mass of contradictions: admittedly shy, even creating two dramatic characters with the aptronymn ‘Bashful,’ yet seeking fame, if not notoriety; referring to herself as unlearned, yet also desiring the acclaim of an intellectual authority; content with a retired country life at her husband’s ruined family estate in Nottinghamshire, yet presenting folio editions of her work to the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge universities; dutifully accepting Royalist exile in Antwerp and, during the Restoration, lack of royal favour, yet lionizing heroic, empowered femininity in her plays and fiction, which nevertheless often conclude with conservative, patriarchal marriages. Throughout the thirteen folio volumes of her published work Cavendish plays with and manipulates these contradictions; she wriggles out of any box of categorization, accepting either fame or infamy as her lot, and evidently catering for both. She enjoys the game aspect of the writer’s role and, in my estimate, would warm to the formulations of contemporary cognitive scientists about the writer’s need ‘to mobilize our domain-specific cognitive architecture in the attempt to influence readers.’54 When rehearsing the reactions to the Empress of the Blazing World, her fictional/real alter ego, Cavendish cunningly disturbs any single or tidy perception: ‘But, good Lord! what several opinions and judgements did this produce in the minds of her country-men; some said she was an angel; others, she was a sorceress; some believed her a goddess; others said the devil deluded them in the shape of a fine lady’ (211). Because Cavendish challenges the criteria of literary judgment in her day and our own, she continues to provoke widely divergent assessments. The intellectual Walter Charleton commended her heroic femininity and productivity, proclaiming that ‘your Grace’s Statue ought to be placed alone, ... in the Gallery of Heroic Women, and upon a Pedestal more advanced then the rest ... you are the First great Lady, that ever Wrote so much, and so much of your own.’55 But other observers in Restoration England were less impressed. Mary Evelyn reached the snide conclusion that Cavendish was ‘amazingly vain and ambitious’; Samuel Pepys called her ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman’; and as early as her first publication of Poems and Fancies in 1553 Dorothy Osborne pitied this ‘poore woman ... soe rediculous ... as to venture writeing book’s and in verse too.’56 The seeming excess of Cavendish’s accomplishment, the quality which prompted Virginia Woolf ’s sneering comparison of her writing to ‘some giant cucumber’ choking the roses and carnations in the garden, shadows her critical reputation. Her eccentricity has been labelled ‘self-absorbed’; her learning, ‘still unformed and inchoate’; her fantasy, ‘confused, ridiculous, ... tedious [and] unbearably dull’; and her genius, ‘cankered.’57 Rather than ‘a true champion of her sex,’ Cavendish has been presented as ‘an egotist who happened to be of the female gender.’58 With five 226

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book-length studies, two new biographies, an essay collection, readers of her political writings, plays, and prose,59 international conferences at the University of East Anglia in 1996 and Oxford in 2003, and a special issue of Women’s Writing (4.3, 1997) devoted to her, as well as a steady stream of available paperback editions, especially of her plays and utopian fantasy, Margaret Cavendish is not lacking attention. In her writing ‘her mind is on display.’60 She probes topics of intense interest in contemporary feminist scholarship; among them are gendered subjectivity (as explored by Andrew Hiscock and Gweno Williams), the science of cognition (as examined by Lisa Sarasohn and Sarah Hutton), selffragmentation and sovereignty (as examined by Catharine Gallagher) and the female creative process (as observed by Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson). I propose to concentrate on two genres of her writing which creatively grapple with these issues in contexts that also reflect the conditions and consequences of the Civil War: the utopian fantasy, The Description of a New World, Call’d The Blazing World, which first appeared as an appendix to her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, in 1666, with a second edition two years later, and a selection of the plays, which appeared in two volumes in 1662 (Playes) and 1668 (Plays Never Before Printed ). Extravagant and parodic, The Blazing World is a metadiscourse on gender and the power to create, in which Cavendish teasingly strains the limits of intelligibility. The personal absolutism of her style separates this fantasy from other examples of seventeenth-century women’s utopian writing,61 namely, Mary Cary’s religio-political vision, A New and More Exact Mappe (1651), Aphra Behn’s utopian pastoral, ‘The Golden Age’ (1684), and Mary Astell’s proposed female seminary, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694–7). Because she delights in the fact that ‘no patterns would do her any good in the framing of her world, ... a world of her own invention’ (188), Cavendish’s narrative is also light years removed from the speculations about extraterrestrial travel by contemporary male authors. Her erratic plot, focused on the Empress of the Blazing World, is distant from John Wilkins’s story of ‘the art of flying’ and the possibility of colonizing ‘that other world’ in The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638; 208). That Wilkins was translated into French in 1656 or that Paul Borel’s Discours nouvel prouvant la pluralité des mondes was available the next year would have made little impression on the strictly anglophonic Cavendish during her exile in Antwerp. It is also unlikely that she would have read, though she may have heard conversations about, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac’s Les États et Empires de la lune (ca. 1648) and the incomplete Les États et Empires du Soleil (ca. 1650). As for Bernard de Fontenelle’s Les Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), appearing twenty years after The Blazing World and thirteen years after Cavendish’s death (with separate English translations by Aphra Behn and John Glanvill in 1688), she could not possibly 227

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have known it. Yet the lessons Fontenelle’s narrator delivers to the imaginary countess on, ultimately, six evenings – about the solar system and other forms of life (‘he therefore that will travel to the Moon, must not expect to find Men there’)62 – would not have been necessary for the Duchess of Newcastle. She had already metamorphosed characters into bear-men, fox-men, fish-men, worm-men, spider-men, and satyrs in her Blazing World. The text venerates a maiden, sole survivor of shipwreck (the then-traditional departure point for the discovery of uncharted worlds, as established by More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis), who in short order is installed as the empress and chief intellectual arbiter of the Blazing World. She is not the only Cavendish persona. The ‘spirit of Margaret Cavendish’ is summoned as the empress’s scribe. These two travel back and forth between blazing and known worlds and even enter the soul of William Cavendish for a remarkably triangulated Platonic conversation. The Blazing World is much more than merely solipsistic or escapist. In investigating interiority so associatively and whimsically, in interrogating the self so daringly, Cavendish analyses the complexity of her own personality traits: communal and sisterly but successfully autocratic and autotelic as well. The eleventh of the works, which Cavendish composed over a fifteen-year span (1653–68), ‘this piece of fancy added to [her] philosophical observations’ (124) also explores the authoring self. Although she labels fiction fancy, she allows that reason enters the undertaking, but as a more recreative and diverting faculty than in philosophical inquiry: ‘Reason searches the depth of nature, and enquires after the true causes of natural effects; but fancy creates of its own accord whatsoever it pleases, and delights in its own work’ (‘To the Reader,’ 123). The ‘world of [her] own creating’ (124) is as diverse as she pleases to fashion it, ‘for every human creature can create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures, and populous of immaterial subjects, ... and all this within the compass of the head or scull’ (185). Consequently she makes no secret of her ‘ambition not only to be Empress but Authoress of a whole world’ (224). Despite the onslaught of contemporary criticism, this Empress/Authoress extraordinaire declares her singularity and, considering the classical catalogue, superiority: ‘The rational figures of my mind might express as much courage to fight, as Hector and Achilles had; and be as wise as Nestor, as eloquent as Ulysses, and as beautiful as Helen. But I esteeming peace before war, wit before policy, honesty before beauty; instead of the figures of Alexander, Caesar, Hector, Achilles, Nestor, Ulysses, Helen, etc. chose rather the figure of honest Margaret Newcastle, which now I would not change for all this terrestrial world’ (224). Honest Margaret Newcastle (Marquis William Cavendish was named Duke of Newcastle in 1665) invokes but dismisses illustrious, martial company, and thereby draws attention to her singularity. However, the classical catalogue, associated with war and exile, also 228

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alludes ironically to the disappointments and frustrations she herself endured as a result of the Civil War. After leading the Royalist forces to defeat at Marston Moor in 1644, William Cavendish had fled to France and the court of Henrietta Maria, where he met and soon married the maid of honour, Margaret Lucas, three decades his junior. Two of Cavendish’s daughters (by Elizabeth Bassett), Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley, had wickedly satirized their new stepmother, whom they had not met, in the character of Lady Tranquillity in their play The Concealed Fancies (ca. 1645);63 likely composed and performed at the Cavendish home, Welbeck Abbey, before their father’s remarriage in December 1645, the household entertainment ridicules Lady Tranquillity as pompous, scheming, and self-absorbed. Margaret’s brother, Sir Charles Lucas, was executed by a Parliamentary firing squad in 1648, and the Lucas estate was ransacked. Cavendish’s estates were confiscated in 1649, when Parliament barred him from England as a traitor. Margaret’s attempts to intervene, by petitioning Parliament in 1651 to grant her husband some income, were unsuccessful. The marriage was childless; explanations include an irregular menstrual cycle and, for William, who had fathered ten children in his first marriage, pre-marital widower’s philandering. The debt and financial losses incurred in exile and the disappointment of the marquis’s hopes in not being named Master of the Horse by Charles II (his elevation to Duke of Newcastle brought no financial benefit) contributed to this couple’s shared trials. In The Blazing World connections to Civil War and Restoration England are more than glancing. Although, when the scribe Margaret Cavendish returns to ‘her own body’ and native country, her husband, the duke, laments that ‘there was no passage between those two worlds’ (221), the author herself continually bridges blazing and known, fictive and real worlds. Many of these links are compensatory. The Emperor of the Blazing World intends to build stables on the model of those of the Duke of Newcastle, a known horseman. The scribe Margaret Cavendish plans a theatre for the Blazing World, where her own plays may be performed ‘when they cannot be acted in the Blinking World of Wit’ (220). As scribe and companion Margaret Cavendish answers the queries of the curious empress with straightforward statements of Royalist grievances and principles. She explains the ‘long Civil War, ... in which most of the best timber trees and principal palaces were destroyed’ and specifies her ‘own dear Lord and husband’s’ loss of ‘half his woods, besides many houses, land, and movable goods’ (193). In dispensing advice to the empress about government – ‘one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language’ being preferable to ‘contentions and divisions’ – the scribe contrasts the paradise of the Blazing World with the ‘miserable’ world ‘from which [she] came, wherein are more sovereigns than worlds, and more pretended governors than governments, more religions than gods, and more opinions in those religions than truths’ (201). 229

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Openly confronting the proscriptions of a gendered construction of knowledge, Cavendish understands the strategies of artistic expression and selfpromotion ‘in a society that tolerated women writing, but was deeply suspicious of women publishing.’64 By ensconcing the empress in the peaceful monarchy of the Blazing World Cavendish makes it clear that this figure is adored not simply because she is the emperor’s wife, but because she erects schools, founds and directs scientific societies, and even builds churches and proselytizes for ‘her own religion,’ making up ‘a congregation of women, whereof she intended to be the head herself ’ and instructing the women who became ‘very devout and zealous sisters’ (162). Cavendish had railed against female subjugation and invested in the creation of heroines who actively, militantly assert themselves and gain respect. Having inveighed against the ‘Hell of Subjection’ in which women ‘are kept like birds in cages to hop up and down in our houses, ... shut out of all power and Authority, ... [and] trodden down with scorn, by the overweaning conceit men have of themselves and through a despisement of us,’65 Cavendish deliberately constructs The Blazing World to supply the real respect for learnedness which she both envied and craved. Her self-absorption and unrestricted fancy are necessary correctives to regnant male models, with her female scientist turning ‘the world upside down’ and providing ‘an alternative perspective to the prevailing Baconian paradigm.’66 The development of engines and submarines is hinted at; cures for ageing and the creation of ‘a poetical or romancical Cabbala’ (183) are entertained. Yet the empress orders the breaking of telescopes as ‘false informers’ (141). Her creative self is ‘double-valenced’; she engages with the text which itself ‘enacts a politics of withdrawal.’67 Direct in its critique and raw in emotional response, The Blazing World stands apart from the measured and oblique speculations of Wilkins, de Bergerac, and Fontenelle. With a feminist purposiveness that allies her with Mary Cary, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell, Cavendish exhibits – flaunts, some would say – an inquiring, eager, associative intelligence. However outlandish or utopian it may have seemed in 1666, she proposes the model of women learning from one another, even from submerged elements of their own selves. The two female interlocutors are as essential to the movement of the narrative as, over a century earlier, Marguerite de Navarre’s five rather than three women storytellers and debates between male and female narrators in the cornice dialogues enlivened the tales of the Heptameron. As removed from the Baconian and erudite first-person narration of wanderings in the city of Bensalem and methodical discoveries in the research institute of Salomon’s House as from the patriarchal condescension of Fontenelle’s narrator instructing a curious woman, the exchanges of The Blazing World are uniquely women-centred. Cavendish’s nineteen plays, most of which are comedies, also pivot around 230

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childless female figures who effectively pursue roles as educators (in The Female Academy, 1662, and The Convent of Pleasure, 1668), dramatists (in Lady Contemplation I and II, 1662), orators (in the tragedy Youths Glory and Deaths Banquet I and II, 1662) and warriors (in Bell in Campo I and II, 1662). In the literary form of fiction and drama Cavendish introduces heroines who manage affairs their way. Women fight alongside men in Bell in Campo; the Creating Princess and Comical Duchess of The Apocriphal Ladies invert cultural types; The Female Academy spotlights the tutelage of young aristocrats by sober matrons, the objections of excluded men and middle-class wives notwithstanding. In her prose tales, many of Cavendish’s female controllers, when unfettered by marriage, like Mademoiselle Grand Esprit in Natures Three Daughters, the She-Ancoret in the tale of the same name, and Delitia in The Contract, are majestic orators on the subjects of knowledge and fame. In Loves Adventures I and II Lady Bashfull vows not to marry, reasoning, ‘Because I am now Mistriss of my self, and fortunes, and have a free liberty; and who that is free, if they be wise, will make themselves slaves, subjecting themselves to anothers humour, unless they were fools, or mad, and knew not how to chose the best and happiest life’ (IV.17); she does, however, accept the proposal of Sir Serious Dumb, who is revealed as ‘one of the finest Gentlemen in this Kingdom’ (IV.21). Cavendish appears to be checking herself out in a hall of mirrors every time one of her ‘heroickesses’ speaks. The decision to publish her plays rather than insist on their performance was deliberate, Cavendish explains in her prefatory address to readers in 1662. Arguing that ‘the printing of [her] Playes spoils them for ever to be Acted,’ she anticipates and prizes thoughtful reading over surprising or inadequately acted performance: ‘[F]or what men are acquainted with, is despised, at lest neglected; for the newness of Playes, most commonly, takes the Spectators, more than the Wit, Scenes, or Plot, so that my Playes would seem lame or tired in action, and dull to hearing on the Stage, for which reason, I shall never desire that they should be Acted; but if they delight or please the Readers, I shall have as much satisfaction as if I had the hands of applause from the Spectators’ (A4). Cavendish’s publishing stratagem implies a theatre pedigree: her ‘Works’ appeared in folio, ‘the most enduring and privileged form drama could take.’68 The discussion here will concentrate on one play from the 1662 collection, Bell in Campo, and one from 1668, The Convent of Pleasure, both now readily available in paperback editions. I want to test the feasibility of Anne Shaver’s observations that Cavendish’s plays ‘end in ways usually termed happy’ and ‘all suggest ways to question that happiness.’69 More of a tragicomedy than a comedy, dramatizing the public and private skirmishes in the war between the Kingdom of Reformation and the Kingdom of Faction, Bell in Campo explores the span of utopian happiness enjoyed by the Lady Victoria and her heroickesses who insist on going to war to 231

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represent Reformation. As in Jonson (whose plays Cavendish had complained about as too long), characters in this two-part drama are identified by allegorical tags. Not only do the women out-perform the men, who had dismissed them as ‘Incumberance[s], ... always puling and sick, and whining, and crying, and tir’d, and froward’ (I.4), but this ‘Amazonian Army’ (III.15) fulfils the expectations announced by Lady Victoria that women ‘are fit to be Copartners in ... Governments, and to help rule the World’ (II.9). Victoria’s address to her ‘Noble Heroickesses’ makes clear the restraints against which this regiment is acting: ‘[H]ad our education been answerable to theirs, we might have proved as good Souldiers and Privy Counsellers, Rulers and Commanders, Navigators and Architects, and as learned Scholars both in Arts and Sciences, as men are.’ (II.9). Different from the warrior maids who follow ‘the rules of the heterosexual, male-dominated social order,’ Lady Victoria’s Amazonian Army actively intervenes ‘in the doings of war.’70 In refusing the protection of a garrison and following the ‘Laws’ of their ‘Generaless’ (III.11), namely that they wear armour at all times, and in decisively routing the forces of Faction, the warrior women also occupy ‘a territory that is foreign to the world of the play.’71 The exceptional happiness of these like-minded women has a beginning and an end. The Lord General, Lady Victoria’s husband, who is initially and reluctantly ‘resolved [she] shall try what [her] tender Sex can endure’ (I.2), reappears to close the second part of the play, as the Lady Victoria enters in triumph following troops of prisoners and the display of ‘Conquered spoils’ (V.20). There is no stinting in the details of her sartorial splendour: ‘in a gilt carriage drawn with eight white Horses, ... she had a Coat on all imbroidered with silver and gold, ... Buskins and Sandals imbroidered, ... on her head a Wreath or Garland of Lawrel, ... her hair curl’d and loosely flowing, in her hand a Crystall Bolt headed with gold.’ The royal proclamation, announced to memorialize the victories of this extraordinary army, signals the end of the war at the same time as its decalogue-plus-one ushers in a new domestic economy for all women. Unlike the actual, proven accomplishments of Victoria and her heroickesses, the manifestolike proclamation describes household governance in the future tense: First, That all women shall hereafter in this Kingdome be Mistriss on their own Houses and Families. Secondly, They shall sit at the upper end of the Table above their husbands. Thirdly, That they shall keep the purse. Fourthly, They shall order their Servants ... Fiftly, They shall buy in what Provisions they will. Sixtly, All the Jewels, Plate, and Household Furniture they shall claim as their own, and order them as they think good.

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Six Major Authors Seventhly, They shall wear what fashioned clothes they will. Eightly, They shall go abroad when they will, without controul, or giving of any account thereof. Ninthly, They shall eat when they will, and of what they will, and as much as they wil, and as often as they will. Tenthly, They shall go to Playes, Masks, Balls, Churchings, Christenings, Preachings, whensoever they will, and as fine and bravely attired as they will. Lastly, That they shall be of their Husbands Counsel.

Through its subplots involving more conventional, protected women (Madam Jantil and Madam Passionate) and their alert, often coarse maids (Nell Careless and Doll Pacify), Bell in Campo also supplies a built-in reality check or a way to question the happiness experienced by some women and the liberation heralded for all. Both women, living ‘securely’ (II.7) in a Garrison-town, are widowed. After invoking death and singing a song about the Paradise that awaits, inserted texts written by William Cavendish, the younger Madam Jantil dies of grief, bequeathing money to allow Nell Careless ‘to live a single life’ (V.19). The lusty, older Madam Passionate falls prey to fortune hunters and lives to regret her choice of a handsome young man, a choice which as she explains represents the forfeiture of the very liberties Lady Victoria’s triumphs propose to ensure. Madam Passionate has lost her lands, which he has sold, her woods, which he has cut down, her independent wealth, which he is squandering, and, most ignominiously, her own bed: ‘when he comes home drunk, he swears and storms, and kicks me out of my warm Bed, and makes me sit shivering and shaking in the cold, whilst my maid takes my place’ (V.17). While the interrogation of marriage and the liberty and happiness that it may (or may not) hold out for women occurs in Bell in Campo through the ironic splicing of main and sub plots, the matters of female agency and happiness propel the plot in The Convent of Pleasure. In four of the five acts of The Convent of Pleasure happiness is circumscribed by the walls of the convent, established by the heiress Lady Happy. Unlike the irony that continues to resonate in Bell in Campo, the marriage which is celebrated in the final act of The Convent of Pleasure between Lady Happy and the Prince, previously disguised first as a woman, who forms a passionate bond with Lady Happy, and then as a man, dissolves the proto-feminist critique and stops the flirtatiously suggested lesbianism of the convent through a heteronormative conclusion. Yet despite the reversal or recanting about marriage at the end, The Convent of Pleasure is full of remarkable dramaturgic experiments. Cavendish plays with the definition of ‘convent,’ transforming a cenobitic community associated with vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, into a female spa where 233

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tactile pleasures and sensual delights abound. Chambers are hung with taffeta, gilt leather, or tapestries according to the seasons; floors are spread with Turkish carpets; fragrant cypress and juniper supply firewood; lights are perfumed wax; the finest bed and table linens are available; weedless gardens of flowers, herbs, and fruit are tended (by unidentified drudges) year-round. The passionate relationship between Lady Happy and the Princess/Prince challenges heterosexual norms – although the reader’s awareness that Lady Happy’s ‘lover’ is male tempers or limits the challenge. Lady Happy enjoys the provocativeness of her question, ‘But why may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man?’ (IV.1), just as the ‘Princess’ takes pleasure in the double meaning of ‘her’ explanation, ‘These my Imbraces though of a Female kind, / May be as fervent as a Masculine mind’ (IV.1). The interspersed scenes of the real torments suffered by less privileged women, conveyed through snippets of their conversation in Act III, and the role of the ‘Fool’ Mimick, who delivers the epilogue, combine to create a meta-theatrical commentary on the convent so deliberately removed ‘from the incumbred cares and vexations, troubles and perturbance of the World’ (I.2). The poor women who talk about feckless, philandering, drunken, or abusive husbands and of the pains and frequent deaths in labour bring the world, in contrast to the Sybaritic utopia of the convent, into sharp focus. Through the character of Mimick Cavendish comments on her own work, on the nesting box of disguises in the role-playing at the convent, and on inevitable criticism. Mimick, whose name conjures up both serious mimesis and deflating ridicule, not only gestures towards the socialized nature of gender roles, in his quip to the newly married Lady Happy that ‘you’ve now a Mimick of your own, for the Prince has imitated a Woman’ (V.3), he also installs himself as a spokesperson for Cavendish, who is above the censure of the moment but who anticipates enduring praise. Speaking for Cavendish in the epilogue, he disarms would-be critics with the acknowledgment that ‘she is careless, and is void of fear; / If you dislike her Play she doth not care.’ Speaking as ‘poor Mimick,’ however, he cajoles ‘But if you please, you may a Cordial give, / Made up with Praise, and so he long may live.’ Such a cunning amalgam of high and low styles, of realistic and consciously fantastic representations, of obliviousness and concern about reception, is the ideal embodiment of Cavendish’s own prolific and provocative art. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda (1632–1664) Katherine Philips’s reputation has had ups and downs. Unlike the sneers of many contemporaries that Margaret Cavendish experienced, Philips’s work, primarily as a poet but also as a translator and letter writer, was hailed in the 234

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decades immediately following her death. Abraham Cowley’s praise helped to establish her renown as a ‘neoclassical poet.’73 The third stanza of Cowley’s ‘On Orinda’s Poems’ focuses on the mellifluousness, wit and strength of her poetics, its ‘well-knit sense’ and ‘fancies high’ in which ‘Both improv’d sexes eminently meet’ (154). Philips became the standard-bearer for a generation of women poets. Jane Barker’s Poetical Recreations (1688) lamented the passing of an era when the muses were so ‘ty’d’ to Orinda ‘That nought their Friendship cou’d divide’ (‘To my friends against Poetry,’ lines 5–6). In Poems (1686) Anne Killigrew, defending her own authorship in ‘Upon the saying that my VERSES were made by another,’ recalled the glorious age of Orinda when ‘What she did write, not only all allow’d, / But ev’ry Laurel, to her Laurel, bow’d’ (46). But one roar of critical thunder changed the climate for Philips’s reception. The Reverend Thomas Newcomb’s attack in Bibliotheca (1712) damned her poetry, where ‘Softness her Want of Sense supplies, / She faints in every line and dyes’ (31). His misguided and misinformed criticism tapped into ‘the prevailing hostility to literary “femininity”’ and thereby ‘tip[ped] the critical scales against a particular woman poet.’74 No further eighteenth-century editions of her work appeared. Revival of interest in Philips, as attempted by Sir Edmund Gosse, for example, in Seventeenth Century Studies (1897), usually resorted to condescending praise of her personal charm and pure muse. Gosse’s ‘venture to revive her’ scarcely started on a firm footing, since he admitted that he neither ‘admired[d] her verses’ nor ‘consider[ed] her in the true sense to have been a poet’ (230). With a three-volume Collected Works edition available since the early 1990s,75 contemporary readings of Katherine Philips are less absorbed in comparative elevation and denigration and more interested in exploring the subtleties of friendship and innocence, the interplay of concord and violence. I propose to concentrate on Philips’s poetry, verse epistles, and meditations – often addressed to identified or coded contemporaries – to examine some of the ways she opens up interior, autonomous space. Philips composed 130 poems – dialogues, odes, epitaphs, eulogies, songs – on topics of immediate concern: friendship, contentment, happiness, retirement, the soul, and death. These are not discrete issues but interrelated and commingled. The six stanzas of ‘Friendship’s Mysterys’ adroitly combine them all. Inviting Lucasia (Anne Owen) to prove ‘to the dull angry world ... there’s a religion in our love’ (4–5), Philips celebrates their isolation and willed captivity through Donnean paradoxes: We court our own capitivity, Then Thrones more great and innocent:

235

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England ’Twere banishment to be set free, Since we weare fetters whose intent Not bondage is, but Ornament. (16–20)

The declaration, ‘We are our selves by rebound, / And all our titles shuffled so, / Both Princes, and both subjects too’ (23–5), distills the sense of the self as contingent and protean, not fixed and foreknown.76 Fittingly in the ‘religion’ of friendship, the hearts of Orinda and Lucasia ‘Are Altars, Priests, and offerings made, / And each heart which thus kindly dy’s, / Grows deathless by the sacrifice’ (28–30). This religion comprises ‘an invisible, indivisible touching of female hearts and minds.’77 Because of its difference and singularity, female friendship, ‘love refin’d and purg’d from all its drosse’ (#64, ‘A Friend,’ 8), is also the touchstone by which marriage and other unions are judged. Friendship is deemed ‘stronger then passion is, though not so grosse’ and ‘nobler then kindred or then mariage band, /Because more free’ (‘A Friend,’ 10, 13–14). Out of diversity the mysterious alchemy of friendship creates unity: Now as distilled simples doe agree, And in the Lembique loose Variety; So vertue, though in scatter’d pieces ’twas, Is by her mind one rich usefull masse. (#27, ‘Lucasia,’ 47–50)

Above philosophical and scientific dissection, the harmony of friendship remains a ‘sublime ... wonder’ (#43, ‘To my Lucasia,’ 13): Let dull Philosophers enquire no more In nature’s womb, nor causes strive t’explore, By what strange harmony and course of things Each body to the whole a tribute brings; What secret Unions neighbouring agents make, And of each other how they doe partake. These are but low experiments; but he That nature’s harmony entire would see, Must search agreeing soules, sit down and view How sweet the mixture is! how true! (‘To my Lucasia,’ 1–10)

Such exalted and exclusive friendship, however, is not without injuries and perceived disloyalties. When Rosania (Mary Aubrey, a friend from girlhood) marries William Montagu privately in 1652, perhaps without consulting or inviting Orinda, Philips addresses ‘Injuria amici ’ (#38) to her as ‘Lovely apostate!’; figuring herself as ‘wounded for and by your power, I / At once 236

Six Major Authors

your martyr and your prospect dy’ (11–12), she inquires plaintively, ‘What was my offence? / Or am I punish’d for obedience?’ (1–2). In ‘The Enquiry’ (#58) she wonders about the slippage from friendship to indifference: If friendship sympathy impart, Why this ill shuffled game, That heart can never meet with heart, Or flame encounter flame? What doth this crueltie create? Is it th’intrigue of love or fate? (37–42)

Although she recognizes the death of Lucasia’s first husband, John Owen, who died at Orinda’s house in 1655, as the ‘greatest loss’ of her ‘dearest friend’ (#92), Philips also acknowledges regretfully her own unsuccessful interference in trying to secure Lucasia’s second marriage to Sir Charles Cotterell. For ‘ills’ and ‘torments’ (#93, ‘Orinda to Lucasia, parting,’ 36, 37), she begs forgiveness, ‘pow’ring out [her] woes / In rhyme, now that [she] dare not do’t in Prose’ (65–6): But though I must this sharp submission learn, I cannot yet unwish thy dear concern. Not one new comfort I expect to see, I quit my Joy, hope, life, and all but thee. (41–4)

Touching on related topics of power, death, and self-effacement, friendship involves Philips in the seventeenth-century exercise of ‘social dreaming on the theme of peace.’78 ‘On the 3rd September 1651’ comments on the defeat of Charles II at Worcester, by invoking the impermanence of realms and diadems. The confrontation at Worcester was decisive; Orinda, married to a Cromwell supporter, shows the breadth of her understanding of Royalist and Parliamentary causes: So when our Gasping English Royalty Perceiv’d her period now was drawing nigh, She summons her whole strength to give one blow, To raise her self, or pull down others too. (11–14)

Allusions to ‘Captive Sampson ... attended with a multitude’ (25–6) and Pompey unable to flee ‘But half the world must beare him company’ (24) underscore the unhappiness of kings ‘who cannot keep a throne / Nor be so fortunate to fall alone!’ (21–2). As ‘Heroes tumble in the common heap’ (32), the poet celebrates the stability of virtue: 237

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England O! give me vertue then, which summs up all, And firmely stands when Crowns and Scepters fall. (33–4)

Although she perceives this event from the sidelines of the victors, Philips’s treatment is remarkable for its nuanced attention to the impossibility of the royal prerogative. Her tribute ‘to the truly noble Mr Henry Lawes’ explores the curative role of the arts, particularly music. According to Philips’s editor, Patrick Thomas, Lawes (1595/6–1662) was ‘perhaps the most important English composer of his period.’79 Lawes not only set some of Orinda’s songs to music, he also composed the music and acted in Milton’s Comus. Since both Milton and Philips wrote poetry about Lawes, it may be instructive to consider their different emphases. Milton’s sonnet XIII, ‘To My Friend, Mr. Henry Lawes, on His Airs,’ composed in 1646, addresses its subject as ‘Harry,’ but quickly shifts to classical allusions to praise this ‘Priest of Phoebus’ Choir’ (10); having taught ‘our English Music’ to fit words and notes together and thus to avoid ‘Midas’ Ears’ (4) or ass’s ears, Lawes will be raised higher than Dante’s ‘Casella, whom he woo’d to sing’ (13), the muse who charmed Dante in Purgatory. Orinda’s tone is less familiar yet more celebratory. Without classical allusions her longer (40 lines) poem sets up a cosmological framework acknowledging the harmony of the spheres and the relation of microcosm to the macrocosm: Beauty is but Composure, and we find Content is but the Concord of the mind, Friendship the unison of well-tun’d hearts, Honour’s the Chorus of the noblest parts, And all the world on which we can reflect, Musique to th’ Eare, or to the intellect. If then each man a little world must be, How many worlds are coppy’d out in Thee? (9–16)

For Milton Lawes’s accomplishment was the honouring of verse. For Philips the legacy is (and the present tense is important) larger, for it encompasses the civilizing mission of the arts, especially music. Live then (Great soule of nature!) to asswage The savage dullness of this sullen age; Charm us to sence, and though experience faile, And reason too, thy numbers will prevaile. (31–4)

More emphatic and idealizing than Milton, for whom Lawes’s ‘worth and skill 238

Six Major Authors

exempts thee from the throng’ (Sonnet XIII, 5), Philips exhorts Lawes to prove music’s restorative influence: Be it thy care our Age to new-create: What built a world may sure repayre a state. (39–40)

Philips’s exhortation to ‘new-create’ an age aptly announces a criterion with which to assess the accomplishments of early modern Englishwomen writers. The six authors discussed in this chapter illustrate some of the issues and challenges, underscored by accelerated scholarly interest, in ‘new-creating’ our understanding of early modern English literary culture. At stake is not simply the matter of adding women to a list of known writers. The more complicated issue concerns the idea of authorship itself, its diverse sites, and its linkage to authority, which the example of these women – and scores of their contemporaries – contests, adjusts, and enlarges. Because of the immense upsurge in scholarly investigation and the availability of texts, discovering and reading early modern Englishwomen writers are activities definitely fuelled and filled, to recall Benjamin’s phrase, with ‘the presence of the now.’ For a variety of reasons, Pembroke, Lanyer, Cary, Wroth, Cavendish, and Philips have all been hidden from view: sensationalized, forgotten, or marginalized in some way. Yet, as we realize, their accomplishments – in manuscripts, published folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos, burned translations, and neglected editions – are not only substantial in themselves but transformative of our view of the early modern cultural landscape. Their work is also a scholarly barometer. The diminution and enhancement of their reputations correspond to tectonic shifts in the formulation of early modern studies. Consider, to begin with, how this sextet dislodges the fixity of traditions and genres. Pembroke’s psalmic metaphrase and inventive translations make it necessary to read her work alongside her brother’s, to grasp how her responses to biblical, philosophical, and dramatic texts inform one another, and to trace the filiation between patronage and creative practice. Lanyer, who was exhumed initially only to be ridiculed, experiments with the chronology and images of biblical narrative to justify God’s ways to womankind – almost three centuries before Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible. As dramatist, chronicler, and once-proscribed translator, Cary, who is now bidding fair to be securely ensconced in the early modern pantheon of canonized authors, attends to the intricate connections between thought and speech, and especially between women’s tongues and their action. Wroth uses the diaphanous veils of fiction in Arcadian romance, pastoral tragicomedy, and songs and sonnets to investigate and, in a therapeutic sense, work through the gendering of the qualities of fidelity and abjection. Braving heckles about dilettantism 239

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

and eccentricity, Cavendish boldly sashays into the literary marketplace, publishing over the full gamut of genres – from autobiography, poems, letters, and philosophical essays to drama and utopian romance. Formerly prized only for the purity and innocence of her muse, Philips’s work as poet, letterwriter, and translator is now being read alongside that of her admiring contemporary Henry Vaughan and as part of the chorus of reactions – from oblique to vociferous – to the violent disruptions of the 1650s.

240

Postscript

Early modern Englishwomen’s writing introduces a vast range of work produced outside the world of court culture and patronage. While aware of the crucial role of the monarchy and the church in attempting to monitor and regularize religious practice, women’s writing discloses multiple perspectives along with an array of institutional sites. In their work, the household and the city are key environments, where the forces of politics, religion, and sexuality are imbricated. In the household, familial, literary, and temperamental loyalties coalesce. It is the site where Margaret Roper translates a treatise by a family friend, Erasmus, and where her daughter, Mary Basset, translates the Latin meditation of her (Basset’s) grandfather, Thomas More, when he was imprisoned and awaiting death. The family home is also the site and subject of Gertrude Thimelby’s poetry, while the letters sent by her sister-in-law Winefrid, from Flanders, to a sister and brother-in-law in England characterize the convent as an extended, spiritual family home. The private but layered emotional space of the domestic household is the formative milieu in which mothers instruct children. Often emerging as posthumous publications, resonating with an ardent maternal voice, the advice books of Elizabeth Grymeston, Elizabeth Joscelin, and others acquaint us with the kind of zealous tutelage received by most early modern authors – not only Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Donne, but Anne Wheathill, Anne Dowriche, and Bathsua Reginald. The household, as women’s writing reminds us, was not a protected enclave, cut off from the surrounding world. It was located within a community, and participated in – as much as it helped to shape – a geopolitical reality. The testimonials, polemics, prophecies, exhortations, and visions composed by such early modern experimenters in the fields of social psychology, cultural semiotics, and civil disobedience as Anne Askew, Rachel Speght, Eleanor Davies, Hester Biddle, and Anna Trapnel testify to the connectedness 241

Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England

of private and public domains. Through household windows and, in the situations of Askew, Davies, and Trapnel, from prison cells, women writers commented on patriarchal clergy, gender stereotyping, the curtailment of rights, political mismanagement, and the prevalence of secularism. Their words speak to us as both prescient and pertinent. The registers of personal voice and the complexities of selfhood indicate that no monolithic concept of the early modern woman ever existed. The breadth of confessional/autobiographical poetry, to cite the example of but one genre, stretches from the urban savvy of Isabella Whitney and the Calvinist gloom of Anne Vaughan Lock’s sonnets, to Aemilia Lanyer’s idyll, the devotional, often self-accusatory lyrics of An Collins and Elizabeth Major, and Katherine Philips’s coded celebration of female friendships. As with their male counterparts, the individually inflected female self can never be evacuated from our understanding of their art. Nor can we fail to be impressed, as we survey the writing of queens, princesses, aristocrats, and women of the middle ranks, by the immense variety as well as the precious rarity of their work. Without moulding these writers into proto-feminists, the discovery of their multiplicity extends to the vast range of topics in the domain of statecraft, civil power, and cultural authority on which they commented and intervened. Their informed, often trenchant, observations on the stability of church governance and regimes of belief, pragmatic and philosophic responses to state-sponsored trial and torture, and jeremiads about upheavals broaden the framework through which we perceive and come to know early modern literary culture. They were instructively adroit at interlacing genres and domains, styles and audiences. The scope of their work surely prompts us to sharpen or recast our understanding of the supposed distances between the formal and the informal, classical and demotic, civic and domestic, public and private, in early modern England.

242

APPENDIX A

Women and the Rise of Print Culture

Early modern women’s writing shines an expanded light on conditions of authorship and the marketplace forces governing the publishing and dissemination of their ideas. As writers, readers, collectors and editors, printers, and sellers, women made significant contributions to the history of the book and to the movement of texts among reading networks. Women writers and printers captured words, thoughts, and sounds on the page, and thus challenged the ‘long tradition of prejudice against the products of female culture as at best trivial and erroneous and at worst dangerous and corrupting.’1 Their participation in print culture not only left a mark; it also effected an expansion of the medium and the message. As David Zaret explains, print itself became ‘a prototype for democratic models of the public sphere because it fostered discourse oriented to a virtual community to which widespread, though not universal, access existed.’2 Interpreting the visual and verbal signs of women’s work calls repeated attention to differences in class and differences between production and consumption. While women in the early modern English book trade left little or no writing for us to consider, they did produce concrete, physical, identifiable textual work. Discovering or exhuming the role of women in the rise of print culture involves the recognition of their activities in a commercial, centrally regulated domain. Although much of their enterprise remains invisible, safely cloaked behind the name of a husband or a son, records of the Stationers’ Company reveal a consistent pattern of female activity. As printers and booksellers women became most visible following the death of their husbands and before either their re-marriage or the passing on of the business to a son or son-in-law. Investigating this record means paying attention to working women, not aristocrats. Unlike courtiers, titled ladies, and noblemen’s daughters who circulated manuscript copies among friends and, as Marjorie Plant observes 243

Appendix A

drily, considered it beneath their dignity ‘to have any dealings with a publisher,’3 the wives of freemen of the Stationers’ Company in London, Edinburgh, and York were intimately affected by the conditions influencing the growth of print culture. In the cut-throat world of Elizabethan and Jacobean commerce, these women had to be savvy and profit-conscious, to know when a merger was wise and how to amortize debts. From the earliest appearances of mechanically made books, when printers designed type to imitate the written hand, to the explosion of radical pamphlets during the Civil Wars and Protectorate, printers (who were bound to be members of the Stationers’ Company) and booksellers and bookbinders (who were not necessarily members) were all attuned to the needs and requirements of the marketplace. Moreover, the dictionaries of printers and booksellers from 1557 to 1667 contain entries for scores of women, widows mostly, who maintained businesses, employed apprentices and pressmen, and were often instrumental in disseminating texts of identifiable political, religious, and literary importance.4 The printers include the Huguenot fugitive Jacquelin Vautrollier (fl. 1588). Although prohibited from printing because her husband, Thomas, who was associated with the published writings of Théodore Bèze and, more sensationally, Giordano Bruno, was not recognized as a printer at the time of his death, Vautrollier was allowed to finish and print a portion of the Greek Testament and Luther’s Commentary on Galatians. Alice Charlewood (fl. 1593) printed Godly Prayers by Edward Dering, the preacher-husband of the Calvinist writer and translator Anne Lock. Jane Coe (fl. 1644–7) printed the first work of the Fifth Monarchist Mary Cary, The Glorious Excellencie (1645). Hannah Allen (fl. 1646–51), a ‘consistent publisher of radical Independent and Baptist authors,’5 was among the first sellers of Henry Jessey’s account of Sarah Wight’s spiritual experiences, The Exceeding Riches of Grace (1647) and the first to publish the work of the anti-Cromwell Independent Welsh preacher, Vavasour Powell. Jane Bell (fl. 1650–9) printed popular romances and fables. Mary Westwood (fl. 1659–63) published the Quaker women’s petition against tithes in 1659 and was one of its over 7000 signatories.6 Among the booksellers, Joan Broome (fl. 1591–1601) held the rights to three comedies by John Lyly. Joan Millington (fl. 1604) published a pamphlet about Queen Anne’s passage through the streets of London. Elizabeth Adams (fl. 1620–5) held a share in the rights to Hakluyt’s Voyages and Camden’s Britanni. Hannah Barrett (fl. 1624–6) was associated with the publication of Bacon’s Essays. Anne Maxey (fl. 1657) held her husband’s rights to Elizabeth Major’s autobiography Honey on the Rod (1656). The knowledge these women attained as employers and figures in the public sphere was both practical and procedural. Their grasp of accounting practices, acceptable wages, and requisite skills for their employees would be 244

Appendix A

sure and tested. They knew the market values of paper, vellum, calfskin, glue, and ink. They would likely oversee the production of printer’s ink from linseed oil and lamp-black. They would know the going rates for and differing qualities of paper purchased from either English mills, which had obtained patents, or Continental competitors, who often provided a superior product. They were familiar with economies of scale, the salability of the portable octavo (text-rich pages of easily read Roman print measuring roughly five by eight inches), and the greater production costs involved in the larger quarto and folio volumes (made by two or one fold, respectively, in the original sheet of thirty-two- by twenty-one-inch printer’s paper). They were obliged to be aware of the laws and decrees governing the print and book trades. Since its Charter of Incorporation during the reign of Philip and Mary in 1557, the Company of Stationers was established to ensure government control of the book trade and to monopolize its operations in London and, to a lesser extent, at the two university presses of Oxford and Cambridge. Elizabeth’s Injunction (1559) clarifying the licensers of publications (the monarch, the Privy Council, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge) also aimed to stem ‘a great abuse in the printers of bokes ... whereby ariseth great dysorderly publicatyon of unfrutefull, vayne and infamous bokes and papers.’7 Printing and bookselling were monitored activities throughout the early modern period. The policing was at its strongest during the heyday of Archbishop William Laud’s influence in the mid-1630s. A Star Chamber decree in 1637 required that all books bear the name of the printer, publisher, and author, with penalties for non-compliance including forfeiture, fines, imprisonment, and corporal punishment. Although the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641 produced a sudden freedom from restrictions, the reaction within two years, with the Order of the Lords and Commons in 1643, inaugurated more severity. The order identified nine ‘classes’ of writing – from divinity, physic, and heraldry to parliamentary papers and, as a single category, philosophy, history, poetry, morality, and art – each with separate examiners and correctors.8 Sellers as well as buyers and collectors of books were affected by new ordinances. As Royalist property – libraries in particular – was being sequestered, an ordinance in 1643 declared that these books were not to be sold, but an account of them was to be made to Roundhead officials. All news sheets had to be licensed by the Clerk of Parliament or the Secretary of the Army. By 1647 the penalties for offenders included fines and imprisonment along with the destruction of the press, while offending pedlars lost their stock and were ‘whipped as common rogue[s].’9 In this monitored realm of orders and decrees, wives and widows from the middle ranks established positions for themselves vital to the circulation and development of print culture. 245

APPENDIX B

Chronologies Compiled with the assistance of Dr Maureen King

Early Modern English Women Writers 1522

Margaret Beaufort Tudor Tr. The mirroure of golde

1524

Margaret (More) Roper (1505–44) Tr. A devout treatise upon the Pater noster

1544

Elizabeth Tudor (1533–1603) Tr. Le miroir de l’ame pecheresse

1545

Queen Kateryn Parr (1512–48) Prayers or Meditacions

1547

Anne Askew (Kyme) (1520–46) The first examinacyon and The Lattre Examinacyon of Anne Askewe Queen Kateryn Parr The lamentacion of a sinner

1548

Elizabeth Tudor Tr. The Godly Medytacyon of the christen Sowle

1550

Ann, Margaret, and Jane Seymour Hecatodistichon

1550? Lady Anne (Cooke) Bacon (1528–1610) Tr. Certayne sermons and Fourteene Sermons of Barnardine of Ochyne

246

Appendix B 1553

Lady Jane Lumley Tr. The Tragedie of Iphigeneia (MS)

1560

Anne (Vaughan) Lock (Prowse) (b. 1530) Tr. Sermons of John Calvin

1564

Lady Anne (Cooke) Bacon Tr. An apologie

1567? Isabella Whitney The Copy of a letter 1573

Isabella Whitney A Sweet Nosegay, or pleasant Posye

1574

Elizabeth Tyrwhit (d. 1578) Praiers

1578

Margaret Tyler Tr. The Mirrour of Princely Deedes

1582

Thomas Bentley The Monument of Matrones Lady Frances Abergavenny Praiers (Lamps II and V in Bentley)

1584

Anne Wheathill A handfull of holesome (though homelie) hearbs

1589

Jane Anger Jane Anger her Protection for Women Anne Dowriche The Frenche Historie

1590

Anne (Vaughan) (Lock) Prowse Tr. Of the markes of the children of God

1592

Mary (Sidney) Herbert (1561–1621) Tr. A Discourse of Life and Death and Antonius, a Tragedie

247

Appendix B 1590s Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke The Sidney Psalter 1599

Lady Margaret (Dakins) (Devereux) (Sidney) Hoby (1571–1633) Diary 1599–1605 [published 1930] Esther Inglis (1571–1624) ‘Les Proverbes de Salomon’ (MS Bodl. 990) ‘Le Livre des Pseaumes’ (MS Christ Church 180)

1602

Elizabeth Weston (1582–1612) Poemata

1603

Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) Intermittent diaries 1603–76 Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross Ane godlie Dreame

1604

Elizabeth Grymeston (ca. 1563–1602/3) Miscelanea

1605

Elizabeth (Cooke) Russell (1528–1609) Tr. A Way of Reconciliation

1608

Elizabeth Weston Parthenicon

1611

Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645) Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

1613

Elizabeth Cary (ca. 1585–1639) The tragedie of Mariam

1616

Bathsua Reginald (1600–ca. 1675) Musa Virginea Dorothy Leigh The Mothers Blessing

1617

248

‘Constantia Munda’ The Worming of a mad Dogge

Appendix B ‘Ester Sowernam.’ Ester hath hang’d Haman Rachel Speght (ca. 1598–1630) A Mouzell for Melastomus 1617? Grace Mildmay (1552–1620) Journal 1621

Rachel Speght Mortalities Memorandum, With a Dreame Prefixed Lady Mary (Sidney) Wroth (1587?–1651/3) The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania

1622

Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln (ca. 1574–1630) The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie

1624

Elizabeth Jocelin (ca. 1595–1622) The Mothers Legacie to her unborn Childe

1625

Eleanor (Audeley) (Touchet) Davies (Douglas) (1590–1652) A Warning to the Dragon and All His Angels Lady Brilliana Harley (ca. 1600–43) MS Letters 1625–1643 [unpublished]

1627? Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland? The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II [published 1680] 1629

Helen Livingston, Countess of Linlithgow The Confession and Conversion

1630

Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland Tr. The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron Diana Primrose A Chaine of Pearle

1632

Alexia Gray Tr. The Rule of the most Blissed Father Saint Benedict

249

Appendix B 1633

Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas All the Kings of the earth shall prayse thee, O Lord and two other tracts

1634

Jane Owen An Antidote Against Purgatory Alice Sutcliffe Meditations of Mans Mortalitie, 2nd ed

1637

Mary Fage Fames Roule

1639

Susan Du Verger Tr. Admirable events

1640

Judith Man Tr. An Epitome of the History of Faire Argenis and Polyarchus ‘Mary Tattlewell and Joan Hit-him-home’ The women’s sharpe revenge

1641

Katherine Chidley The [J]ustification of the Independant Churches of Christ Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas The Lady Eleanor, Her Appeale

1642

Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas Samson’s Legacie Elizabeth of Bohemia (1596–1662) Declaration and Petition of the Palsgrave and the Queene his mother to Parliament The Humble Petition of many hundreds of distressed Women The Mid-wives Just Petition

1643

Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas Amend, Amend and The Star to the Wise The Lady Falkland: Her Life [MS biography, first published 1861]

1644

250

Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas Apocalypsis Jesu Christi and six other tracts

Appendix B 1645

Katherine Chidley Good Counsell and A New-Yeares Gift, or A Brief Exhortation to Mr. Thomas Edwards Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas For Whitsontyds last feast and four other tracts Elizabeth Richardson (1576–1651) A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters Lady Isabella Twysden (1605–57) Diary 1645–1651 [unpublished]

1646

Dorothy Burch A Catechisme Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas The Revelation Interpreted and five other tracts Mary Cary (Rande) (ca. 1621–53) The Glorious Excellencie of the Spirit of Adoption Elizabeth Warren The Old and Good Way Vindicated

1647

Elizabeth Avery Scripture-Prophecies Opened Mary Cary (Rande) A Word in Season to the Kingdom of England Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas The Excommunication and The Mystery of General Redemption Mary Overton To the Right Honourable, the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses Mary Pope A Treatise of Magistracy Elizabeth Warren Spiritual Thrift

251

Appendix B 1647? Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas Ezekiel the Prophet Explained as follows 1648

Mary Cary (Rande) The Resurrection of Witnesses Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas Reader, the heavy hour at hand and five other tracts Alice Rolph To the chosen and betrusted Knights, Citizens and Burgesses

1649

Johanna Cartwright The Petition of the Jewes Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas The Bill of Excommunication and eleven other tracts Elizabeth Poole An Alarum of War and A Prophecie touching the death of King Charles Mary Pope Behold Here is a Word Anne Skelton Comforts Against the Fear of Death The humble Petition of divers wel-affected Women Inhabiting the Cities of London, Westminster To the Supreme Authority of England the Commons Assembled in Parliament [Leveller petition signed by 10,000 women] Elizabeth Warren A warning-peece from heaven

1650

Anne (Dudley) Bradstreet (1612–72) The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America Frances Cooke Mris. Cookes Meditations Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas The Appearance or Presence of the Son of Man and three other tracts

252

Appendix B Anne Smyth The Case of Anne Smyth 1650? Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas The Lady Eleanor Douglas, Dowager, her Jubiles plea 1651

Mary Cary (Rande) Little Horns Doom and Downfall A new and more Exact Mappe or Description of New Jerusalems Glory Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas The benediction. From the A:lmighty O:mnipotent and seven other tracts Mary (Stone) Love Love’s name Lives Anna Weamys A continuation of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia The Womens Petition to the right Honourable Lord General Cromwell

1652

Mary Fisher Bayly, Jane Holmes, and Elizabeth Hooten (1600?–1670). False Prophets and their False Preachers Described Lady Eleanor (Davies) Douglas Bethlehem Signifying the House of Bread: or War and one other tract Eliza’s Babes: or, the Virgins-Offering Lady Dorothy (Osborne) Temple (1627–95) Letters 1652–4 [published 1928]

1653

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73) Philosophical Fancies and Poems and Fancies Mary Cary (Rande) Twelve New Proposals An Collins Divine songs and meditacions Elizabeth Talbot Grey, Countess of Kent A Choice Manuall

253

Appendix B The Humble Petition of divers afflicted Women, in behalf of M: John Lilburn Jane Turner Choice Experiences of the Kind Dealings of God 1654

Mary Blaithwaite The complaint of Mary Blaithwaite Widdow Elinor Channel A Message from God The Ladies Companion Margaret Somerset, Countess of Worcester To the Parliament of the Commonwealth Katharine Stone To the High Court of Parliament Anna Trapnel Report and plea, The Cry of a Stone, A Legacy for Saints, and Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall

1655

Anne (Newby) (Camm) Audland (1627–1705) A True Declaration of the suffering of the Innocent Margaret Beck The Reward of Oppression, Tyranny and Injustice [H]ester Biddle (ca.1629–96) Wo to thee city of Oxford and Wo to thee town of Cambridge Judith Boulbie (d. 1706) A Testimony for Truth against all Hireling-Priests and Deceivers Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle The Philosophical and Physical Opinions and The Worlds Olio Priscilla Cotton (d. 1664) To the Priests and People of England

254

Appendix B Margaret (Askew) Fell (Fox) (1614–1702) False Prophets, Anticrists, Deceivers Martha (Calvert) Simmonds (d. 1665) A Lamentation for the lost Sheep of the house of Israel and one other tract 1656

Susanna Bateman I matter not how I appear to Man Bourgeois, Louise ‘Advice to her daughter.’ In The Compleat Midwifes Practice Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle Natures Pictures drawn by Fancies Pencil Margaret (Askew) Fell (Fox) For Manasseth Ben Israel and two other tracts Ann Gargill A Brief Discovery of that Which is called the Popish Religion Margaret Killin (d. 1672) A Warning from the Lord to the Teachers and People of Plymouth Elizabeth Major Honey on the Rod Elizabeth (Carey) Mordaunt, Viscountess of County Down Diary 1656–78 [first published 1856] Martha (Calvert) Simmonds O England; thy time is come Sarah Wight (b. 1632) A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter to a friend

1657

Mary Howgill A Remarkable Letter to Oliver Cromwel Elizabeth Moore Evidences for Heaven

255

Appendix B Gertrude More (1606?–1633) The Holy Practices of a Divine Lover 1658

Sarah Blackborow A Visit to the Spirit in Prison Sarah Jinner An almanack Gertrude More The Spiritual Exercises Anna Trapnel [A] Voice for the King of Saints and Nations Rebeckah (Booth) Travers (ca. 1609–88) Preface to A Message from the spirit of Truth By James Nayler Venn, Anne (d. bef. 1658) A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning

1659

[H]ester Biddle Oh! Wo, Wo, from the Lord. To the Inhabitants of the town of Dartmouth Priscilla Cotton A Briefe Description by way of Supposition Margaret (Askew) Fell (Fox) Concerning ministers made by the will of man and To the Generall Councill of Officers of the English Army Sarah Jinner The Woman’s Almanack Susanna Parr Susanna’s Apologie Against the Elders Rebeckah (Boothe) Travers For those that meet to worship at the Steeplehouse and two other tracts van Schurman, Anna Maria (1607–78) The Learned Maid; or Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar (trans. C. Barksdale)

256

Appendix B Mary Webb I being moved of the Lord, doth call unto you in Parliament Dorothy White (1630?–1685) A Diligent Search amongst Rulers, Priests, Professors and People 1660

H[ester] Biddle A Warning From the Lord God of Life and Power Sarah Blackborow The Just and Equal Ballance Discovered Anne Clayton A Letter to the King Margaret (Askew) Fell (Fox) The Citie of London Reproved for its Abominations and three other tracts Elizabeth Fletcher A few words in season to all the Inhabitants of the Earth Rachel Jevon Carmen Regiae majestati Caroli II and Exultationis Carmen Sarah Jinner An almanack Dorothy White Unto all Gods Host, in England and A Visitation of Heavenly Love

Continental Women Writers 1510

Lea Raskai (fl. 1510–25) Transcription of Book of Examples

1510? Lea Raskai Transcription of the Legend of Blessed Margaret 1514

Lea Raskai Transcription of the Cornides Index [1514–19]

1517

Lea Raskai Transcription of the Legend of Saint Dominique

257

Appendix B 1522

Lea Raskai Transcription of the Horvat Codex

1524

Caritas Pickhemier (1467–1532) Denkwurdigkeiten [memoirs 1524–8; first published 1852]

1531

Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse

1532

Jeanne Flore Contes amoureux

1535

Sister Jeanne de Jussie Le levain du calvinisme

1536

Marie Dentière (fl. 1540) La guerre et delivrance de la ville de Genesve

1538

Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547) Rime Helisenne de Crenne (Marguerite Briet) (fl. 1525) Les Angoysses douloureuses Marie Dentière Epistre très utile

1539

Helisenne de Crenne Les epistres Familières & invectives

1540

Helisenne de Crenne Le Songe

1541

Helisenne de Crenne Tr., Les quatre premiers livres des Eneydes Pernette Du Guillet (1520–45) 2 Poems

1543

258

Marguerite de Navarre La fable du faulx cuyder

Appendix B 1545

Pernette Du Guillet Les Rymes

1547

Marguerite de Navarre Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses

1552

Marguerite de Navarre Le Miroir de Jesus-Christ crucifié

1554

Gaspara Stampa (ca. 1523–54) Rime

1555

Louise Labé (1526–66) OEuvres

1559

Marguerite de Navarre L’Heptameron Rime diverse [anthology of female Italian poets]

1562

Anne de Marquets (d. 1588) Sonets, prieres et devises St Teresa of Avila (1515–82) The Book of Life [published 1588]

1564

St Teresa of Avila The Way of Perfection [published 1583]

1570

Olimpia Morata Divinae orationes

1571

Georgette de Montenay (b. 1540) Emblemes

1573

Anne and Catherine (1554–1631) de Parthenay Judith et Holopherne Marie de Romieu Instruction pour les jeunes dames St Teresa of Avila Book of the Foundations

259

Appendix B 1575

Veronica Franco Terze rime

1577

St Teresa of Avila The Interior Castle

1578

Madeleine (ca. 1520–87) and Catherine des Roches (1542–87) Les Oeuvres

1580

Veronica Franco Lettere familiari

1581

Moderata Fonte (pseud. of Modesta Pozzo) (1555–92) Le feste Marie de Romieu Que l’excellence de la femme surpasse celle de l’homme

1582

Catherine des Roche La Puce (un receuil de divers poeme Grecs, Latins et François) Moderata Fonte La Passione di Cristo

1587

Katharina Boudewijns Prieelken der Gheestelijcken Wellusten

1591

Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645?) Des Saines Affections

1594

Marie le Jars de Gournay Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne par sa fille d’alliance

1595

Marie le Jars de Gournay Preface to Les Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne Nicole Estienne Liebaut Les Miseres de la femme mariée

1597

260

Dames des Roche Instruction pour les jeunes dames

Appendix B Anne Parent (b. 1585) Oracles sententieux des mages, par A.P., agée de douze ans 1600

Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) Le nobilta et l’eccellenza delle donne Anne Parent De animalium natura, livre traduict du grec en latin et vers françois par A. P., agée de 14 ans Moderata Fonte Il merito delle donne

1601

Anne Parent Discours sur le mariage du Roy

1602

Marie de Brabant, Dame de Blacy Annonces de l’esprit et de l’ame fidele Jacqueline de Miremont Apologie pour les dames

1604

Charlotte de Brachart Harengue aux hommes qui veulent défendre la science aux femmes Catherin le Doulx (1540–1625?) Tobie, comedie

1605

Anne de Marquets Sonets spirituels

1610

Marie le Jars de Gournay Adieu de l’Ame du Roy de France

1622

Marie le Jars de Gournay Egalité des hommes et des femmes

1624

Charlotte Arbaleste (de Mornay) (d. 1606) Memoires de messire Philippe de Mornay

1626

Marie le Jars de Gournay Le Grief des dames

261

Appendix B 1635

Ana Caro Mallen de Soto El conde Partinuples

1636

Cassandra Fedele Epistolae et orationes

1637

Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor (ca. 1590–1661) Novelas amorosas y ejemplares

1638

Anna Maria van Schurman of Utrecht (1607–78) Amica dissertatio

1639

Anna Maria van Schurman of Utrecht Paelsteen van den tijt onzes levens

1640

Laura Cereta Clarissimae epistolae

1641

Marie Crous Abbrege pour tirer la solution de toutes propositions d’Aritmetique Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) Ibrahim

1642

Suzanne de Nerveze Oeuvres spirituelles et morales Madeleine de Scudéry Femmes illustres

1643

Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–52) Paradiso monacale

1644

Suzanne de Nerveze Les Genereux Mouvements Arcangela Tarabotti L’Antisatira

1648

262

Anna Maria van Schurman of Utrecht Opuscula

Appendix B 1649

Madeleine de Scudery Artamene ou le grand Cyrus [8 vols. 1649–53]

1650

Alberte Barbe d’Ernecourt, Dame de Saint-Balmon (1608–60) Les Jumeaux Martyrs Anna Owena Hoyers (1584–1655) Poemata Arcangela Tarabotti Lettere familiari e di complimento

1651

Marthe Cosnard Preface to Les chastes martirs Arcangela Tarabotti Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini

1652

Charlotte Saumaise de Chazan, Comtesse de Bregy La sphere de la lune

1654

Madeleine de Scudéry Clelie, Histoire romaine [10 vols. 1654–60] Charlotte Saumaise de Chazan, Comptesse de Bregy La reflexion de la lune sur les hommes Arcangela Tarabotti La semplicita ingannata [Simplicity Betrayed]

1655

Francoise Pascal (b. 1632) Agathonphile

1657

Francoise Pascal L’Amoureuse Vaine et Ridicule, L’amoureux Extravagant, et Endymion Jacqueline Pascal, Soeur Sainte-Euphémie Reglement pour les enfants Anne (Ninon) de Lenclos (1623–1704) La Coquette vengée

263

Appendix B 1660

Charlotte de Flecelles, Countess de Bregy The Royal Standard of King Charles II

English and Continental History 1485

Battle of Bosworth Field; Henry Tudor slays Richard III

1487

Bartholomew Diaz rounds Cape of Good Hope

1490

Aldine Press (of Aldus Manutius) established in Venice

1492

Spanish capture Granada & expel Jews from Spain; Columbus discovers America

1496

Cabot sets out on voyage of exploration; forced conversion of Jews in Portugal

1498

Savonarola executed; Vasco da Gama sails to India

1500

Pedro Alvares Cabral discovers Brazil

1501

Prince Arthur m. Catherine of Aragon

1505

refoundation of God’s House as Christ’s College, Cambridge by Margaret Beaufort

1506

massacre of Jews in Lisbon

1509

accession of Henry VIII; Henry VIII m. Catherine of Aragon

1513

English defeat Scottish at Flodden Field; Balboa reaches Pacific

1514

Ponce de Leon discovers Florida

1515

French victory over Swiss & papal armies at Battle of Marignano

1517

Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses

1518

Royal College of Physicians founded in London

1520

meeting of Henry VIII & Francis I at Field of the Cloth of Gold at Guines, France

264

Appendix B 1521

burning of Luther’s writings in St Paul’s churchyard; Henry VIII made Defender of the Faith

1525

Tyndale’s English Bible printed in Cologne

1526

copies of Tyndale’s English Bible seized in London and burnt

1529

Thomas More Lord Chancellor of England

1530

Confession of Augsburg

1533

Henry VIII m. Anne Boleyn; Queen Elizabeth I b

1534

Acts of Succession & Supremacy in England; Day of the Placards in France (tracts against Catholic Church); Ignatius Loyola founds Society of Jesus; Jacques Cartier sails up St Lawrence River

1535

execution of Sir Thomas More; Coverdale’s Bible

1536

execution of Anne Boleyn; Act of Succession declares Mary & Elizabeth illegitimate; Pilgrimage of Grace (demanding repeal of Act of Dissolution of monasteries)

1537

Edward VI b.; Jane Seymour d

1539

Act of Six Articles in England

1543

Henry VIII m. Kateryn Parr; Mary crowned Queen of Scots; Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus published

1545

opening of Council of Trent

1546

Anne Askew burnt at Smithfield for heresy

1547

accession of Edward VI; Edward Seymour, Lord Protector; Somerset’s army defeats Scottish at Battle of Pinkie

1548

Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises published

1549

first Book of Common Prayer

1551

Geneva Bible published

265

Appendix B 1553

proclamation of Lady Jane Grey as Queen; accession of Mary I

1554

execution of Jane Grey; Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion & execution

1555

Bishops Latimer & Ridley burned at the stake

1556

Cranmer burned at the stake; Stationers’ Company given printing monopoly in England

1558

accession of Queen Elizabeth I; John Knox’s First Blast published

1559

Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity renounce papal authority in England

1563

Thirty-Nine Articles; close of Council of Trent

1567

Lord Darnley murdered; Mary Queen of Scots m. James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell; Mary imprisoned for complicity in Darnley’s murder; abdicates Scottish throne; Prince James proclaimed King James VI

1570

Pope excommunicates Elizabeth I

1571

Ridolfi Plot against Elizabeth I; Turkish fleet defeated at Lepanto by Don Juan of Austria

1572

St Bartholomew Day Massacre in Paris

1576

Peace of Monsieur (religious liberty to Huguenots)

1577

Sir Francis Drake begins circumnavigatory voyage

1582

Pope Gregory XIII institutes Gregorian calendar

1583

Throckmorton Plot to place Mary of Scotland on English throne; Galileo discovers principle of the pendulum

1584

Francis Throckmorton executed

1586

Sir Philip Sidney d. during battle at Zutphen

1587

Mary Queen of Scots executed; Ralegh sets out to establish New World colony

266

Appendix B 1588

English defeat the Spanish Armada; Marprelate tracts circulate in London; Vatican Library built

1594

execution of Queen Elizabeth’s physician Roderigo Lopez

1595

Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland; Drake and Hawkins sail for West Indies

1598

Henri IV issues Edict of Nantes (Huguenot civil and religious liberty)

1600

Giordano Bruno burned in Rome

1601

rebellion, trial, and execution of Earl of Essex

1602

Dutch East India Company established

1603

accession of James I; Samuel de Champlain in Canada

1604

Hampton Court Conference

1610

imprisonment of Arbella Stuart for marriage to William Seymour; Galileo constructs telescope

1611

Authorized Version of the Bible

1615

Earl & Countess of Somerset arrested and accused of Overbury’s murder; Galileo before Inquisition; Arbella Stuart d. in the Tower

1620

Battle of White Mountain (Frederick loses Palatinate and Bohemian throne and flees into exile in Holland); Pilgrim Fathers establish colony at Plymouth, New England

1624

Foundation by Captain Thomas Warner of first English colony in Caribbean at St Kitts

1625

accession of Charles I; Charles I m. Henrietta Maria of France

1629

Treaty of Suza (peace between England and France)

1630

Gustavus Adolphus invades Germany and Sweden enters Thirty Years’ War

1635

French Academy founded

267

Appendix B 1640

dissolution of Charles I’s Short Parliament; Long Parliament convenes

1641

Earl of Strafford executed for treason; Root and Branch Bill (proposing abolition of bishops); act abolishing Star Chamber; Grand Remonstrance (statement of grievances of parliament) passed in the Commons; outbreak of rebellion in Ireland

1642

Civil War begins in England

1644

Scottish & Parliamentary forces defeat Royalist armies at Marston Moor

1645

Archbishop Laud executed; ordinance for New Model Army enacted; Parliamentary victories at Naseby and Langport

1646

surrender of Oxford, Royalist HQ during the war, marks end of Civil War

1647

Charles I seized by New Model Army soldiers

1648

Parliament renounces allegiance to the King; New Model Army’s second occupation of London; Pride’s Purge of Parliament; Peace of Westphalia ends Thirty Years’ War

1649

trial and execution of Charles I; Rump Parliament declares England a republic (the Commonwealth)

1650

victory of Cromwell’s army against Scots at Dunbar

1651

Cromwell defeats Charles II at Worcester

1653

Cromwell forcibly dissolves Rump Parliament; opening of Barebones Parliament; Cromwell installed as Lord Protector

1654

Treaty of Westminster ends Anglo-Dutch war; beginning of first Protectorate Parliament; MPs forced to sign ‘Recognition’; abdication of Christina of Sweden and succession of Charles X

1658

Cromwell dissolves second Protectorate Parliament; Anglo-French victory over Spain at Dunes; death of Oliver Cromwell and succession of Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector

1659

Treaty of Pyrenees ends Franco-Spanish war

268

Appendix B 1660

General George Monck and English army in Scotland declare for Rump Parliament (what remained of Long Parliament from 1640) and march to London; Rump Parliament declares itself dissolved and orders new elections; Charles II issues Declaration of Breda; meeting of Convention Parliament: resolves in favour of government by king, Lords, and Commons; return and restoration of Charles II

English and Continental Publications 1500

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Adages

1508

Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo Amadis de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul)

1509

Desiderius Erasmus Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly)

1513

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) The Prince

c.1513–18 Sir Thomas More History of Richard III (English & Latin versions) 1516

Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) Orlando Furioso Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) Utopia (Latin)

1522

Desiderius Erasmus Colloquies

1528

Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier)

1531

Sir Thomas Elyot (ca. 1490–1546) The Boke of The Governour

1533

Sir Thomas More Apology

269

Appendix B 1535

François Rabelais (1494–1553) Gargantua and Pantagruel Part I

1539

The Great Bible

1550

Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) Odes

1557

Richard Tottel and Nicholas Grimald, eds Songs and Sonnets

1559

Jorge de Montemayor La Diana

1563

John Foxe (1516–87) Actes and Monuments

1570

Roger Ascham (1515–68) The Scholemaster

1574

Torquato Tasso (1544–95) Gerusalemme liberata

1578

John Lyly (ca. 1554–1606) Euphues

1579

Edmund Spenser (1552–99) The Shepheardes Calendar

1580

Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) Essais I–II

?1587 Thomas Kyd (1558–94) The Spanish Tragedy Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) 1 Tamburlaine ?1588 Christopher Marlowe 2 Tamburlaine 1589

270

George Puttenham The Art of English Poesy

Appendix B ?1589 Christopher Marlowe The Jew of Malta 1590

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queen I–III

1591

Sir John Harington (1561–1612) Tr. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso Edmund Spenser Complaints and Daphnaida

?1592 Christopher Marlowe Dr Faustus and Edward II 1593

Christopher Marlowe Hero and Leander

1594

William Shakespeare Venus and Adonis

1594

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece

1595

Edmund Spenser Amoretti, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, and Epithalamion

1596

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene IV–VI (second printing of I–III), Fowre Hymnes, and Prothalamion

1597

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) Essays

1598

George Chapman (ca. 1559–1634) Seaven Bookes of the Iliades Ben Jonson (1573–1637) Every Man in His Humour

1599

Thomas Dekker (b. ca. 1572) The Shoemaker’s Holiday

271

Appendix B Ben Jonson Every Man Out of His Humour John Marston (1576–) Antonio and Mellida William Shakespeare Henry V and Julius Caesar 1600

John Marston Antonio’s Revenge

1601

Ben Jonson Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster

1603

Thomas Heywood (ca. 1570–ca. 1631) A Woman Killed With Kindness

1604

George Chapman Bussy D’Ambois Samuel Daniel Philotas John Marston The Malcontent

1605

Francis Bacon Advancement of Learning Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Don Quixote George Chapman, Ben Jonson, & John Marston Eastward Ho!

1606

Ben Jonson Volpone

1607

Francis Beaumont (ca. 1584–1616) The Knight of the Burning Pestle

272

Appendix B Cyril Tourneur (ca. 1575–1626) The Revenger’s Tragedy 1608

George Chapman Charles Duke of Byron

1609

Ben Jonson Epicoene William Shakespeare Sonnets

1610

Ben Jonson The Alchemist

1611

Authorized Version of the Bible Ben Jonson Catiline

1612

John Webster The White Devil

1613

William Shakespeare Henry VIII

1614

Ben Jonson Bartholomew Fair John Marston The Duchess of Malfi

1616

Ben Jonson The Devil is an Ass

1622

Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) & William Rowley The Changeling

1623

William Shakespeare First Folio

1626

Ben Jonson The Staple of News

273

Appendix B Thomas Middleton A Game at Chess 1637

John Milton (1608–74) A Mask [Comus]

1638

John Milton Lycidas

1644

John Milton Areopagitica

1645

John Milton Poems

1646

Henry Vaughan (1622–95) Poems

1648

Robert Herrick (1591–1674) Hesperides

1650

Henry Vaughan Silex Scintillans

1655

Andrew Marvell (1621–78) The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.

1660

John Dryden (1631–1700) Astraea Redux

274

Notes

Chapter One: Studying Early Modern Women Writers 1 Martin, ed., Women Writers in Renaissance England, 9. Woods and Hannay, eds., Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 20. 2 Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in early modern England, 22, 164. 3 Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 49, 48. 4 Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2: 691. 5 Erler, ‘Devotional Literature,’ 498. 6 Richard Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children, ed. Barker, xiii; Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World, 166. 7 Preface, ELR 25.3 (1995): 287; Jardine, ‘Strains of Renaissance Reading,’ 294; Bevington, ‘Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity,’ 318. 8 LaCapra, ‘From What Subject-Position(s) Should One Address the Politics of Research?,’ 62; History and Reading, 65, 67. 9 Howard, ‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,’ 23. 10 Hamilton, ‘The Renaissance of the Study of the English Literary Renaissance,’ 380. 11 Baldwin, A Mirrour for Magistrates, ed. Campbell, 68. 12 Bentley, The Monument of Matrones, B1. 13 Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, 12–13. For another view of Ballard, highlighting his omissions and errors, see Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 66–103. 14 Goulianos, ed., By a Woman Writt, xii. 15 Travitsky, ed., The Paradise of Women, xx, xxi. 16 Greer, et al., eds., Kissing the Rod, 1. 17 Graham, et al., eds., Her Own Life, 18, 21. 18 Preface by the General Editors, Travitsky and Cullen, The Early Modern Englishwoman, vii.

275

Notes to pages 10–17 19 Murray, The Ideal of the Court Lady, 38–9. Camden, The Elizabethan Woman, 270. Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 280. Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, 1, 78. 20 Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?,’ 156. 21 Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word, 14. Haselkorn and Travitsky, eds., The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, 4. Brant and Purkiss, eds., Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, 9. Grundy and Wiseman, eds., Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740, 14. Cerasno and Wynne-Davies, eds., Gloriana’s Face, 18. Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, 4. Frye and Robertson, eds., Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens, vii. Burke et al., eds., Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, xviii. 22 Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’ 93. 23 Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, 309. 24 Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 65. Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, xx. Kim Hall, Things of Darkness, 177. Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State, 14. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 72. James, Kateryn Parr, vii. Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 266. Moore, Desiring Voices, 11. 25 Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 14. Chapter Two: Women in Early Modern England 1 2 3 4

MacCulloch, Reformation, xv. Franco, Terze Rime (Venice, 1575) in Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 192. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 74. Meale and Boffey, ‘Gentlewomen’s Reading,’ The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3: 526. Meale and Boffey cite Fishmonger’s code of conduct from Bodleian, MS. Lyell 27, fol. 150v. Williams, ‘A Moon to Their Sun,’ 89. The epitaph is cited by Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, 26. 5 Reproduced in Parker, The Subversive Stitch, plate following p. 76. See also Neale, Queen Elizabeth, 12, and Elizabeth’s Glass, ed. Schell. The pattern is also reproduced as the cover design for the Columbia University Press Morningside edition (1989) of Betty Travitsky’s anthology, The Paradise of Women. 6 Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots, 412–14; Fraser cites Nicholas White’s observations of the royal prisoner (414), refers to the comments of William Drummond of Hawthornden to Ben Jonson that the device is actually addressed to Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, with a ‘more philo-progenitive meaning’ and suggests that Mary’s prolonged imprisonment, during which embroidery became so therapeutic, left her ‘in some ways frozen in curiously youthful and even naive attitudes’ (413). For an examination of the appeal of Mary’s embroidery to ‘unmarried, Protestant, English, and middle class’ Victorian women, as in Agnes Strickland’s Life of Mary Queen of Scots (1844), see Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots,

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Notes to pages 17–25

7 8

9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

181–6; Lewis concludes, ‘It is the record of female witness to Mary, often creative, often silent, that retrieves her as a mended whole into the Victorian present’ (185). The virescit vulnere virtus panel is reproduced in Parker, The Subversive Stitch, plate following p. 76. Woodbridge, ‘Patchwork’; Frye, ‘Sewing Connections.’ Hutchinson, Of the Nobilitie and excellencye of woman kynde, trans. Clapham; Tasso, The Housholders Philosophie, trans. Kyd. Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. Keeble, 15. Hufton, ‘Women, Work, and Family,’ 23. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 92; Mendelson and Crawford cite A New Discourse of Trade, 91, and the Statute of Artificers, 96. Marcus, ‘Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,’ 42–3. See also her ‘Cyberspace Renaissance.’ Finke, Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England, 153. At the Roundtable held in Chicago (30 March 2001), Randolph Starn’s paper, ‘The Early Modern Muddle’ was read by the chair, Martin Elsky. Richard Helgerson spoke on ‘ “Renaissance,” “Early Modern,” and Other Tendentious Titles.’ Richard Strier was the respondent. King, ‘Women’s Voices, 21. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, 191. On the gendering of speech and silence, see chapter 2, ‘Silence and Gender,’ in Luckyj, ‘A Moving Rhetoricke.’ Ladurie, The Mind and Method of the Historian, 24. Spufford, ‘First Steps in Literacy,’ 409. See also Charlton and Spufford, ‘Literacy, Society and Education,’ 15–54. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 53, 58. Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,’ 130; Fleming, ‘Dictionary English and the Female Tongue,’ 299. Cressy, ‘Literacy in Pre-Industrial England,’ 236. Meale and Boffey, ‘Gentlewomen’s Reading,’ 527, 531. Erler, ‘Devotional Literature,’ 506. Hull, Women According to Men, 24–5. See also Crawford, ‘Provisional Checklist of Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700,’ 211–82; Hosington, ‘Voice Unfettered: Recent Writings on and by Early Modern Englishwomen,’ 436–48; Schwoerer, ‘Women’s Public Political Voice in England.’ Grundy and Wiseman, eds., ‘Introduction,’ Women, Writing, History 1640–1740, 14. Woodmansee, ‘On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,’ in Woodmansee and Jaszi, eds., The Construction of Authorship, 15. Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, 20; ‘The Social Framework of the Information Society,’ The Microelectronics Revolution, ed. Tom Forester, 521. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?,’ in The Foucault Reader, 120; ‘The Functions of Literature,’ in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 307–8. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2: 689. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print, 6, 9, 11. Tribble, Margins and Marginality, 2. Slights, Managing Readers, 22. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 1–21, and ‘Speech-Manuscript-

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Notes to pages 25–31

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48

Print,’ 94, 108. Orgel, ‘What Is an Editor?,’ 29, 24; ‘The Authentic Shakespeare,’ 10. See Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 57. Roberts, ‘Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England,’ 66, 70. Victoria Burke, ‘Women and Early Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Culture,’ 147. Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo, 7–8; ‘Hamlet’s Hand,’ 310. Masten, Textual Intercourse, 20. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 5. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 165. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 241–4. Jones, The Currency of Eros, 14. King, ‘Women’s Voices,’ 28. Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More, 42. Prescott, ‘Divided State,’ 451; in this witty utopian dialogue, Prescott laments the overuse of such terms as ‘hegemony,’ ‘demonized,’ ‘patriarchy,’ and ‘marginalized,’ and conveys the ‘worried bafflement’ of the students in her graduate seminar when she had called Thomas More a humanist. Daniell, Introduction, Tyndale’s New Testament, xxix. More, The Correspondence, 105. McCutcheon, ‘The Education of Thomas More’s Daughters,’ 198. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 56. More, Selected Letters, letter 128, 155. Grundy, ‘Women’s History? Writings by English Nuns,’ 128. More, Latin Poems, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 3: 294–7. See also Nelson, ‘Thomas More, Grammarian and Orator.’ Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, 115; McCutcheon, ‘The Education of Thomas More’s Daughters,’ 195. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman, 158. Quoted by Watson, Vives: On Education, xxiii. Utley, The Crooked Rib, 69. Adams, The Better Part of Valor, 226. Kaufman, ‘Juan Luis Vives on the Education of Women,’ 894, 891. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman, 177. Wayne, ‘Some Sad Sentence,’ 20, 27. Jordan, ‘Feminism and the Humanists,’ 201. Tilney, The Flower of Friendship, ed. Wayne, lines 1279–81, 1263–7. See commentary, 169, 61. Wayne cites Coverdale’s translation of Bullinger (chap. 24, sig. K4). Hutson, The Userer’s Daughter, 22; Hutson disagrees with the schematization and symmetry of Kathleen Davies’s comments about the division of labour in the conjugal household as ‘very nearly meaningless’ (21). See Davies, ‘The Sacred Condition of Equality.’ Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, 85, 152. Farlie, Lychnocausia, no. 50. See also Huston Diehl, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books 1500–1700, 45.

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Notes to pages 31–40 49 Knapp, ‘“Is it appropriate for a man to fear his wife?,”’ 393–4. 50 Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, 1, 23, 95. 51 Salter, A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie, 19. W.P., The necessarie, fit and convenient education of a gentlewoman), D6. 52 Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (1581), 170, 186, 177. 53 Markham, The English Housewife, 7. 54 Billingsley, The Pens Excellencie or the Secretaries Delight, B4v. 55 Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, 224. 56 Udall, ‘To the most vertuous Ladie and most gracious Quene Katherine,’ in Preface to the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the gospell of Sainct John, fol. cccxcix. 57 Ballard, Memoirs, 180; Ballard cites Erasmus, Ep. 31, Lib. 19: ‘Scena rerum humanarum invertitur ... Faeminae libris indulgent.’ 58 See Camden, The Elizabethan Woman, 85–6, for a citation from an English translation of Agipppa’s The Commendation of Matrimony (1545). 59 ‘The New Mother,’ The Colloquies of Erasmus, 271. 60 As translated by Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 63. 61 Belsey, ‘Feminism and Beyond,’ 40. 62 The primary source of information about Mary Ward’s writing, especially the Ratio Instituti (1616), as translated from the Latin, the Verity speech, the Third Speech and the lemon juice correspondence, is Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward, 1: 375–85, 412–14; 2: 389–97. See also Gallagher, ‘Mary Ward’s “Jesuitresses” and the Construction of a Typological Community,’ 199–217. Latz, ‘Glow-Worm Light,’ 150–79. Norman, ‘A Woman for All Seasons: Mary Ward.’ Orchard, ed., Till God Will: Mary Ward Through Her Writing. Biography of van Schurman has been gleaned from Birch [later, PopeHennessy], Anna Van Schurman (1909); this study contains three self-portraits by van Schurman. Quotations from The Learned Maid; or Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar (1659), as translated from Latin by clergyman Clement Barksdale, are based on The Early Modern Englishwoman, Series II, vol. 5. See also MacCulloch, Reformation, 612, 687. 63 Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 880. 64 Shepherd, The Women’s Sharp Revenge, 29–51. The collection includes the responses of Ester Sowernam, Constantia Munda, Mary Tattle-well, and Joan Hit-him-home. See also Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, Woodbridge’s is the most comprehensive and zesty survey of the controversies. 65 Magnusson, ‘ “His Pen With My Hande,”’ 273. 66 In addition to the lively, humorous satire of The Batchelars Banquet ... Pleasantly discoursing the variable Humours of Women (1603), a translation from a French text attributed to Thomas Dekker, the first decade of James’s reign saw the appearance of I.G.’s An Apologie for Women-kinde (1605), Lodowick Lloyd’s The Choyce of Jewels (1607), William Heale’s An Apologie for Women (1608), and Barnabe Rich’s The Excellencie of Good Women (1613).

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Notes to pages 41–52 67 Johnson, A Crowne-Garland of Goulden Roses, sig. C4. 68 The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, ed. Lewalski, 1–41. Subsequent references are to this edition. 69 Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State, 87. 70 Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing, 3. Garber, Vested Interests, 26, 32. Acts of Apparel or Sumptuary Laws were passed during the reigns of Edward IV, Henry VIII, Philip and Mary, and on at least five dates during the reign of Elizabeth (1559, 1574, 1577, 1580, 1597). Regulating items of clothing according to class and gender, the Elizabethan legislation forbade the wearing of cloth of gold or silver and purple-coloured silk for any woman under the degree of a countess, satin and taffetas for women under the degree of baroness, velvet gowns and silk stockings for women under the degree of a knight’s wife, and damask and plain taffeta gowns for women under the degree of a gentleman’s wife. See ‘Sumptuary Laws,’ 247–57. 71 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, ed. Elizabeth Cook, ‘To the Comic Play-Readers, Venery and Laughter,’ lines 14–15; this edition reproduces the fronstispiece of the 1611 folio. Krantz, ‘The Sexual Identities of Moll Cutpurse,’ 16; Krantz also cites the condemnation of Moll’s on-stage appearance from the London Correction Book (16). Cerasno and Wynne-Davies reproduce the text of the Consistory Court of London, Correction Book, fols. 19–20, in Renaissance Drama By Women, 172. In Women in Early Modern England, Mendelson and Crawford include a rare print of Mary Frith and comment on its ‘male iconography’ (22). See also Rose, ‘Women in Men’s Clothing,’ 91 and Kim Walker, ‘New Prison.’ 72 Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 124; Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, 7–8; MacCulloch, Reformation, 616. Lewalski, ‘Literature and the Household,’ 603. 73 Travitsky, ‘Down-Home Bacon,’ 135–6. Travitsky proposes that Egerton’s attempts ‘to rationalize and maneuver within her subordinate state’ could be inadvertent. 74 Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage, 20; Drew-Bear quotes from Roger Edgeworth’s sermon exhorting ‘all women to beware of counterfeiting, adulterating or changing the fashion and form of God’s work’ (20). Lichtenstein, ‘Making up Representation,’ 77. Finke, ‘Painting Women,’ 359. Garner, ‘“Let Her Paint an Inch Thick.”’ Dolan, ‘Taking the Pencil Out of God’s Hand,’ 229–30. 75 Herbert, ‘Mrs. Herbert’s Kitchin Booke,’ ed. Charles, 169. About Magdalen Newport Herbert, the mother of the poet George, who wrote Latin and Greek verses in her memory, Charles notes: ‘Of the dozen of such household account books that she must have overseen as mistress of several households, the only one known to survive is that begun in London the day before Easter, 1601’ (164). Heldke, ‘Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice,’ in 203. Lawless, ‘Cooking, Community, Culture: A Reading of Like Water for Chocolate,’ 221.

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Notes to pages 52–65 76 Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State, 195, n. 7. See also Newman, ‘Renaissance Family Politics’ and Simonds, ‘The Marriage Topos in Cymbeline.’ 77 Travitsky, ‘Husband-Murder and Petty Treason in English Renaissance Tragedy,’ 173. Belsey, ‘Alice Arden’s Crime,’ 92. See also Attwell, ‘Property, Status, and the Subject in Middle-Class Tragedy.’ Hill, ‘Parody and History in Arden of Feversham (1592).’ 78 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 5; Staub, ‘“Matchlesse Monsters of the Female Sex,”’ 111. 79 Friedman, ‘Portrait of a Marriage,’ 550; Friedman introduces and transcribes BL Lansdowne 46, nos. 30–3. 80 Slater, ‘The Weightiest Business,’ 34. Mendelson, ‘Debate: The Weightiest Business,’ 129, 134. 81 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 15. 82 Dobbie, ‘An Attempt to Estimate the True Rate of Maternal Mortality,’ 80. Dobbie contests the figure of ten to fifteen deaths per thousand births, terming this estimate by Audrey Eccles ‘much too low as an estimate of total maternal mortality’; Dobbie cites Eccles, Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 20 (1977): 10. 83 The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. MacFarlane. 84 Percival Willoughby, Observations in Midwifery, edited from the original MS, by Henry Blenkinsop 1863, with a new introduction by John Thornton (East Ardsley, Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1972); this text is a complete reprint of Blenkinsop’s 1863 Shakespeare Printing Press edition. 85 Frances Abergavenny, ‘Another godlie and earnest praier to be said of everie Christian and faithfull woman, in the time of hir travell or child-birth’ and ‘Another praier and thanks-giving to be said of everie faithfull woman in childbed, after the time of hir deliverance,’ in Bentley, The Monument of Matrones, Fifth Lamp, 3: 106–7, 121–2. 86 Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men, 19. 87 Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World, 125, 126. 88 Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England,’ 51. Crawford cites N. Rowe’s English translation (1720) of C. Quillet’s Callipaedia, 63–4. 89 Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 167, 173. Chapter Three: The Genres of Early Modern Women’s Writing 1 Florio, trans., Montaigne’s Essayes (London, 1603), sig. A2r. Mary Ellen Lamb notes that ‘the representation of intellectual endeavors as masculine “births” possibly derived in part from Plato’s Symposium’; see Gender and Authorship, 241, n. 42. 2 Lamb, ‘The Cooke Sisters,’ in Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word, 116–17. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 43.

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Notes to pages 65–9 3 Steiner, After Babel, 47. Micheline White, ‘Renaissance Englishwomen and Religious Translations,’ 381, 376–7. 4 Matthiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art, 232; Clements, Tudor Translations, ix; Belloc, On Translation, 7. 5 Hunter, Psalms, 5. 6 Beaufort, trans., The Earliest English Translation of ... the De Imitatione Christi, ed. Ingram; all quotations from ‘the forthe boke’ will be based on this edition. 7 Dionysius Carthusianus, The mirroure of golde for the synfull soule ... now of late in to Englisshe by Margaret Countesse of Richemond and Derby (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1522). All quotations from The Mirroure of Golde will be based on this edition. 8 [Margaret Roper, trans.], A deuout treatise vpon the Pater noster/ made fyrst in latyn by the moost famous doctour mayster Erasmus Roterodamus/ and tourned into englishe by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of xix yere of age (London: Thomas Berthelet, ca. 1525), in Erasmus of Rotterdam: A Quincentennial Symposium, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (New York: Twayne, 1971). The edition includes the prefatory letter from Richard Hyrde, ‘Vnto the moost studyous and vertuous yonge mayde Fraunces S. sendeth gretynge and well to fare.’ All quotations from A deuout treatise will be based on this edition. 9 Elizabeth’s Glass, with ‘The Glass of the Sinful Soul’ (1544) by Elizabeth I and ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ & ‘Conclusion’ (1548) by John Bale, ed. Shell. Shell reproduces the 1545 manuscript; subsequent parenthetical references will include folio numbers from MS Cherry 36 and page numbers from Shell’s edition. 10 St. Thomas More’s De Tristitia Christi and Mary Basset’s Translation of the De Tristitia, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 14, parts I and II, ed. Miller. All quotations from More’s De Tristitia and Basset’s translation will be based on this edition. 11 See Simon, Of Virtue Rare, and Seward, The Wars of the Roses. 12 Leo Shirley-Price, trans., Introduction, The Imitation of Christ, 20–3. 13 Michael Iosephus Pohl, ed., Thomae Hemerken a Kempis De Imitatione Christi, vol. 2, in Opera Omnia, 91–138; quotations from à Kempis’s Latin will be based on this source. 14 Robertius Stephanius, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, Tomus II, 443; this dictionary defines gazophylacium as ‘arca sive quivis alius locus, in quo pretiosior supellex conservatur.’ 15 Laurie Finke draws a connection with the medieval mystic Gertrude the Great; see Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England, 149–50. 16 For the reproduced portrait of the More household, see Jonathan Goldberg’s comments on the Tudor representation of the family as a ‘diffuse, ... visual version of the commonwealth,’ in ‘Fatherly Authority,’ in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Ferguson, Quilligan, and Vickers, 6. The individual portrait of Margaret Roper and the 1525 woodcut are in Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word, 136–7;

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Notes to pages 69–72

17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

they are also in Reynolds, Margaret Roper Eldest Daughter of St. Thomas More, 38– 9. Letter 2212, Freiburg, 6 September 1529, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. Allen, 5: 274. See also ‘Correspondance entre Erasme et Margaret Roper.’ McCutcheon, ‘The Education of Thomas More’s Daughters,’ 200. Lost are her Latin and Greek verses, Latin speeches, imitation of Quintilian and treatise The Foure Laste Thynges, which her father considered equal to his own; her keen eye led to a correction in the text of Saint Cyprian, an emendation which the Louvain exile John Clement relayed to the commentator on Vincent de Lérins, John Coster, and for which Roper was credited by subsequent editors of Saint Cyprian. See Hallett, trans., The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More by Thomas Stapleton, 103–4. Among the remnants of letters are one to Erasmus, two to her father in the Tower and one of disputed authorship, the Alington letter, an account of a conversation with her imprisoned father written to her stepsister, Alice Alington. On the matter of Margaret’s writing the Alington letter, Walter M. Gordon favours neither side over the other, pointing to the facts that ‘there is no winning argument in this dialogue’; see ‘Tragic Perspectives in Thomas More’s Dialogue with Margaret in the Tower,’ 4. Elaine Beilin opts for Roper’s authorship as ‘more than likely,’ in Redeeming Eve, 25. Nancy E. Wright uses Foucauldian theory to illustrate how ‘Margaret’s words function as a homosocial bond between Thomas More and Henry VIII,’ in ‘The Name and the Signature of the Author of Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington,’ 257. Precatio Dominica Digesta in Septem Partes, Juxta Septem Dies, per Desiderium Erasmum Roterodamum, Opera Omnia, Tomus Quintus (Cura & impensis Petri Vander Aa, Cum speciali Privilegio Illustr. ac Praepotent Ordd. Holl. & West-Frisiae, 1704). All quotations from Precatio dominica will be based on this text. King, Women of the Renaissance, 207. The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Rogers, 97, 134, 154. Letter 1401, Basel, 25 December 1523, The Correspondence of Erasmus, The Collected Works of Erasmus, 10, 133–4. Béné, ‘Cadeau d’Erasme à Margaret Roper: Deux hymnes de Prudence,’ 473. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom, 103. Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, xx.Vogel, Meg, 6, 25. Murphy, ‘Review of Paula A. Vogel, Meg,’ 115. Murphy highlights a central problem in observing that ‘the frustration of trying to wrest from history the complete personalities of women seen only through the eyes of men is a real one’ (115). Janel Mueller refers to John Foxe’s view of Queen Kateryn Parr as ‘ancilla,’ ‘A Tudor Queen Finds Voice,’ 16. For Margaret Roper’s ‘early apprenticeship,’ see Weinberg, ‘Thomas More and the Use of English in Early Tudor Education,’ 26.

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Notes to pages 72–7 29 Gee, ‘Margaret Roper’s English Version of Erasmus’ Precatio Dominica,’ 161, 165. 30 Verbrugge, ‘Margaret Roper’s Personal Expression in the Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster,’ 40–1. 31 Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. King and Rix, 17, 16. 32 Verbrugge clarifies More’s part ‘in ... planning and revising’ Henry VIII’s Assertio Septem Sacramentorum adversus Martinus Lutherus and in preparing his Responsio ad Lutherum in 1523. Cardinal Wolsey instigated a book-burning ceremony at Paul’s Cross in 1521 and, in 1524, Bishop Tunstall warned London booksellers against selling imported books which had not been vetted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. See ‘Margaret More Roper’s Personal Expression,’ 36–7. 33 Ibid., 42. Because Verbrugge argues that Roper lays ‘an unnecessary emphasis’ on unworthiness and vileness, she concludes that Roper’s image of the injured animals means that ‘she also pictures [man] metaphorically as a repulsive “scabbe sheepe.”’ This argument misses the dynamic of the contrast between rapacious and curative interventions. 34 Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, 40. 35 Shell, Introduction, Elizabeth’s Glass, 7. As quoted from Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship by Collinson, ‘Little Bastard,’ 17. 36 Elizabeth I, Collected Works, xv. Duncan-Jones, ‘Regular Royal Queen,’ 3–4. 37 Findley, Elizabeth Rex, 40, 49. 38 Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings, ed. Pemberton xii. 39 Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, 217, and ‘Why Did Elizabeth Not Marry?’ Elizabeth’s childhood formation is not the only reason she did not marry. Although she ended up rejecting at least a dozen suitors, her motivation, as Doran explains convincingly, was neither ‘an implacable hostility to matrimony’ nor the ‘clinically hysterical’ behaviour ‘stemming from childhood disturbance.’ What Elizabeth’s single state does show, however, is her strong instinct for survival and intuitive grasp of the impediments in each proposed or possible match. 40 Marguerite D’Angoulême, Le Miroir de l’Ame Pécheresse, ed. Allaire, lines 24–8, pages 27–8. All references to Le Miroir will cite this edition’s line and page numbers. 41 ‘The Thirteenth Psalm of David,’ The Poems of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Bradner, 13. Comparisons with the Vulgate are drawn from Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, recensuit Robertus Weber et al. (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969). 42 As quoted from Nicholas Harpsfield’s Life of More by Monsignor P. E. Hallett, ed., The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More by Thomas Stapleton, xii. 43 Ibid., xii, xviii. 44 Garry Haupt, ed., The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 13: Treatise on the Passion, Treatise on the Blessed Body, Instructions and Prayers, clxxii, clxxix. 45 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 72.

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Notes to pages 77–9 46 De Tristitia Christi, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 14, Part 1, ed. Miller, 197. The subsequent quotations from More (Vol. 14, Part 1) and Basset (Vol. 14, Part 2) will be based on this edition. 47 See my translation of the Hecatodistichon, ‘The Seymour Sisters: Elegizing Female Attachment.’ 48 Sometimes called Isocrates’s ‘Cyprian’ orations because of their association with the island, the orations Lady Lumley translated are addressed to noteworthy Cyprians: one to Demonicus, a young man whose father had recently died, on the topic of practical ethics, two to Nicocles, the young king, on a ruler’s conduct toward his people and on the duties of subjects, and the fourth, an epideitic oration eulogizing Nicocles’s father, Evagoras. See Norlin, trans., Isocrates, vols. 1 and 3. 49 Diplomat, administrator, and man of letters, Henry Fitzalan (1513–1580) served as deputy-general of Calais for four years (following which he was created Fourteenth Earl of Arundel), commander at the siege of Boulogne, and Lord Steward of the Household for ten years stretching through the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. A Catholic, he supported Northumberland’s plans for the coronation of Lady Jane Grey and then, when the tide turned, he adroitly positioned himself in Queen Mary’s Council. Elizabeth appointed him chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1559, but after a few months he resigned; however, she rebuffed this widower as a suitor. He was sent to prison twice, to the Tower because of his support of the remarriage of his son-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk, to Mary, Queen of Scots, and to the Marshalsea for his suspected involvement in the Ridolfi plot. Having survived all his children and his two wives, Arundel died in London in 1580. See Doyle, The Official Baronage of England, 1: 81–3; Williams, Thomas Howard Fourth Duke of Norfolk. 50 Purkiss, ed., Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women, 168. All citations of Lumley’s play will include line references from both the Penguin Renaissance Dramatists series edition and the much earlier Malone Society reprint, Iphigenia At Aulis, ed. Child. 51 Two entries in the Lumley Catalogue concern this manuscript juvenilia: number 1743 (Exercises in Greek and Latin of Lorde Maltravers and ladie Lumley, done when thei were yoonge, of their owne hand wrytinge) and number 1753 (Exercises and translations out of Greeke into latin and otherwise of Marie Duchesse of Suffolke, Jane ladie Lumley, and Sir John Ratclif when theiy were yonge, of their owne hande wrytinge, bound up together). See Jayne and Johnson, eds., The Lumley Library: The Catalogue of 1609, 206–7. 52 Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 156–7. 53 The Tragedy of Mariam The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Weller and Ferguson, 26–7. 54 Quotations from Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, along with parenthetical page references, will be based on Euripides, with an English translation by A.S. Way, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912), vol 1. Quotations from

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Notes to pages 80–5

55 56 57

58 59

60

61 62

63 64 65 66

Erasmus’s Iphigenia will be based on Euripidis Iphigenia in Aulide, e Graeco Sermone in Latinum Traducta, Desiderio Erasmo Roterdamo Interprete, Opera Omnia in decem tomos distincta (Lvgdvni Batavorum, Petri Vander, 1703; repr. London: Gregg Press, 1962), 1: 1155–86. Greene, ‘Lady Lumley and Greek Tragedy,’ 547; Frank D. Crane, ‘Euripides, Erasmus, and Lady Lumley,’ 227–8. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority, 91. A translation of the Latin text is found in Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae, intro. and trans. McCutcheon. Diane Purkiss notes that Anne Cooke Bacon ‘was one of the chief mourners at Lady Lumley’s funeral.’ Three Tragedies, xli. Crane, ‘Euripides, Erasmus and Lady Lumley,’ 224. Lumley may have known the adjective and concept from the Bible (Wisdom 15: 13; Psalms 89.9), a text well represented in the Lumley Library even before the addition of Cranmer’s books. There were several Latin Bibles, two Greek, one Hebrew, one French, one polyglot, and one with the Latin commentary of the Venerable Bede; see Jayne and Johnson, eds., The Lumley Library, 48–53. McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke,’ 236. The youngest daughter, Margaret Cooke Rowlett (1532–1558), about whom little is known, died shortly after her marriage; like Ann, she served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary (243). The Cooke sons were not the prodigious scholars their sisters were; Anthony and Edward died in their twenties, William entered Gray’s Inn, and Richard was mainly interested in hunting (239). Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 51. Berger, Jr, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance, 87. Although Berger is addressing the ‘feedback’ between piety and usury in the patronage culture of the Italian city-state, his reading of Rembrandt’s interpretation of patronage as an interpretation of painting contains suggestive parallels for seeing early modern women’s translations as interpretations of and contributions to early modern literary culture. McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke,’ 240, n. 38. The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, 3 vols., ed. Giles, 1: 228. Edwardes’ poem is quoted by Whiting, ‘The Learned and Virtuous Lady Bacon,’ 270. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 307. Ruth Hughey makes a strong case for Anne Cooke’s translating Fourtene Sermons (ca. 1550), numbers 12–25 in Certyane Sermons (ca. 1550) and numbers 1–14 in Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne (to the number of 25) (ca. 1570), in ‘Lady Anne Bacon’s Translations,’ 211. However, Louise Schleiner cautions that ‘when checking Ochino’s sermons for Anne Cooke’s translations, one must take care to get the right ones’; she credits Cooke with translating nineteen of the collected twenty-five sermons. See Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 254–5, n. 5. My quotations will be based on Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne (to the number of 25.).

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Notes to pages 86–94 67 An Apologie or answere in defence of the Churche of Englande. The prefatory letter is unpaginated. All references to Bacon’s translation will be based on this text. 68 Jewel, An Apologie or Aunswer in Defence of the Church of England 1562. All references to the first translation are based on this text. 69 Spedding, An Account of the Life and Times of Francis Bacon, 1: 20. 70 Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 46. 71 (London: R.B., 1605). All quotations will be based on this text. 72 The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, ed. Felch. All quotations from Lock, based on this volume, will include page references from the original texts and from this edition. 73 M.T., trans., The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood. The Preface to the Reader is reproduced in Travitsky, ed., The Paradise of Women and Martin, ed., Women Writers in Renaissance England. 74 Schleiner, ‘Margaret Tyler, Translator and Waiting Woman,’ 6. 75 Chapman, Jonson, and Marston, Eastward Ho, ed. Van Fossen, 2.2.198–9; 395–6. The Overburian Characters, ed. Paylor, 43. 76 Krontiris, Oppositional Voices, 49. Roberts, ed., The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, xxxviii. 77 See Hannay, et al., ed., ‘Introduction,’ The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, I: 39. All references to Antonius will be based on this edition. See also Beauchamp, ‘Sidney’s Sister as Translator of Garnier.’ 78 The Countess of Pembroke’s Translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death, ed. Bornstein, 20. 79 Skretkowicz, ed., The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, lxii. 80 Kinnamon, ‘The Sidney Psalms,’ 140. 81 Quotations from Sir Philip Sidney’s translation of Psalms 1–43 will be based on The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, Jr. 82 Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically, 145. 83 Brennan, ‘“First rais’de by thy blest hand, and what is mine / inspired by thee,”’ 43. 84 I am grateful to Marie Loughlin for the suggestions in her paper, ‘“Dissolv’d to Inke while penns impressions move”: Bleeding and Authorship in Mary Sidney’s “To the Angel (Angell) Spirit,”’ delivered at the Conference of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, Memorial University, St John’s, Newfoundland, 2 June 1997. 85 Lesley Peterson, a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, is preparing the scholarly edition of Cary’s translation, The Mirror of the Worlde. On the topic of the date of Cary’s Ortelius manuscript, see Peterson, ‘The Source and Date of Elizabeth Tanfield Cary’s Manuscript The Mirror of the Worlde’ (forthcoming), and ‘An Early English Translation of Ortelius: Elizabeth Tanfield Cary’s Manuscript The Mirror of the Worlde, Trans Peter van der Krogt, Caert-Thresoor (forthcoming). In their introduction to The Tragedy of Mariam, editors Weller and Ferguson cite

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Notes to pages 96–102

86

87

88

89 90

91

92 93 94

Drayton’s praise. The Lady Falkland: Her Life, By One of Her Daughters, in The Tragedy of Mariam, ed. Weller and Ferguson, 213. Collins, Introductory Note, Susan DuVerger’s Admirable Events, in Travitsky and Cullen, eds., The Early Modern Englishwoman, vol. 5, ix, x. I am grateful to Brenda Hosington for the insights gleaned from her paper, ‘Honey from Another Hive: Susan DuVerger as Translator of Jean-Pierre Camus, Bishop of Belley,’ delivered at the Canadian Society of Renaissance Studies conference at Dalhousie University, 31 May 2003. Maureen Bell et al. admit that ‘there is very little evidence to place her,’ but cite the evidence of Harleian Society, vol. 13, that she was the daughter of William Man and granddaughter of John Man; see A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers, 132. Kim Walker speculates that ‘Man’s skill becomes the ornament of a marriageable young woman with birth, beauty, and good breeding, so that her own availability as a commodity functions to support the marketing of the text’; see Women Writers of the English Renaissance, 51. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Letters, vol. 2, ed. Thomas, 55. Thomas explains that Poliarchus’s name ‘is that of a character in John Barclay’s historicopolitical romance Argenis (1621) in which [he] is supposed to represent Henri IV of France’ (13). Philips wrote to Cotterell about Pompey in Letters XIV–XV, XVII–XXXII. Citations from Pompey will be drawn from The Collected Works, The Translations, vol. 3, ed. G. Greer and R. Little. Quotations from La Mort de Pompée will be based on Corneille, Oeuvres Complètes. ‘To the excellent Orinda,’ The Translations, 203. ‘The Forty-Two Articles, 1553,’ Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation, Bray, 302; unchanged in the text of the Thirty-Nine Articles, this item became Article 28 in 1571. For ‘The Act of Six Articles, 1539’ see ibid., 224. Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 141. ‘Johan Bale to the Christen readers,’ The First Examinacyon, The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Beilin, lines 103, 212, 225; all references to Askew, as edited by Bale and Foxe, will be based on this text. In his Historia Ecclesiae (5. 1), Eusebius retold the story of Blandina as an emblem of constancy under torture. The last of the Lyons martyrs to die, she was tossed in a net by a bull, evoking awe among the pagans, who had never seen a woman suffer so long and so much. Askew’s taunting reproaches and sheer vocalism led the Marian apologist Miles Hogarde, in The Displaying of the Protestantes (1556), to dispute Bale’s comparison with Blandina. Macek, ‘The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in The Book of Martyrs,’ 80; Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 160, 150. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 56. ‘Ecclesiastes 3’ and ‘Ecclesiastes 4,’ The Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, ed. Padelford, 103–6.

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Notes to pages 103–5 95 Matchinske, Writing, gender and state, 64. Mush’s biography of Clitherow first appeared in the third volume of The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, ed. Morris. On Mush’s influence on the maturing of Mary Ward’s vocation, see Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward, I: 50–2. 96 James, Kateryn Parr, 121. 97 Anne Crawford, ed., Letters of the Queens of England, 220. 98 The Lamentacion of a synner, made by the moste vertuous Lady Quene Caterine; bewailyng the ignoraunce of her blind life (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1547), C iii. Subsequent quotations from The Lamentacion will be based on this text and identified parenthetically. 99 Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England, 113. 100 To date critical reception of Kateryn Parr has focused on a hunt for sources. C. Hoffman, Jr concluded that she ‘has no place among English authors’; see ‘Catherine Parr as Woman of Letters,’ 367. The debate about the influence of Erasmus separates James McConica’s view of The Lamentacion as ‘the unmistakable record in the Erasmian vein of a deep religious experience’ from William Haugaard’s position that Kateryn parted company with the Erasmians ‘when she assigned a primary place to faith in the justification of men’; see McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI, 229 and Haugaard, ‘Katherine Parr,’ 357. Janel Mueller compares Parr to Erasmus, Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer. Latimer’s role as the Queen’s Lenten instructor in 1546 buttresses Mueller’s claim for Kateryn’s adoption of a ‘self-effacing path to authorship’; see ‘A Tudor Queen Finds Voice,’ 26, 30, 32, 36. 101 James, Kateryn Parr, 247. 102 In 1548 Edward Courtney, the nephew of Anne, Duchess of Somerset, who described himself as ‘the sorowfull captive,’ completed his translation of Benedetto da Mantova’s Il Beneficio di Cristo and dedicated his Treatice most profitable, of the benefit that true christianes receyve by the dethe of Iesus Christe (CUL MS Nn. 4. 43) to his powerful aunt to petition for her favour. Courtney, Earl of Devonshire (1526–56), was imprisoned for almost fifteen years, from the age of twelve. He was restored to favour at Mary’s accession, but his implication in Wyatt’s Rebellion to overthrow Mary and Philip and install Elizabeth led to his exile on the Continent, where he died in Padua. Il Beneficio (Venice, 1543), ‘the most famous work’ associated with Italian Reform thought of the spirituali (reform-minded Catholics), ‘sold thousands of copies before being systematically ferreted out and burned by the Inquisition.’ The author, a Benedictine monk from Mantua, was Benedetto Fontanini. See Gleason, ‘Spirituali,’ Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Grendler, 6:82. The primary connections between this Reformist treatment of the Crucifixion stressing justification by faith alone and Parr’s Lamentacion involve declarations about the intimate entanglements of sin, the sufficiency of the

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Notes to pages 106–14

103 104

105 106 107

108 109 110 111

112 113

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sacrifice of the Cross, and the preeminence of a lively over a historical faith. On the abominable ingratitude of justification by works, Courtney expresses da Mantova’s dismay that ‘we nevertheles go about to iustefie our selves and to obtaine the forgeunes of our synnes by our owne workes as though the merites, the rightuousnes and the bloude of Christe were not sufficient to do it unlese we put therunto our folishe rightuousnes’ (16v). Courtney depicts (22r–25v) the union of the soul with Christ as a marriage, ‘this copulation of the sole the wief withe her husbande Christe’ (25v), and compares righteous glorying in works to menstruation, ‘all our rightuousnes is like the clothes stayned with the flowers of a woman’ (33r). In contrast to a belief in works, termed ‘this historicall and very vayne faithe, with the works that folowe it,’ Courtney upholds the lively, justifying, transforming faith as ‘a work of God in us by the which our olde man is crucified’ (40v). For the Italian and English texts see Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio di Cristo, con Le Versioni Del Secolo XVI Documenti e Testimonianze. Jane Owen, An Antidote Against Purgatory, introduced by Latz, The Early Modern Englishwoman, vol. 9, xi, 182–5. Mullan, ‘Mistress Rutherford’s Narrative,’ 19, 30. Mullan clarifies that we do not know the precise origins of this autobiography, ‘whether it was actually written down by the subject herself or dictated at the request of one of her pastors, for the sake of her own family and friends, or just a personal memorial of her own experience of God’s mercy’ (16). The quoted excerpt from Mistress Rutherford’s narrative appears in Mullan’s essay, 23. His edition of the Narrative appears in the Scottish History Society, Miscellany xiii. Cullen, ‘Introduction,’ Meditations of Man’s Mortalitie, The Early Modern Englishwoman, Part 1, vol. 7, x. Ludlow, ‘Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations,’ 102; Dailey, ‘The Visitation of Sarah Wight,’ 451. See Skerpan, The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, 160. Joseph Caryl, nonconformist leader and minister at St Magnus Church, was a member of Cromwell’s London commission of ‘triers’ to approve public ministers. Mack, Visionary Women, 149, 319. Kelly, Prayer in Sixteenth-Century England, 11. Targoff, Common Prayer, 25; Targoff cites the Edwardian act from William Maskell, Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1: ccviii. Targoff builds a reading of ‘Claudius’s announcement of the irreconcilable discrepancy between his heart and tongue’ (49) into her examination of ‘the mimetic impulse that the English church imagined to arise from a convincing devotional performance’ (61) in ‘The Performance of Prayer.’ This article forms a portion of her introduction to Common Prayer. Mueller, ‘Devotion as Difference,’ 175. Hoffman, Jr, ‘Catherine Parr as a Woman of Letters,’ 354. Hoffman points out

Notes to pages 115–32

114 115

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117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128 129

130

that of the five prayers, which he considers ‘distinctly Catholic,’ three were added in the second edition of November 1545. Haynes, A Collection of State Papers, 107–8, 103–4. Alison Plowden remarks on the callousness with which Lady Jane was used: ‘The plot was simply to use her and her royal blood to elevate a plebeian Dudley to a throne to which he had no shadow of a right so that his father could continue to rule’; see The House of Tudor, 155. Plowden provides background about Lady Jane’s upbringing and learning in Tudor Women, 128–30. See also Alison Weir’s treatment of the way Lady Jane was used for others’ ends in Children of England, 157–69. Atkinson and Atkinson, ‘Numerical Patterning in Anne Wheathill’s A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs (1584),’ 3, 5. See also their ‘Anne Wheathill’s A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs’ and ‘Four Prayer Books Addressed to Women During the Reign of Elizabeth I.’ Byatt, Possession, 130–1. Lanyer, ‘To the Ladie Arabella,’ Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Woods, 17. Steen, ed., ‘Introduction,’ The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, 98. Quotations from the letters will be based on this edition. Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs,’ 183. Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, ed. Meads, 63. In the early portion of the diary Lady Hoby does not identify months. Clifford, ed., Prologue, The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, 1. Clifford is quoting from Lady Anne’s Great Books, beginning in 1650, of which the Kendal Diary is a major part. All quotations from Clifford’s diaries will be based on this text. Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley (1854). ‘The Diary of Isabella, Wife of Sir Roger Twysden, Baronet,’ 113, 133. Bowerbank and Mendelson, eds., Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, 11. Frye, ‘Sewing Connections,’ 166. As quoted and glossed by Barker, ed., Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children, xlix. Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, 119. Wendy Wall sees Nosegay ‘anchored to Whitney’s personal narrative of economic disenfranchisement and spiritual sickness’ in ‘Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy,’ 47. Travitsky reads the Will as a vivid survey, ‘Bohemian rather than pious’ in tone, ‘of an obviously beloved and well-known London’; see ‘The “Wyll and Testament” of Isabella Whitney,’ 82. Wendy Wall hears the poetics of resistance in Whitney’s venting of ‘personal and social frustrations’ through ‘mock bequests disclos[ing] a social world harshly indifferent to the desires of its individual citizens’; see ‘Whitney and Legacy,’ 51, 53. Jane Donawerth interprets it as an ars moriendi celebrating ‘the thingness, the joyful materiality of life’; see

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Notes to pages 132–8

131 132

133

134 135 136 137

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‘Women’s Poetry and the Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange,’ 16. Danielle Clarke understands this lower-middle-class woman’s gendered interventions in Tudor poetic culture as ‘aimed at an emergent urban readership’; see Renaissance Women Poets, xiii. Quotations from Whitney’s Epistles, Nosegay, and Wyll are based on this edition. Martin, ed., Women Writers in Renaissance England, 303. Quotations from The Lamentation are drawn from Martin’s edition. M.H. Armstrong Davison views the documents, ‘indefinite and inconclusive compositions,’ as ‘a combination of the letters of at least two persons’; see The Casket Letters, 227. Gordon Donaldson considers it ‘impossible to prove the letters either genuine or forgeries,’ but he labels the sonnets ‘perilously near nonsense’; see Mary Queen of Scots, 112, and for his view of the poetry, see The First Trial of Mary Queen of Scots, 73. Mrs P. Stewart-MacKenzie Arbuthnot, one of the first serious compilers of Mary’s poetry, lamented the Queen’s falling ‘under the influence of a fatal affection for the man who had ruined her,’ and excluded the love sonnets from her edition, though admitting grudgingly that they ‘are not without a certain grace’; see Queen Mary’s Book, 154–5. Betty Travitsky includes them in her anthology, The Paradise of Women, 187–207. In Mary, Queen of Scots, 403–4, Antonia Fraser disputes Mary’s authorship of ‘these long rather turgid verses.’ In The Paradise of Women, 190, Betty Travitsky detects the recurring themes of ‘doomed fate’ and a ‘strong sense of guilt.’ In ‘Queen, Lover, Poet,’ 118, Mary Burke reads the sonnets as ‘a mirror of the psyche of a woman battling to reconcile the contrary positions of ruler and woman.’ Robin Bell, editor and translator, presents the sonnets as the extended dialogue of a religious woman who married her rapist; see Bittersweet Within my Heart, 37. Quotations will be based on Bell’s edition and translation. Beilin, ‘“Some Freely Spake Their Minde,”’ 130. Ibid., 135. The Poems of Alexander Hume (1557–1609), ed. Lawson, 3, 5. The poet John Armstrong (Lawrence Temple) judged it ‘almost too terrible for the ear’; see Miscellanies, 2: 234. The antiquarian John Pinkerton viewed ‘the dreadful and melancholy of the production [as] deeply affecting to the enthusiastic’; see Select Scottish Ballads, 1: xxxviii. The text, available in David Laing’s Early Metrical Tales (1826), provoked a curious exchange in Notes and Queries (1859), in which Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton inquired about the provenance of an old ballade’s mention of ‘the Ladye of Culrosse, in her wilde shreeking dreme,’ and an Edinburgh correspondent refers to ‘what the ancient ballad not inappropriately calls her wilde shreekinge dreme’; see ‘Lady Culross’s Dream’; J.O., ‘Lady Culross’s Dream.’ Alexander Hume’s editor, G. Lawson, remarks on Melville’s ‘feeling for the terrible which approaches sublimity’; see The Poems of Alexander Hume, 185. Elaine Beilin observes the aptness of Melville/Colville’s

Notes to pages 140–4

138

139 140 141

142 143

144 145 146 147 148

spiritual quest to early modern women’s poetry, ‘involving a search for Christian identity and poetic authority’: see Redeeming Eve, 110. Germaine Greer and her co-editors draw attention to the timeliness of Melville’s publication ‘when Presbyterian ministers were pleading with James to repeal the laws forbidding “prophesyings,” when ... “all pairts” of the congregation were encouraged to interpret Biblical texts’; see Kissing the Rod, 32. This anthology also includes Melville’s sonnet (1605) addressed to the imprisoned son-in-law of John Knox, John Welsch (33). Scott-Elliot and Yeo, ‘Calligraphic Manuscripts of Esther Inglis.’ Cheney and Hosington, trans. and eds., Elizabeth Jane Weston, Collected Writings. See also Ziegler, ‘“More Than Feminine Boldness”’ and ‘Hand-Ma[i]de Books.’ Wark, ‘The Gentle Pastime of Extra-Illustrating Books.’ Frye, ‘Sewing Connections.’ Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘The Needle and the Pen.’ The estimated total of Inglis manuscripts uncovered to date is based on the Scott-Elliot and Yeo Catalogue and more recent identifications: Getty, The Wormsley Library. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, 111. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 98. Laing, ‘Notes Relating to Mrs. Esther Inglis,’ 307, 301. Laing, the Scots antiquary who first took Inglis seriously, dismissed any ‘claims to original genius,’ while Dorothy Judd Jacson concluded that she showed ‘limited abilities.’ See Laing, ‘Notes,’ 309. Jackson, Esther Inglis, Calligrapher, np. Dunn, Pretexts of Authority, 51. Laing, ‘Notes,’ 292. Although she wrote comparatively few independent literary exercises, Inglis mastered many hands: among them, italic, text, secretary, French secretary, bastard secretary, and chancery, and such intricate styles as lettera mancina (mirror writing), lettere piacevolle (linked curling terminals and beginnings), lettera rognosa (trembling hand), lettera tagliata (with a broken horizontal line), and lettre pattée (with triangular serifs); see Scott-Elliot and Yeo, ‘Calligraphic Manuscripts,’ 19, and Alexander and Temple, Illuminated Manuscripts in Oxford College Libraries, 79. Laing, ‘Notes,’ 304; Scott-Elliot and Yeo, ‘Calligraphic Manuscripts,’ 81.9. Parthenica, 1.34, ‘Clarissimo Viro,’ lines 31–2; 1.39, Collected Writings, ed. and trans. Cheney and Hosington, 64–5. Weston, Collected Writings, 177, 181. Ziegler, ‘Hand-Ma[i]de Books,’ 83–4. Lange, ‘A Rediscovered Esther Inglis Calligraphic Manuscript.’ In the early 1620s it is likely that for this adaptation about Mary, Queen of Scots, and for the self-portrait adapted from de Montenay’s frontispiece portrait by Woeiriot, Inglis was consulting the polyglot Frankfurt edition (1619) of de Montenay; however, she may just as conceivably have had access to the French text,

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Notes to pages 148–53

149 150

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152 153 154 155

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published in Zurich in 1584, in which Woeiriot’s engraving of de Montenay appeared. This engraving is reproduced by Claire Richter Sherman in Writing on Hands, 250. ‘Fama,’ Poëmata, II.42, and ‘Virtus sola nobilitat,’ Parthenica, II.47, in Collected Writings, ed. and trans. Cheney and Hosington, 132–5. Rowse, The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 28. Beilin considers the Salve Deus ‘a monumental triptych’; see Redeeming Eve, 206–15. Marie Loughlin examines Lanyer’s use of the typology of Revelation to construct ‘a powerful and apocalyptic version of women’s past and future,’ in ‘“Fast ti’d unto them in a golden Chaine,”’ 142. Lynette McGrath views Lanyer as a ‘poet-priest [who] celebrates the sacrament of her poem, nurturing women with a feast of female identity’ (104); see ‘Metaphoric Subversions.’ McBride studies Lanyer’s ‘radically transgressive understanding of her poetic power’; see ‘Engendering Authority,’ 21. Esther Gilman Richey argues that Lanyer uses her knowledge of Paul and possibly of Agrippa in writing ‘her New Testament to give women a voice,’ in ‘“To Undoe the Booke,”’ 113. Suzanne Trill examines the current state of Lanyer criticism to argue for Salve Deus as a profession of faith in ‘Feminism versus Religion.’ Editor Susanne Woods underscores Lanyer’s accomplishment in revising ‘fifteen hundred years of traditional commentary’; see The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, xxxiv. Quotations will be based on this edition. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 218–19. Katherine Duncan-Jones reads Lanyer’s boldness in addressing a poem on Christ’s passion to such eminent persons as inspired by a ‘desire to remind all these ladies of her existence, as her son reached marriageable age’; see ‘Aemilia the Bold,’ 23. Richey, ‘“To Undoe the Booke,”’ 112. Trill, ‘Feminism versus Religion,’ 72. Schoenfeldt, ‘The Gender of Religious Devotion,’ 228. Balen, ‘Revisions, Feminisms, and Ventriloquisms.’ Gardner Campbell considers Lanyer’s use of Procula to deliver the defence of Eve ‘unusually apt for a feminist polemic that sought equality and union, sinner with sinner, men with women’; see ‘The Figure of Pilate’s Wife in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’ 13. Loughlin, ‘“Fast ti’d unto them in a golden Chaine,”’ 135. In her reading of ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ Kari Boyd McBride argues that ‘Lanyer constructs in Cumberland a figure of legitimate authority who orders any landscape she inhabits, regardless of her right – or lack of right – to land and property’; see Country House Discourse in Early Modern England, 109. Information about Bathsua Reginald Makin is drawn from Vivian Salmon, ‘Bathsua Makin’; Salmon, ‘Women and Study of Language in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England’; Teague, ‘The Identity of Bathsua Makin’; Brink, ‘Bathsua Reginald Makin.’ Quotations from her work are based on the 1616 edition of Musa Virginea and the 1673 edition of An Essay.

Notes to pages 156–64

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161 162 163 164 165

166 167 168

169

170

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Information about Rachel Speght is drawn from Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 247– 66; van Heertum, ‘A Hostile Annotation of Rachel Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617)’; Purkiss, ‘Material Girls’; The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, ed. Lewalksi. Quotations from her work are based on the 1617 edition of A Mouzell for Melastomus and the 1621 edition of Mortalities Memorandum. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Roberts, 47. Quotations from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus will be based on this edition. Masten, ‘“Shall I turne blabb?”’ 67. As one of the most praised and studied poetic sequences in the corpus of early modern women’s writing, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus has generated a diversity of critical readings. As a sampling, see Roberts, ‘The Biographical Problem of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’; Jones, ‘The Self as Spectacle in Mary Wroth and Veronica Franco’; Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, 256– 66; Kinney, ‘Mary Wroth’s Guilty “secrett art”’; Dove, ‘Mary Wroth and the Politics of the Household.’ Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 227–8. Ibid., 189. See Robert Sidney, Poems, ed. Croft. Primrose, A Chaine of Pearle (London: Thomas Paine, 1630). All quotations will be based on this edition. Gim, ‘“Faire Eliza’s Chaine,”’ 189, 192. Eliza’s Babes (London: Laurence Blaiklock, 1652). An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions (London: R. Bishop, 1653). Elizabeth Major, Honey on the Rod (London: Thomas Maxey, 1656). All quotations will be based on these editions. Schwoerer, ‘Women’s Public Political Voice in England,’ 61–2. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2, 4, and Black Sun, 8. See also MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam. Elaine Hobby’s sustained treatment of ‘Eliza,’ Collins, and Major stresses their political as distinct from theological situation, presenting them as dutiful, passive women, faithfully promoting ‘highly restrictive ideologies’; see Virtue of Necessity, 54, 74. Greer at al., eds, Kissing the Rod, 142, 144. With Eliza’s disquisition on the Trinity, ‘Three in One conjoyn’d ... yet each Person differing’ (‘To My Sister, S.S.,’ 27) and on the bread and wine of the Eucharist as ‘the pleadges of thy grace’ (‘On going to the Sacrament,’ 58), there is little compelling evidence of her strong ‘Calvinist sentiments.’ Elizabeth Hageman discerns ‘radical’ potential in Collins; see ‘Women’s Poetry in Early Modern Britain,’ 195. Sidney Gottlieb finds much evidence of her ’boldness and engagement in public issues’; see his edition, An Collins: Divine Songs and Meditacions, x. Greer et al. maintain that Collins was ‘devoutly antiCalvinist’; see Kissing the Rod, 148, 154. Eugene Cunnar posits that her ‘Protestant theology’ was ‘influenced by Calvinism’: see ‘An Collins,’ Hester, 49. Jonson, Timber or Discoveries, 86.

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Notes to pages 164–79 172 173 174 175

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183 184

185 186 187 188 189

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Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720, 4. Gottlieb, An Collins, xiii. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 305. All quotations from the poems of Gertrude Thimelby are drawn from Tixall Poetry, ed. Clifford and from the letters of Winefrid Thimelby, from Tixall Letters, ed. Clifford. For a recent edition of the work of Constance Aston Fowler, see The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition, ed. Aldrich-Watson. Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. J. Hensley. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London: T.R. and J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653). Collected Works of Katherine Philips, Thomas et al., 3 vols. All quotations will be based on these editions. Lutes, ‘Negotiating Theology and Gynecology,’ 319. For Bradstreet’s knowledge of Crooke, see McMahon, ‘Anne Bradstreet, Jean Bertault, and Dr. Crooke.’ As quoted in Jones, A Glorious Fame, 99 and Patricia Phillips, The Scientific Lady, 63. In The Mind Has No Sex? Londa Schiebinger notes Cavendish’s association with the Newcastle circle; in The Scientific Lady Patricia Phillips refers to Cavendish’s silence. Anna Battigelli argues that Cavendish’s ‘Atomes’ poems present ‘a vitalist view of nature’; see Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, 100. John Rogers sees them as decidedly ‘nonvitalist’ and ‘mechanist’; The Matter of Revolution, 183–4. Jay Stevenson thinks they combine ‘vitalism and mechanism’; see ‘The Mechanist-Vitalist Soul of Margaret Cavendish,’ 531. Marjorie Hope Nicolson explains the seventeenth-century mechanist world-view in The Breaking of the Circle, 2. Jowitt, ‘Imperial Dreams?,’ 384. Maureen Mulvihill judges Philips’s achievement to have been ‘overstated’ by ‘several powerful male allies’; see ‘A Feminist Link in the Old Boys’ Network,’ 100, 72–3. Harriette Andreadis maintains ‘there is no question that Katherine Philips produced lesbian texts’; see ‘The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips,’ 57, 60. Limbert, ‘Two Poems and a Prose Receipt.’ Comensoli and Russell, eds., ‘Introduction,’ Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, 10. Among the texts and collections concerned with women’s drama and dramatic production, see Cerasno and Wynne-Davies, eds., Renaissance Drama by Women and Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama; Purkiss, ed., Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women; and Findlay et al., eds., Women and Dramatic Productions. Miller, ‘Mothering Others,’ 4. Poole, ‘“The fittest closet for all goodness,”’ 73. Snook, ‘“His open side our book,”’ 168. Brown, ed., Women’s Writing in Stuart England, 97. Poole, ‘The fittest closet for all goodness’ 80–1; Feroli, ‘“Infelix Simulacrum,”’ 97, 99.

Notes to pages 179–88 190 Brown, Women’s Writing, 150. 191 Schwoerer, ‘Women’s Public Political Voice in England,’ 61. 192 Ludlow, ‘Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations,’ 95–6; Gillespie, ‘A Hammer in Her Hand,’ 216. 193 Hinds, God’s Englishwoman, 7. See also Lindley, The English Civil War and Revolution. Curiously and perhaps because his sources include none of the women authors of the 1640s and 1650s, Lindley observes of the Levellers that ‘there was nothing in their programme for women’ (28). 194 Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, ed. Cope, xiv; quotations from Davies will be based on this edition. 195 Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State, 127. Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body,’ 153. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit, 163. 196 Gentles, ‘London Levellers in the English Revolution,’ 282. 197 Gillespie, ‘A Hammer in Her Hand,’ 215, 220. 198 Chidley, The Iustification of the Independant Churches of Christ, 2. 199 ‘To the Christian Reader.’ The text is unpaginated. 200 Avery, Scripture-Prophecies Opened, 8, 39. 201 Parker, Copy of a Letter, 10, 12. 202 Poole, An Alarum of War, Given to the Army (London, 1649), 1; two texts with the same title were published in the same year. 203 Gillespie, ‘A Hammer in her Hand,’ 225; the quotation from A Petition (1649) is drawn from Gillespie’s excerpt. 204 Channel, A Message from God, 5, 3. 205 Hooton, ‘To Edward Bowles Priest.’ Portfolio Manuscripts, Library of the Society of Friends, 3.26. 206 Howgill, A Remarkable Letter of Mary Howgill to Oliver Cromwell, Called Protector, 3. 207 Cotton and Cole, To the Priests and People of England, 8, 3. 208 Biddle, A Warning from the Lord God of Life and Power, 1, 19, 22. 209 Hobby, ‘O Oxford Thou Art Full of Filth,’ 163; for Biddle’s travels, see Rickman, ‘Esther Biddle and Her Mission to Louis XIV.’ 210 Blackborrow, Visit to the Spirit in Prison, 1. 211 Parr, Susanna’s Apologie Against the Elders (London, 1659), 14, 31, 23, 77, 106. 212 Fell, False Prophets, 22; Testimonie of the Touch-stone, 9, 3. 213 Fell, The Citie of London Reproved, 1. 214 2nd ed. (1667) repr. 1979 with an introduction by David Latt. 215 Fell, A Declaration and an Information, 2, 7. 216 See Tarter, ‘Nursing the New Wor(l)d.’ 217 Evans and Chevers, A Short Relation, 1; see also A True Account of the Great Sufferings undergone by those two faithful servants of God, Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers and A Brief Discovery of God’s Eternal Truth. 218 Cary, The Glorious Excellencie of the Spirit of Adoption; A Word in Season to the Kingdom of England; The Resurrection of the Witnesses and Englands Fall from [the

297

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219

220 221 222

298

mysticall Babylon] Rome; The Little Horns Doom & Downfall; A New and More Exact Mappe; Twelve Proposals to the Surpeme Governors. The Short-Title Catalogue ascribes a total of six titles to Cary; the first attribution, the most tentative, is The Glorious Excellencie of the Spirit of Adoption by ‘M. G.’ The Stationers’ Register notes the entry on 19 July 1645 and lists the author as M.G. Hilary Hinds, in God’s Englishwoman, follows Wing in ascribing The Glorious Excellencie to Cary (235). Although the surname initial on the title page is ‘G’ not ‘C,’ there are several reasons for considering this a misprint by the printer Jane Coe. The address ‘To the Reader’ is signed with letters that look like ‘M.C.’ (A5). The preceding selfdescription as ‘the Servant of Jesus Christ’ and the title page’s ‘Minister of the Gospell’ are both in keeping with Cary’s authorial stylings. The most persuasive evidence for Cary’s authorship lies in the nature of the writing itself. Though without the political applications that became so characteristic, The Glorious Excellencie demonstrates the logical, precisely introduced, explicitly itemized exegetical commentary that is a hallmark of all Cary’s later work. The lack of political detail – beyond the derogation of adherence to the letter of the law ‘as was the Pharisaicall and now is the Papist manner’ (54) – is quite readily explained in what was likely the first work of this woman writer living in the volatile atmosphere after the dramatic Parliamentary victory as Naseby. There are many resonances with Cary’s later writing. Not only does the address ‘to the Reader’ cite the biblical image of ‘the talent wrapt up in a Napkin’ (A3v), repeated in The Resurrection of the Witnesses (129), the endorsement of the Saints who experience ‘abundant consolation’ (29), who are ‘cleered’ of ‘that nickname of Antinomian’ (71), and who are ‘translated out of the kingdome and power of darknesse into the glorious light and libertie and Kingdome of the Son of God’ (78) is also consistent with the overall tenor toward the Saints in Cary’s published work. The most compelling evidence to argue for The Glorious Excellencie being Cary’s is the careful discrimination of the discourse. The text’s iteration of the privileges of the Saints, who were once ‘under the curse,’ ‘in darknesse,’ ‘strangers and aliens in your mindes,’ ‘defiled with pollution,’ and ‘in fear continually,’ and who are now ‘free from the curse,’ ‘light in the Lord,’ ‘drawne nigh to God,’ with ‘the deedes of the body mortified’ and ‘in continuall peace,’ illuminates with contrastive precision the traits of those ‘that walke after the Spirit’ (63; mispagination for 77). It strikes me that Cary was announcing and exercising her exegetical talents in this apprentice work. Mack, Visionary Women, 117; Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 410; Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, 308; Davies, Unbridled Spirits, 145. Hill, The English Bible, 298–9. Cary, A New and More Exact Mappe, 238. Cary, The Resurrection of the Witnesses, 129.

Notes to pages 189–99 223 Elizabeth (Bourchier) Cromwell was the Protector’s only wife; she bore four daughters and four sons. Bridget Cromwell, their daughter, married Henry Ireton days before the surrender of Oxford, in 1646, which he helped to negotiate. Ireton was one of the signatories of the warrant for the execution of Charles I. Bridget Ireton bore three daughters and one son. Margaret (Foot) Rolle (spelled ‘Role’ by Cary), daughter of a London alderman, bore one son. Member of the Council of State, Henry Rolle was Chief Justice of Court, Lord Chief Justice of the Upper Bench, and Commissioner of the Exchequer. 224 Joshua Sprigg’s (1618–84) Anglia Rediviva; Englands Recovery, a 335-page history complete with illustrations of coats of arms, appeared in 1647. 225 The Cry of a Stone; Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall; A Legacy for Saints; Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea. 226 Channel, A Message from God, 7. 227 Hinds, ‘Soul-Ravishing and Sin-Subduing;’ 126. 228 Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body,’ 150. 229 Achinstein, ‘Romancing the Spirit,’ 433. Chapter Four: Six Major Authors 1 Robert Garnier, Two Tragedies, ed. Hill and Morrison, 7–8. Quotations from Garnier will be based in this edition. All quotations from Pembroke will be based on The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert. 2 Skretkowicz, ‘Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius,’ 22. 3 The Countess of Pembroke’s Translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death, ed. Bornstein, 20. The line numbers for A Discourse are based on the text in The Collected Works, vol 1. 4 The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems by Mary Sidney Herbert, ed. Waller, 11. 5 Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed.Van Dorsten, 22, 25, 42. 6 Nugae Antiquae, ed. Harington, 1: 173. In Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, H.R. Woudhuysen quotes Harington’s lament about the Psalter’s unpublished state from BL Add. MS 46371, fo. 3r; he also suggests a social link between Harington and the countess, since ‘Mary Sidney’s father-in-law, the first Earl of Pembroke, was John Harington’s godfather, and the Earl had probably secured Harington’s father’s election as MP for Old Sarum in 1559’ (345). Nugae Antiquae includes eight of Mary Sidney’s psalms. In Philip’s Phoenix Margaret Hannay dismisses Harington’s charge about the countess’s inability as ‘absurd’ (134). 7 The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, Jr. 502; Lanham, The Old Arcadia, 183. 8 Freer, ‘The Countess of Pembroke in a World of Words,’ 38; Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 95.

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Notes to pages 199–205 9 The consolation and direction of the Penitentials make them a form of commonplace book, ‘about the intimate connection between remembering and remarking a text.’ See Max W. Thomas, ‘Reading and Writing the Renaissance Commonplace Book,’ 410. The provenance of the Penitentials is ancient, extending from Augustine’s reported death-bed request, in 430 CE, to have the psalms of David concerning penitence written on the wall, to Cassiodorus’s sixth-century allegorical explanation of septem psalmi poenitentium. Whether in a cave or in the earth, David’s period of death-like withdrawal is regenerative. For Petrarch in The Triumph of Love the cave-dwelling king rediscovers the value of the contemplative, solitary life, while for Caxton in The Golden Legend David’s being buried neck-deep twenty times ‘tyl he felt the wormes crepe in his flesshe’ corresponds to the twenty verses of the Miserere. See Huttar, ‘Frail Grass and Firm Tree,’ 48, 190. In Tudor Royal Iconography John King discusses Henry Parker’s presentation of Henry VIII as a modern David (90) and in ‘Evil Tongues ...’ Anne Lake Prescott studies reformers’ characterization of David as a ‘slandered courtier’ who complained against the tongues in ‘courtly mouths’ (167). The Penitentials, particularly the Miserere, were widely used meditative texts in Tudor England. Bishop John Fisher wrote a treatise on The seven penyitencyall psalmes (1508); Sir Thomas Wyatt translated them; Lady Jane Grey recited Psalm 51 on the scaffold; Lady Grace Mildmay admitted in Meditations that she read the penitentials daily; Elizabeth Grymeston’s Miscelanea included odes in imitation of the penitentials. 10 Gilby, trans., Théodore de Bèze, The Psalmes of David, truely opened and explaned by paraphrasis, 126–7. Quotations will also be drawn from the standard Elizabethan translation of Calvin’s commentary on the Psalms: Golding, trans., The Psalms of David and Others. With M. John Calvins Commentaries. 11 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 198. 12 See Hannay, ‘“Unlock my lipps.”’ 13 All quotations from Lanyer will be based on The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Woods. 14 Lamb, ‘Patronage and Class in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’ in 43–4. 15 Coiro, ‘Writing in Service,’ 365. Coiro’s witty allusion refers to Edith Wharton’s social-climbing heroine in The House of Mirth. 16 Parry, ‘Literary Patronage,’ 136 17 Barroll, ‘Looking for Patrons,’ 35. 18 Schnell, ‘“So Great a Diffrence Is There in Degree,”’ 43. 19 McBride, ‘Sacred Celebrations: The Patronage Poems,’ 65. 20 Loughlin, ‘“Fast ti’d unto them in a golden chaine,”’ 139. 21 Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 220. 22 Mueller, ‘Feminist Poetics,’ 102–3.

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Notes to pages 205–13 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30

31

32 33

34

35 36 37 38

Richey, ‘“To Undoe the Booke,”’ 115. Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, 161–2. Trill, ‘Feminism versus Religion,’ 72. Mueller, ‘Feminist Poetics,’ 112. Comparisons with The Geneva Bible (1560), The Bishops’ Bible (1568), and the Authorised Version (1611) reveal few substantial differences in these Psalm texts. The most remarkable is the Geneva Bible version of Ps. 147:6: ‘The Lord releueth the meke, & abaseth the wicked to the grounde.’ Lanyer’s borrowing is occasionally as close as the Bishops’ Bible version of Ps. 103:12: ‘[Loke] howe farre distaunt the east is from the west: so farre a sunder setteth he our sinnes from us’ (cf. Lanyer, 79–80). Quotations are based on W.A. Wright, ed., The Hexaplar Psalter (1911). Lewalski, ‘Literature and the Household,’ 616; Writing Women in Jacobean England, 235. In her treatment of Anne Clifford, Lewalski provides a helpful legal background to Cookham and speculates about George Clifford’s motives in leaving the estate to his brother as the person who ‘could best manage the estate and arrange for the payment of his massive debts’; see Writing Women, 369, n.8. Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Springborg, 73. Quotations from the play and the biography will be based on The Tragedy of Mariam the Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland Her Life, ed. Weller and Ferguson and from The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II in Renaissance Women: The Plays of Elizabeth Cary, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Purkiss. Wright, ‘The Canonization of Elizabeth Cary,’ 64, 60. Wright argues against ‘anxious biographical validation of Cary’s works’ as ‘regressive and harmful canonization,’ which effectively excludes Cary from the early modern canon Purkiss, ed., Renaissance Women, xi. Among the studies avoiding the biographical fallacy are those by Elaine Beilin, Donald Foster, and Barbara K. Lewalski. For essays attending to domestic tensions, see Nancy Guttierez, Rosemary Kegl, Tina Krontiris, Karen Raber, and Marta Straznicky. Along with the allusions to Othello and Antony and Cleopatra suggested by Weller and Ferguson, Dympna Callaghan compares the representations of the other in The Merchant of Venice and Antony and Cleopatra; Frances Dolan examines the domestic jealousies of Othello; Maureen Quilligan discusses The Taming of the Shrew; and Betty Travitsky proposes connections between Salome and the murderous Alice in Arden of Faversham. Belsey, ‘Feminism and Beyond,’ 174. Slowe, ‘In Defense of Her Sex,’ 197. Ferguson, ‘Running on with Almost Public Voice,’ 52. Donald Foster, Isobel Grundy, Barbara Lewalski, Tina Krontiris, Karen Nelson, Donald Stauffer, Kim Walker, and Stephanie Wright favour Cary’s authorship.

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Notes to pages 214–25

39 40 41 42

43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Daniel Woolf makes the case for a forgery in ‘The True Date and Authorship of Henry, Viscount Falkland’s History of the Life, Reign and Death of King Edward II.’ Purkiss, ed., Renaissance Women, xxix. Kim Walker, Women Writers of the English Renaissance, 144. See Nelson, ‘Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II, 157–73. In 1615 the Overbury trials were a cause célèbre in Court circles and the popular press. Robert Carr had married Frances Howard, the former Countess of Essex, in December 1613. Overbury had opposed the liaison between Carr and Howard; ten days following Overbury’s death, Howard was granted an annulment from Essex. Two years later when Somerset was being replaced as the King’s favourite, the rumours of the poisoning began. Robert Carr, Frances Howard, Richard Weston, James Franklin, Gervase Elwys, and Anne Turner were indicted for Overbury’s murder. All were found guilty and sentenced to death; only Carr and Howard were pardoned by the King. Quotations will be based on Josephine Roberts’s editions of The Poems and The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, and Michael Brennan’s edition of Love’s Victory. Quotations from Denny’s verse are drawn from the citations in Roberts’s edition of Wroth’s Poems. Although he discerns in Wroth’s life and writings ‘the fitful but significant development of a number of “womanspaces,”’ Gary Waller understands Urania as an exposition of ‘the difficulties of constructing a subject-position for a woman in the early modern period’; see The Sidney Family Romance, 277. While acknowledging that Wroth’s speaking out about private relationships ‘necessarily involves emblazoning her own shame,’ Josephine Roberts goes as far as crediting her with a vivid portrait of ‘the highly conflicting practices of the early seventeenth-century court society’; see ‘“The Knott Never to Bee Untide,”’ 129. Christina Luckyj promotes Wroth’s favouring ‘the greater referentiality and didacticism of romance narrative,’ in ‘The Politics of Genre in Early Women’s Writing,’ 274. Wroth’s ‘self-conscious revision of male-authored conceits and conventions’ prompts Naomi Miller to argue that ‘it is in the very multiplicity of women’s voices in Urania that the most powerful challenge to masculine objectifications of women resides’; see Changing the Subject, 171. Urania, ed. Roberts, xlviii. Weidemann, ‘Theatricality and Female Identity in Mary Wroth’s Urania,’ 200. Cavanaugh, Cherished Torment, 14, 19. Gaines and Roberts, ‘The Geography of Love in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Fiction,’ 294. Urania, ed. Roberts, xvii. Lewalski, ‘Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy,’ 88. McLaren, ‘An Unknown Continent,’ 291. Campbell, ‘Love’s Victory and La Mirtilla in the Canon of Renaissance Tragicomedy,’ Women’s Writing 4 (1997): 115.

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Notes to pages 226–32 53 Quotations from Cavendish’s works will be based on editions cited in the Bibliography. Quotations from her plays will be based on The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Shaver. 54 Zunshine, ‘Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in A. L. Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children,’ 137. 55 As quoted by Chalmers, ‘Dismantling the Myth of “Mad Madge,”’ 332–3. 56 Evelyn, ‘A Letter to Mr. Bohun,’ 731–2; The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews, 9: 123; The Letters of Dorothy Osborne, ed. Moore Smith, 37. 57 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 29. Perry, The Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband, 288. Meyer, The Scientific Lady in England 1650–1760, 14. Grant, Margaret the First, 208. Jones, A Glorious Fame, 168. 58 Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women, 55. 59 For twentieth-century studies, see Perry, The Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband; Grant, Margaret the First; Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women; Jones, A Glorious Fame; Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. For recent biographies, see Rees, Margaret Cavendish and Whitaker, Mad Madge. For a recent essay collection, see Cottegnies and Weitz, eds., Authorial Conquests. For recent readers, see Bennett, ed., Bell in Campo & The Sociable Companions; Bowerbank and Mendelson, eds., Paper Bodies; James, ed., Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings; Shaver, ed., The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays. 60 Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 59. As James Fitzmaurice explains in ‘Front Matter and the Physical Make-up of Natures Pictures,’ moreover, Cavendish herself is on display in the altered frontispieces, being represented as ‘a benevolent stepmother’ and then as one of ‘a group of ladies and gentlemen met by a fire on a cold winter’s evening’ recounting tales (356). 61 Kate Lilley explains the benefits for feminist theory and genre theory of ‘putting together these two unstable terms, “women’s writing” and “utopian writing”’ in ‘Blazing Worlds,’ 106. 62 de Fontenelle, A Plurality of Worlds, trans. Glanvill, 55. 63 The text of The Concealed Fancies is reproduced in Renaissance Drama by Women, ed. Cerasno and Wynne-Davies, 127–58. 64 Fitzmaurice, ‘Fancy and the Family,’ 209. 65 ‘To the Two Universities,’ Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1655). 66 Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down,’ 294; Bowerbank, ‘The Spider’s Delight,’ 398. 67 Sherman, ‘Trembling Texts,’ 185, 191. 68 Williams, ‘“No Silent Woman,”’ 122. 69 The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Shaver, 7. 70 Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 4. Raber, ‘Warrior Women in the Plays of Cavendish and Killigrew,’ 429. In her edition of Bell in Campo for Broadview Press (2002), Alexandra Bennett includes eyewitness accounts of the involvement of women (among them, the Marchioness of Hamilton and Ann

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71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79

Dimack, who fought as a soldier in man’s uniform) in the Civil Wars and letters outlining the courage of Queen Henrietta Maria, the ‘she-majesty generalissima,’ in leading Royalist forces to her husband’s armies in 1643; see 213–19. Bonin, ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender,’ 433. On the importance of Mimick see Peterson, ‘Defects Redressed,’ 1–30. Loscocco, ‘“Manly sweetness.” The Complete Works of Abraham Cowley, ed. Grosart, 154. The Poems of Jane Barker, ed. King. Killigrew. Loscocco, ‘“Manly sweetness,”’ 274, 279. Quotations from Philips will be based on this edition, The Complete Works of Katherine Philips, ed. Thomas et al., 3 vols. Quotations from The Poems are taken from volume one, with poem and line numbers from this edition. Andrew Shifflett labels the effect ‘a sense of sublimity,’ a great power derived ‘from their marginality’; see ‘“Subdu’d by You,”’ 185. Price, ‘A Rhetoric of Innocence,’ 235. Shifflett, ‘“Subdu’d by You,”’ 192. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Poems, ed. Thomas, 334.

Appendix A 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700, 174. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 133. Plant, The English Book Trade, 23. McKerrow, ed., A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books 1557–1640. Plomer, ed., A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were At Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. Bell, ‘Hannah Allen and the Development of a Puritan Publishing Business,’ 32. See Bell, ‘Mary Westwood Quaker Publisher.’ McKerrow, Dictionary, x–xi. Greg, Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing 1550–1650, 13–14. Plomer, Dictionary, xv.

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346

Index

Abergavenny, Lady Frances, 59, 116, 118 Abraham and Isaac, 80 Account Audited, The, 189 Achilles, 81–2 Achinstein, Sharon, 193 Act for abolishing ... books and images, 113 Actes and Monumentes (Foxe), 100 Adams, Elizabeth, 244 Adultresses Funeral Day, The (Goodcole), 54 Agamemnon, 81–2 agency, concept of, 8, 11, 12, 19 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, 18, 33–4, 46, 48, 150–1, 205 Aholiab, 143 Alarum of War, An (Poole), 184 Albret, Jeanne de, Queen of Navarre, 144 Allen, Hannah, 244 Amadis de Gaule (trans. Munday), 217, 220 Aminta (Tasso, trans. Fraunce), 223 Anatomie of Absurdity, The (Nashe), 40 Anatomie of Abuses, The (Stubbes), 44–5 Anger, Jane, 39–40, 46 Anglyce Mylke for Chyldren (Holt), 28 Anguisola, Sofonisba, 15

Anne, Queen, 40, 149, 154, 202, 204, 216, 244 anthologies of women writers, 8–9, 343–5 Antidote Against Purgatory, An (Owen), 106 anti-Lutheran campaign, 73 Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus, trans. Lodge), 209, 215 Antonius (Herbert), 91, 196–7, 209 Antony and Cleopatra, 91, 210–12 Aphthonius, 92 Apologia ecclesiae anglicanae (Jewel), 78, 86–7 Ar’t Asleepe Husbande? (Braithwait), 51 Araignement and Burning of Margaret Ferne-seede, The, 53 Araignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women, The (Swetnam), 41–2 Arcadia (Sidney), 156–7, 195–6, 217, 221 Arden of Faversham, 52–3, 210 Aristotle, 31, 169 Ars Poetica (Horace), 74 Arundel library, 79 Ascham, Anthony, 49 Ascham, Roger, 74, 84 Ashley, Katharine, 114

347

Index Ashmole, Elias, 170 Askew, Anne, 21, 99–102, 108, 117, 242–3 Astell, Mary, 207, 227, 230 Aston, Kat, 167–8 Aston, Katherine Thimelby, 164, 167 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney), 195, 200 Atkinson, Colin and Jo, 118–19 atomism, 170, 296n180 Attending to Early Modern Women conferences, 6 Aughterson, Kate, 9 Austin, Ann, 187 Austin, William, 46 author, concepts of, 24, 63–4, 99, 128–9, 193–4, 195, 239–42 Autobiography (Thornton), 59 Avery, Elizabeth, 183 Aylmer, John, 39 Bacon, Lady Anne Cooke, 78, 80; correspondence with son, 87; support of nonconformist preachers, 87; translations of Ochino and Jewel, 84–7, 286n66 Bacon, Sir Francis, 228, 230 Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 80, 83 Baldhoven, Georg Martinius von, 148 Bale, John, 75 Balen, Michelle, 151–2 Bampfield, Colonel Joseph, 111 Barclay, John, 96 Barker, Jane, 235 Barrett, Hannah, 244 Barroll, Leeds, 204 Bart, Lily (House of Mirth), 203 Basil, Archbishop of Caesaria, 84 Basset, Mary, 66, 76–7, 242 Beaufort, Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, 66–9, 98–9 Beaumont, Francis, 52 Becon, Thomas, 51, 113

348

Bell in Campo (Cavendish), 231–4 Bell, Jane, 244 Bell, Ilona, 131 Bellamore, 167 Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert, 106 Bené, Charles, 71 Beneficio di Giesu Cristo Crocifisso (Mantova), 105, 289n102 Bergerac, Cyrano de, 227, 230 Bertie, Lady Susan, Countess Dowager of Kent, 204–5 Bezaleel, 143 Bèze, Théodore de, 93, 200–2, 244 Bibliotheca (Newcomb), 235 Biddle, Esther, 185, 242 Blackborrow, Sarah, 185 Blandina of Lyons, 100, 288n91 Boethius, 74 Boleyn, Queen Anne, 61, 75, 79, 213 Bolt, Robert, 71 Bonner, Bishop Edmund, 101 Book of Common Prayer, The, 92, 99, 112, 118, 179 Book of Husbandry, The (Fitzherbert), 51 Book of Martyrs (Foxe), 51 Book of the Courtier, The (Castiglione), 10, 30, 65, 142 book trade, 243–5 Bornstein, Diane, 91, 198 Bowerbank, Sylvia, 127, 227 Boyd, Robert, 141 Brackley, Lady Elizabeth, 175, 229 Bradstreet, Anne, 168–70 Brandon, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, 88–9, 112, 202, 204 Brennan, Michael, 91–2 Breton, Nicolas, 195 Brief Discovery, A (Evans and Chevers), 187 Broome, Joan, 244 Brounker, Sir Henry, 120–1

Index Brown, Sylvia, 178 Bruno, Giordano, 244 Buchanan, George, 93, 202 Burch, Dorothy, 183 Burgeus, Annas, 135–6 Burrough, Edward, 109 Byatt, A.S., 120 Calahorra, Diego Ortunez de, 89–90 Caldwell, Elizabeth, 53–4 Calvin, John, 78, 134–5, 201–2; Calvinist influences, 104, 139, 147 Camden, Carroll, 10 Camden, William, 74, 159, 244 Camus, Jean-Pierre, 95 Carr, Robert, Earl of Somerset, 40, 215 Cartwright, Thomas, 117 Cary, Elizabeth, 9, 11, 22, 52, 79, 93–5, 128, 137, 208–15, 301–2n38 Cary, Lucius, second Viscount Falkland, 208 Cary, Mary, 22, 63, 188–91, 193, 230, 244, 297–8n28 Cary, Sir Henry, 94–5, 208–9, 213 Caryl, Joseph, 163 Case, John, 31 Castiglione, Baldassare, 10, 30, 65, 142 Catechisme of the Severall Heads (Birch), 183 Catherine of Aragon, Queen, 29 Cavendish, Charles, 170 Cavendish, Lady Jane, 175, 229 Cavendish, Margaret, 10, 22, 56, 94, 96, 225–34, 303n59; letters, 126–8; plays, 175, 231–4, 303–4n70; poetry, 170–1 Cavendish, William, 170, 229–30 Caxton, William, 5, 65 Cecil, Lady Mildred Cooke, 83–4. See also Cooke sisters Cecil, William, 86 Cellier, Elizabeth, 60

Cellini, Benvenuto, 15 Certaine Quaeres (Speght), 41–2 Chaine of Pearle, A (Primrose), 159 Chaloner, Thomas, 7 Chamberlen forceps, 60–1 Chandieu, Antoine de la Roche, 147 Channel, Elinor, 184, 192 Chapman, George, 65, 90, 120, 156–7 Chapone, Sarah, 8 Charles I: as prince, 154; as king, 160, 181, 213 Charleton, Walter, 226 Charlewood, Alice, 244 Cheney, Donald, 140, 144 Chevers, Sarah, 22, 186–7 Chidley, Katherine, 182–3 Chidley, Samuel, 182 Child, J., 19 Child-Birth, The (Crooke), 56 Choice Experiences (Turner), 22, 109 Christian Oeconomy (Dillingham), 50 Christian State of Matrimonie, The (Bullinger), 30 Civil War: allusions to, 229–30; letters during, 123–6; meditations during, 107–11 Clapham, David, 33 Clarke, Alice, 54 Clarke, Danielle, 12 class as scholarly category, 15–16, 19, 22, 160, 182, 204, 208–9, 243–4 Cleaver, Robert, 30, 48, 49 Clement, Margaret, 28 Cleopatra, 97–8, 127, 196–7, 211–12 Clifford, Arthur, 164 Clifford, Francis, 207 Clifford, George, 207 Clifford, Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland, 150, 202–4 Clifford, Sir Robert, 120 Clinton, Elizabeth, Countess of Lincoln, 176, 178

349

Index Clitherow, Margaret, 21, 102–3 closet drama, 22, 174–5 Clytemnestra, 79–83 Coe, Jane, 244 Coeffetau, M.N., 96 Cole, Mary, 185 Coligny, Gaspar de, Admiral of France, 135–6 Collins, An, 129, 160–4, 242, 295n170 Collins, Randall, 12, 37 Colloquies (Erasmus), 32–3, 71 Comenius, Jan Amos, 154 Comensoli, Viviana, 175 Compleat Midwife’s Practice, The (Culpeper), 61 computer-based projects, 6 Comus (Milton), 238 Concealed Fancies, The (Cavendish and Brackley), 175, 229 Confession and Conversion (Livingston), 106 Consolatione Philosophiae, De (Boethius), 74 Constitutions of Oxford, 27 constructionism, 4 controversy about women, 37–46 Convent of Pleasure, The (Cavendish), 231–4 convents, 22, 28, 165, 167–8 Cooke, Sir Anthony and Lady Anne, 83–4, 87 Cooke sisters, Anne, Elizabeth, Katherine, and Mildred, 32, 83, 93, 128. See also Bacon, Anne Cookham, 152–3, 202, 207–8 Copia of Words and Ideas, On (Erasmus), 72 Copland, Robert, 52 Copy of a Letter, The (Parker), 183 Copy of a Letter, The (Whitney), 129–31 Corneille, Pierre, 97–8, 172 corona sonnets, 157–8

350

Cotton, Priscilla, 185 Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, The (Wroth), 10, 90, 156, 216–22, 302n45; emblematic constructs, 216, 218–20, 222; as roman à clef, 216–18 Countesse of Lincolne’s Nurserie, The (Clinton), 176, 178 Courtney, Edward, 105, 289–90n102 Coverdale, Miles, 30, 104 Cowley, Abraham, 124, 172 Cranmer, Archbishop Thomas, 86, 99– 100, 104, 113 Crashawe, Elizabeth and William, 57 Crawford, Patricia, 12, 23, 188 Creede, Thomas, 137 Cressy, David, 56 Cromwell, Elizabeth, 189, 299n223 Cromwell, Oliver, 162–3, 181, 183–5, 190–3, 237, 244 Crooke, Helkiah, 61, 169 Crouch, Samuel, 214 Cry of a Stone, The (Trapnel), 191 Cullen, Patrick, 9, 12 Culpeper, Nicholas, 61 Culros, Lady. See Melville, Elizabeth Curiositate, De (Plutarch), 74 cyberculture, ix, 6 D’Avenant, Sir William, 165–6 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds, 153 Dailey, Barbara Ritter, 108 Daniel, Samuel, 195, 213 Dante, 138, 238 Davies, Lady Eleanor, 160, 181–2, 242–3 Davies, Sir John, 92, 181, 195, 209 Davies, Stevie, 188 Defence of Poetry, A (Sidney), 195, 199 Defense of Good Women, The (Elyot), 37–8 Dekker, Thomas, 45, 52, 142 Denham, Henry, 117, 119 Denny, Edward, Baron of Waltham, 216

Index Denny, Lady Joan, 102 Dering, Edward, 88, 117 Descartes, René, 170 ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ (Lanyer), 149, 152–3, 202, 207–8 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 122, 146 devout treatise upon the Pater noster, A (Roper), 66, 69–73 Diallecticon viri boni et literati (Ponet), 87 Diana (Montemayor, trans. Yong), 217 Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, The, 51–2, 122 Diary of Ralph Josselin, The, 57–8 Digby, Kenelm, 170 Dillingham, Francis, 50 Diotrephe (Camus, trans. DuVerger), 95 Directory for Public Worship, 179 Discours nouvel prouvant la pluralité des mondes (Bourel), 227 Discourse of the Artificiall Beauty of Women, A (Haydocke), 50 Discourse of Life and Death, A (de Mornay, trans. Herbert), 197–8 Discovery of a World in the Moon, The (Wilkins), 227 Dissertatio logica de ingenii muliebris (van Schurman), 34–5 Divine Songs and Meditations (Collins), 160–4 Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Kelso), 10 Dod, John, 30, 48–9 domestic sequestration: opposed, 18; recommended, 30–1 Donne, John, 91, 93, 129, 152, 157, 165–6, 173, 193, 195, 199, 205, 235, 242 Double Marriage, The (Beaumont and Fletcher), 52 Douglas, Sir Archibald, 181 Dowriche, Anne, 3, 6, 129, 135–7, 242

Drake, Joan, 22 Drayton, Michael, 94 Dryden, John, 172 DuBellay, Joachim, 78, 133 Dudley, Guildford, 117 Dudley, Thomas, 168 Dugdale, Gilbert, 53 DuPerron, Cardinal Jacques, 94, 208, 213, 215 DuVerger, Susan, 93, 95–6 DuVergers Humble Reflections, 95 Dyalogue Defensyve for Women, A (Vaughan), 38 Dyer, Mary, 187 E., T., 47, 49 Early English Books Online (EEBO), 6 Early Modern Englishwoman (Cullen and Travitsky), 9, 12 early modern period: comparisons with postmodernism, 5, 12, 26, 170; education, 5, 15, 19, 26–37; emblems, 31, 48; obstetrics, 56–62; paradoxes, x, 20; selfhood, 128–39, 159, 174, 218; trends in scholarship, 4–6, 12, 19–21 East, Thomas, 90 Eastward Ho (Chapman, Jonson, Marston), 90 Edgcumbe, Piers, 135 Edgeworth, Roger, 50 Edward II (E. Cary), 213–15 Edward VI, King, 76, 79, 85, 99–100, 113, 117 Edwardes, Richard, 84 Edwards, Thomas, 182, 190 Egerton, Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater, 49 Egerton, Sir Thomas, Lord Chancellor, 147 Eikonoklastes (Milton), 112 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 5, 24 Elementarie (Mulcaster), 129

351

Index Eliot, T.S., 16–17 Eliza’s Babes (‘Eliza’), 160–2, 164 Elizabeth (daughter of James): as Princess, 154, 177, 202, 204; as Queen of Bohemia, 162, 189 Elizabeth Rex (Findley), 74 Elizabeth Tudor: as Princess, 16, 26, 66, 73–6, 103, 172; as Queen, 37, 39, 74, 121, 137, 142, 159, 169, 171, 195, 204, 284n39 Elizabeth of York, 67 Elstob, Elizabeth, 8 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 31, 37 Enemy of Idlenesse, The (Fulwood), 120 Englands Recovery (Sprigg), 190 English Gentlewoman, The (Braithwait), 31 English Housewife, The (Markham), 50, 61 English Literary Renaissance, 6–7 English Secretarie, The (Day), 120 Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, Les (Fontenelle), 227–8 Epitome of History of Faire Argenis, An (Man), 96 Erasmus, Desiderius, 27, 30, 32–3, 37, 39, 66, 69, 71–3, 79–83, 104–5 Erler, Mary, 23 Essay to Revive Antient Education of Gentlewomen, An (Makin), 154, 168 Essayes (Montaigne, trans. Florio), 65 Ester hath hang’d Haman (Sowernam), 42 Esther, Queen, 42, 121 États et Empires de la lune, Les (de Bergerac), 227 eucharistic formula, 99–100 Eukleria (van Schurman), 36 Eulalia, 30, 33 Euphues (Lyly), 40 Euripides, 78–83 Eusebius, 77 Evans, Arise, 184, 192 Evans, Katharine, 22, 186–7

352

Evelyn, John, 141 Evelyn, Mary, 226 Evenemens Singuliers, Les (Camus, trans. DuVerger), 95 Exceeding Riches of Grace, The (Jessey), 22, 108–9, 192 Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort (de Mornay), 91 Exclusion Crisis, 213 Ezell, Margaret, 12 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 217 Fage, Mary, 160 Fairfax, General Thomas, 124–5, 188 Fairfax, Mary, 47, 123–6 Fairfax sisters, 124–6 Falkland, Lady. See Cary, Elizabeth Fames Roule (Fage), 160 family, theories of, 47 Farlie, Robert, 31 Feake, Christopher, 189 Felch, Susan, 117, 134 Fell, Margaret, 22, 186–7 Feroli, Teresa, 179 Ferrers, George, 7 Ferrers, Richard, 45 Fifth Monarchists, 21–2, 186–93 Filmer, Sir Robert, 49 Findley, Timothy, 74 Finke, Laurie, 20 First Blast of the Trumpet, the (Knox), 39 First Examinacyon, The (Askew), 100–2 Fisher, Bishop John, 67–8, 99 Fisher, Mary, 22, 187 Fishmonger, Austin, 16 Fisken, Beth Wynne, 91 Fitzalan, Henry, fourteenth Earl of Arundel, 79, 285n49 Fitzalan, Ladies Jane and Mary, 32, 285n51. See also Lumley, Lady Jane Fitzwilliam, Lady Jane, 102

Index Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (Tusser), 51 Fleet Prison, 181–2 Fleming, Judith, 23 Fletcher, John, 52 Florio, John, 64 Floures of Philosophie (Plat), 131 Flower of Frendship, The (Tilney), 30, 39 fluency in languages, 16, 23, 32, 36, 42, 65, 77–9, 117, 132–3, 141, 153–4, 176, 208 Folowynge of Christ, The (Whitford), 113 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 227–8, 230 Forman, Simon, 149 Forty-Two Articles, 100 Foucault, Michel, 21, 24 Fowler, William, 198 Fox, George, 186 Fox, Thomas, 214 Foxe, John, 51, 100 Franco, Veronica, 14, 27 Fraser, Antonia, 16 Fraunce, Abraham, 195, 202, 223 French Historie, The (Dowriche), 135–7 Frith, John, 101 Frith, Mary, 45–6 Frye, Susan, 17 Fulwood, William, 120 Gallagher, Catherine, 100, 227 Galloping Girls, 35 Gangraena (Edwards), 190 Gardiner, Bishop Stephen, 101 Garnier, Robert, 91, 195–6 Gaveston, 213–14 Gee, John Archer, 72 gender as scholarly category, 12, 15 generatione animalium, de (Harvey), 58 generatione hominis, De (Paré), 58 Geneva Bible, 92, 301n27 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 15 Gérard, Marc-Antoine de, 98

Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 15 Giardino cosmographico (Sylva), 88, 134 Gidea Hall, 83 Giggs, Margaret, 28 Gillespie, Katharine, 182, 184 Glass of the Sinful Soul, The (Elizabeth), 66, 74–6, 103 Gloriana’s Face (Cerasno and WynneDavies), 11 Godlie Dreame, Ane (Melville), 4, 137–9 Godlie Forme of Household Government, A (Dod and Cleaver), 30, 48–9 Godwin, Bishop Francis, 124 Goldberg, Jonathan, 25, 91 Golden Book of Christen Matrimonye, The (Becon), 51 Gondibert (D’Avenant), 165 Gonell, William, 27 Goodcole, Henry, 54 Gordon, Lady Jean, 133 Goreau, Angeline, 9 Gorhambury, 80 Gospelles of Dystaves, The, 18, 69 Gosse, Sir Edmund, 235 Gosson, Stephen, 44 Gosynhyll, Edward, 38 Goulianos, Joan, 8 Graham, Elspeth, 9 Graphina (E. Cary), 209 Greenblatt, Stephen, 77, 100 Greer, Germaine, 9 Greville, Fulke, 205 Grey, Lady Jane, 37, 79, 84, 117, 291n115 Gruffith, William, 132 Grymeston, Elizabeth, 59, 176–7, 242 Guise, Duke of, 136 Gunaikeion (Heywood), 46 Gutenberg, Johannes, 147 Hacking, Ian, 4–5

353

Index Haec Homo (Austin), 46 Haec Vir, 44 Halkett, Lady Anna, 111–12, 125 Hallett, Monsignor, 77 Haman, 43, 121 Hamlet, 113 Hamton, Anne, 53 handfull of holesome hearbes, A (Wheathill), 118–19 Hannay, Margaret, 91 Hannay, Patrick, 48 Happy Husband, A (P. Hannay), 48 Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subiectes, An (Aylmer), 39 Harington, Sir John, 199, 217, 299n6 Harley, Lady Brilliana, 123–5 Harper, Charles, 214 Harpsfield, Nicholas, 76 Harvey, Elizabeth, 11 Hay, Lord James, 216 Haydocke, Richard, 50 Hecatodistichon (Seymour sisters), 78 Heldke, Lisa, 52 Helen of Troy, 81–2 Helgerson, Richard, 20 Henderson, Katherine Usher, 9 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 95, 160, 213– 14 Henry VIII, as father, 79; as husband, 37, as king, 99, 103–5, 114 Hepburn, James, fourth Earl of Bothwell, 133–4 Heptameron (de Navarre), 230 Her Own Life (Graham et al.), 9 Herbert, George, 91, 152, 205 Herbert, Mrs Magdalen, 52 Herbert, Lady Mary Sidney, 10–11, 22, 78, 96, 128, 139, 149, 175, 209, 215, 218; as translator, 91–3; as translator and poet, 195–202 Herbert, Philip, fourth Earl of Pembroke, 40, 123

354

Herbert, Susan, Countess of Montgomery, 217, 224 Herbert, William, third Earl of Pembroke, 156; as Amphilanthus, 217, 222 Herrick, Robert, 152 Heywood, Thomas, 46, 52, 107 Hezekiah, King, 89 Hic Mulier, 44 Hinds, Hilary, 192 Hiscock, Andrew, 227 Historie of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Camden), 159 history, concepts of, 4, 7, 12, 63–4, 128– 9, 193–4, 239–40 History of Don Quixote of the Mancha, The (Cervantes, trans. Shelton), 217 History of the Reformation (Knox), 132 Histrio-mastix (Prynne), 45 Hit-him-Home, Joan, 43 Hobbes, Thomas, 170 Hobby, Elaine, 11 Hoby, Lady Margaret, 51–2, 56 Hoby, Sir Thomas, 65, 122 Hogrefe, Pearl, 10 Holbein, Hans, 69 Holland, Philemon, 65 Holyrood library, 132 Honest Whore, The (Dekker), 52 Honey on the Rod (Major), 22, 110, 160– 1, 163–4, 244 Honour of Virtue, The, 57 Hooke, Christopher, 56 Hooker, Thomas, 22 Hooton, Elizabeth, 184–5 Horace (Corneille, trans. Philips), 98 Horace, 74 Hosington, Brenda, 140, 144 Housholders Philosophie (Tasso), 18 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 7, 102 Howard, Jean, 7 Howard, Queen Katherine, 75

Index Howard, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, 89 Howgill, Mary, 185 Hubert, Francis, 213 Huguenot Psalter, 92 Humble Petition, The (Chidley), 182, 184 Hume, Alexander, 138 Hunsdon, Lord, 149 Hunter, Alistair, 65 Hutchinson, Anne, 187 Hutchinson, Lucy, 18 Hutton, Dorothy, 124–6 Hutton, Sarah, 227 Hymnes or Sacred Songs (Hume), 138 Hyrde, Richard, 29, 66 illiteratus, 5 Imitatione Christi, De (à Kempis), 66–8 Index librorum prohibitorum, 32 Inglis, Esther, 63, 137, 139–48, 293nn143, 148 Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 35 Institutione Feminae Christianae (Vives), 29 Instruction of Christian Women (Hyrde), 29 Iphigenia at Aulis (Lumley), 78–83, 209 Ireton, Bridget, 189, 299n223 Isabel, Queen (Edward II), 214 Isocrates, 79, 285n48 Jagodzinski, Cecile, 24 James I, King, 37, 120, 122, 133, 141, 144, 154 James, Susan, 104 Jane Anger her Protection for Women, 39–40 Jardine, Lisa, 7, 92 Jephthah, 80 Jessey, Henry, 22, 108–9, 189, 192, 244 Jewel, Bishop John, 78, 86–7 Jinner, Sarah, 22 Job, 223 Johnson, Richard, 40–1

Jonas, Richard, 61 Jones, Inigo, 123 Jones, Richard, 130–1 Jonson, Ben, 107, 129, 149, 156, 164, 207, 232 Joscelin, Elizabeth, 56, 59, 176, 178–9, 242 Joscelin, Taurell, 178 Josselin, Jane and Ralph, 57–8 Jowitt, Claire, 171 Juniper Lecture, A (Taylor), 43 Just and Equall Ballance Discovered, The, 22 Kant, Immanuel, 4 Keeble, N.H., 9 Kelley, Edward, 141 Kello, Bartholomew, 140 Kelly-Gadol, Joan, 10 Kelso, Ruth, 10 Kempe, Margery, 5 Kempis, Thomas à, 66–8, 98, 113 Kendal Diary, The (A. Clifford), 122–3 Kennedy, William J., 150, 205 Killigrew, Anne, 235 Killigrew, Katherine, 88. See also Cooke sisters King, Margaret L., 21 King’s Primer, The, 112 Kinnamon, Noel, 91 Kissing the Rod (Greer et al.), 9 Kitchin Booke (Magdalen Herbert), 52 Knapp, Robert, 31 Knole Diary, The (A. Clifford), 122–3 Knott, John, 100 Knox, John, 39, 132 Kristeva, Julia, 161 Krontiris, Tina, 11, 90 Kyme, Thomas, 101 Labadie, Jean de, 34 Lac puerorum (Holt), 28 LaCapra, Dominick, 7

355

Index Ladies Companion or English Midwife, The (Sermon), 58 Ladies Legacy, A (Richardson), 176, 179–80 Ladies Looking Glasse, My (Rich), 43 Ladurie, Emmanuel, 23 Lady Falkland: Her Life, The, 94, 208–9 Laing, David, 141 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 91 Lambeth Conference (1584–5), 87 Lamentacion of a Gentlewoman, The (Whitney), 129, 132 Lamentacion of a synner, The (Parr), 103–7 Lanyer, Aemilia, 11, 91, 129, 148–53, 195, 202–8, 215, 294n150 Latimer, Bishop Hugh, 99, 104 Lattre Examinacyon, The (Askew), 100–2 Latz, Dorothy, 106 Laud, Archbishop William, 181, 183, 188, 245 Laughlin, Marie, 149, 152, 204 Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights, The (T.E.), 47, 49 Lawes, Henry, 238 Lay by Your Needles, Ladies (Trill et al.), 18 Learned Maid,The (van Schurman, trans. Barksdale), 34, 36–7 Lee, Sir Henry, 94 Legacy for Saints, A (Trapnel), 191–3 Leo, Johannes, 148 Letters (A. Stuart), 120–2 letters, theories of, 119–20 Lewalski, Barbara K., 11 Lewis, C.S., 85 Leyster, Judith, 15 Lilburne, John, 184 Litanie (Cranmer), 113 literacy, 23 litteratus, 5

356

Little Horns Doom and Downfall (M. Cary), 189–90 Livingston, Helen, Countess of Linlithgow, 106–7 Livre contenant cinquante Emblemes, Ce (Inglis), 140, 143, 147 Livre de l’Ecclesiaste (Inglis), 144 Lock, Anne Vaughan, 78, 88–9, 93, 117, 129, 134–5, 137, 201, 242, 244 Lodge, Thomas, 209 Long, Kingesmill, 96 Looking Glasse for Maried Folkes, A (Snawsel), 33, 48 Love, Harold, 140 Love’s Victory (Wroth), 175, 216, 222–5 Lucar, Elizabeth, 16 Ludlow, Dorothy, 108 Lumley, Lady Jane, 22, 63, 78–83, 175, 209 Lumley, Lord John, 79 Luther, Martin, 33, 244 Lydgate, John, 7 Lyly, John, 40, 244 Lyn, Walter, 33 Macbeth, Lady, 211 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, x, 47 Mack, Phyllis, 110, 188 Maclean, Ian, 10 Magdalen, Mary, 151 Magdalia, 71 Maids and Mistresses (Frye and Robertson), 11 Major, Elizabeth, 22, 110, 160–4, 242, 244 Makin, Bathsua, 36, 154, 168. See also Reginald, Bathsua Mamacker, Hieronymous, 114 Man for All Seasons, A (Bolt), 71 Man in the Moon, The (Godwin), 124 Man, Judith, 93, 96–7 Manley, Delarivier, 22

Index Mantova, Benedetto da, 105, 189– 90n102 Mar, Earl of, 144 Marc Antoine (Garnier), 91, 196–7 Marcus, Leah, 20, 74 Markham, Gervase, 32, 50, 61 Marot, Clément, 93 Martin, Dorcas, 117–18 Martyr, Peter, 86 Mary Tudor: as Princess, 29, 32, 56, 78, 103; as Queen, 77, 99–100 Masten, Jeffrey, 25 Matchinske, Megan, 103 Matthew Bible, 101 Maxey, Anne, 244 May, Steven, 91 McBride, Kari Boyd, 149 McCutcheon, Elizabeth, 70 McGrath, Lynette, 149 McKenzie, D.F., 25 McManus, Barbara, 9 Meale, Carol M., 23 Measure for Measure, 42, 113, 223 mechanism, 170, 296n180 meditations, 99–112 Meditations of Mans Mortalitie (Sutcliffe), 107 Meditations on the Twenty and Fifth Psalm (Halkett), 111 Meg (Vogel), 71–2 Melissus, Paul, 141 Melville, Elizabeth, 4, 6, 137–9, 292– 3n137 Memoirs of Several Ladies (Ballard), 8, 275n13 Mendelson, Sara, 12, 23, 55, 122, 127, 188, 227 Menelaus, 81–2 menstruation, attitudes towards, 61 Merchant Royall, The (Wilkinson), 50 Merchant Taylors: Company, 16; school, 31

Message from God, A (Channel), 184 Microcosmographia (Crooke), 61, 169 Middleton, Thomas, 45 midwifery, practices and licensing, 58– 61 Midwives Booke, The (Sharp), 58 Midwives Just Petition, The, 60 Milton, John, 12, 129, 190, 193, 238 Minerva Britanna (Peacham), 48 Mirrhor of Modestie, The (Salter), 31 Mirroir de l’âme pécheresse, Le (Navarre), 66, 73–6 Mirror of the Simple Soul, The (Porete), 21 Mirror of the Worlde, The (Ortelius, trans. Tanfield), 94 Mirrour of Princely Deedes, The (Tyler), 89–90 Mirrour for Magistrates, A (Baldwin et al.), 7 Mirroure of Golde for the Synfull Soule, The (Beaufort), 66–8 Miscelanae, Meditations, Memoratives (Grymeston), 59, 176–7 miscellany, Elizabethan, 7 Miserere (Psalm 51), 75, 117, 134, 200–2 Montaigne, Michel de, 64 Montenay, Georgette de, 140, 143, 147, 194 Montrose, Louis, 7 Monument of Matrones, The (Bentley), 7, 116–19 Moore, Mary, 12 More, Edward, 39 More, Sir Thomas, 27–9, 37, 66, 76–7, 99, 228, 242 Mornay, Philippe de, 91, 195, 197–8 Morning and Evening Prayer (Tyrwhit), 114–15 Mort de Pompée, La (Corneille), 97 Mortalities Memorandum (Speght), 155 Mothers Blessing, The (Leigh), 176–8 Mothers Counsell, The (M.R.), 176

357

Index Mothers Legacie, The (Joscelin), 56, 176, 178–9 Mothers Teares, A, 176 Moundford, Mrs Mary, 153 Mouzell for Melastomus, A (Speght), 41–2, 155 Mueller, Janel, 74, 113 Mulcaster, Richard, 31, 129, 131, 136, 142 Munda, Constantia, 42–3 Munday, Anthony, 217 Murray, Lucy Hunter, 10 Murther, Murther, 53 Musa Virginea (Reginald), 154 Mush, Rev. John, 21, 102–3

Ochino, Bernardino, 78, 84–5 Octonaries (Chandieu), 147 Olor Iscanus (Vaughan), 172 Ong, Walter J., S.J., 23 Orgel, Stephen, 25 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto, trans. Harington), 217 Ortelius, Abraham, 93, 208, 215 Orwin, Thomas, 137 Osborne, Dorothy, 123–5, 170 Othello, 210–11 Overbury Scandal, 215, 302n42 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 90, 215 Owen, Anne (‘Lucasia’), 172, 236 Owen, Jane, 106

Napier, Richard, 161 Nashe, Thomas, 40 Navarre, Queen Marguerite de, 16, 66, 75–6, 78, 230 necessarie, fit and convenient education of a gentlewoman, The (W.P.), 31 Needles Excellency, The (Taylor), 17 needlework: component of education, 16; pastime or labour, 18–19, 296–7n6; preempting criticism of, 168–9 New Atlantis (Bacon), 228 New Discourse of Trade, A (Child), 19 New Model Army, 183 New and More Exact Mappe, A (M. Cary), 189–90, 227 Newcastle, Duchess of. See Cavendish, Margaret Newcomb, Rev. Thomas, 235 nobilitate et praecellentia sexus foeminei, de (Agrippa), 18, 33–4, 150 Nonsuch mansion, 80 Norfolk, Duke of, 16 North, Thomas, 65, 74

P., W., 31 Palatine, Elector Frederick, 152, 177, 217 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Wroth), 156–8, 167, 216, 223 Paradeiser Haus, 35–6 Paradise of Women, The (Travitsky), 8–9 Paré, Ambroise, 58 Parker, Archbishop Matthew, 86 Parker, Henry, 198 Parker, Thomas, 183 Parr, Queen Kateryn, 16, 32, 66, 76, 78, 89, 99, 102–6, 113–15, 172, 289n100 Parr, Susanna, 185 Parry, Graham, 203 Parry, Thomas, 115 Parthenicon (Weston), 141–2, 143–4, 147–8 Passe, Simon van de, 92, 216 Pastor Fido, Il (Guarini), 223 Patriarcha (Filmer), 49 patriarchy, assumptions of, x, 31–2, 37, 39, 44, 49 Pattern of Piety, A (Ley), 22 Patterson, Annabel, 25

Observations in Midwifery (Willoughby), 58–9

358

Index Peacham, Henry, 48 Pemberton, Caroline, 74 Pembroke, Countess of. See Herbert, Mary Sidney Pepys, Samuel, 226 Perdita project, 6 Peters, Hugh, 189 Petrarch, Francesco, 91, 195, 198–9 Petrarchism, 12, 212–13, 216 Phaer, Thomas, 7 Philips, James (‘Antenor’), 171 Philips, Katherine (‘Orinda’), 10–11, 93–4, 234–40; allusions to lesbianism, 173, 242; juvenilia, 172–3, 175; poetry, 171–4; translations, 97–8 Pikeryng, John, 52 Plant, Marjorie, 243 Plat, Sir Hugh, 131 Plato, 4, 228 Pleasant Quippes (Haydocke), 50 Plutarch, 65, 74 Poëmata (Weston), 141, 143–4, 147–8 Poems and Fancies (Cavendish), 170–1 Pommaunder of Prayers, The (Becon), 113 Ponet, Bishop John, 87–8 Poole, Elizabeth, 184 Poole, Kristen, 179 Porete, Marguerite, 21 Positions (Mulcaster), 31, 142 Possession (Byatt), 120 postmodernism: assumptions, 4, 24; hybridity, 5; links to the early modern, 12; technology, 6 Praise and Dispraise of Women, The (Pyrrye), 39 Praise of Eight Ladyes of Queene Elizabeth’s Court (Edwardes), 84 prayers, as writing form, 112–13 Prayers or Meditations (K. Parr), 103–4, 113–14 Prayse of all women, The (Gosynhyll), 38 Precatio Dominica (Erasmus), 66

Presot, Marie, 140 Primrose, Diana, 129, 159, 169 Procter, William, 154 Procula, 151, 206–7 Progymnasmata (Aphthonius), 92 Protectorate writing, 110–12 Proude Wyves Pater Noster, The, 39 Proverbes de Salomon, Les (Inglis), 143–4, 146 Prudentius, 71 Prynne, William, 45 Psalms, 75–6; Penitentials, 199–202, 300n9 Pynson, Richard, 66 Pyrrye, C., 39 Quakers, 22, 184–7 Queenes Prayers, The (K. Parr), 114 Radcliffe, Countess Anne, 102 Radcliffe, John, 79 Rande, Mary. See Cary, Mary Rastell, William, 66 Ratcliffe, Jane, 22 Raynalde, Thomas, 61 Reason’s Disciples (Smith), 10 Reasons Against Independent Government (Edwards), 182 Reginald, Bathsua, 22, 129, 149, 153–5, 242 Regiomontanus, 5 Remarkable Letter, A (Howgill), 185 Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, The (Haselkorn and Travitsky), 11 Renaissance Notion of Woman, The (Maclean), 10 Renaissance Society of America, 6 Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron, The (E. Cary), 95 Report and Plea (Trapnel), 191–3 Resurrection of the Witnesses, The (M. Cary), 189

359

Index Reynolds, Myra, 8 Rheims-Douay Bible, 69 Rich, Richard, 102 Richard III, 66–7 Richardson, Elizabeth, 176, 179–80 Richardson, Sir Thomas, 180 Riche, Barnabe, 43 Richey, Esther, 149–50, 205 Ridley, Bishop Nicholas, 86, 99 Roaring Girl, The (Dekker and Middleton), 45 Roberts, Josephine A., 25, 90, 156, 221 Role, Margaret, 189, 299n223 Roman Articles (1554), 86 Ronsard, Pierre de, 133 Roper, Margaret, 27, 66, 69–73, 76, 242, 275n19 Rose, Mary Beth, 74 Rossi, Properzia de, 15 Rösslin, Eucharius, 61 Rowse, A.L., 149 Russell, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby, 83, 87–8. See also Cooke sisters Russell, Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford, 209 Russell, Lady Margaret, 123, 149 Rutherford, Mistress, 106–7 Saint Bartholomew Massacre, 135–7 Saint Jacques, Rue, murders in, 135–6 Salome (E. Cary), 209, 211–13 Salter, Thomas, 31 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Lanyer), 149–52, 202–8 Sanctuary for Ladies, A (Tuvil), 43 Sandford, Sir Hugh, 92 Sarasohn, Lisa, 227 Scaliger, Joseph, 141 Schleiner, Louise, 83, 89, 91 Schnell, Lisa, 204 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 151

360

Schole House of Women, The (Gosynhyll), 38 School of Abuse, The (Gosson), 44 Schurman, Anna Maria van, 34, 36–7, 154, 189, 279n62 Scott, James, 26 Scott, Joan, 11 Scott-Elliot, A.H., 140 Scripture-Prophecies Opened (Avery), 183 Scudéry, Mademoiselle de, 124 Scudéry, Monsieur de, 98 Selby, Ellinor, 124 Senecan drama, 196–7, 208 Seres, William, 116, 119 Sermon, William, 58 service, domestic, 19 Seven Sorrowes, The (Copland), 52 Seventeenth Century Studies (Gosse), 235 Seymour, Ladies Ann, Margaret, and Jane, 32, 78 Seymour, Lord Admiral Thomas, 75, 115 Seymour, Lord Protector Edward Somerset, 75, 79 Seymour, William, 120 Shakespeare, 129, 242 Sharp, Jane, 58 Shaver, Anne, 231 Shelton, Thomas, 217 Shepherd, Simon, 9 Shirley, Elizabeth, 28 Short Relation, A (Evans and Chevers), 187 Sidney, Sir Philip, 91–2, 156–7, 195, 216 Silent But for the Word (Hannay), 11 silk workers, 15, 18 Six Articles, Act of, 99 Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Brink), 6 Slater, Mariam, 55 Slights, William, 25 Smith, Hilda, 10 Snawsel, Robert, 33, 48

Index sociology of texts, 25 Songes and Sonettes (Tottel), 7 Southwell, Robert, 205 Sowernam, Ester, 42 Speght, Rachel, 22, 37, 41–2, 46, 149, 153–5, 242 Spenser, Edmund, 91, 129, 192, 195, 218 Spiritual Thrift (Warren), 107–8 Sprigg, Joshua, 190 Stanhope, Anne, Countess of Hertford, 102 Stanhope, Sir John, 121 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 239 Stapleton, Thomas, 71 Starkey, David, 74 Starn, Randolph, 20 Stationers’ Company, 243–5 Statute of Artificers, 19; of Treasons, 52 Staub, Susan, 53 Steen, Sara Jayne, 120 Steinberg, Theodore, 91 Stenton, Doris, 8 Sterne, Laurence, 61 Sternhold, Thomas and John Hopkins, 202 Stone, Lawrence, 47, 57 Strafford, Earl of, 183, 188 Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, 53 Strange and Wonderful Newes (Trapnel), 191–3 Strier, Richard, 21 Stuart, Lady Arbella, 120–2, 154, 204 Stuart, Esmé, 40 Stuart, Henry, Lord Darnley, 133 Stuart, Mary, Queen of Scots, 16–17, 120, 128–9, 132–4, 136, 144–5, 292nn132, 133 Stubbes, Philip, 44–5 Susanna’s Apologie (S. Parr), 185 Sutcliffe, Alice, 107 Sweet Nosegay, A (Whitney), 129, 131–2 Swetnam, Joseph, 41–3

Sylva, Dr Bartolo, 88, 134 Tablet for Gentlewomen, A (Seres), 116, 119 Talbot, Gilbert, Earl of Shrewsbury, 121 Taming of the Shrew, The, 49, 210 Tanfield, Elizabeth and Lawrence, 94, 208–9 Targoff, Ramie, 112–13 Tasso, Torquato, 18 Tattlewell, Mary, 43 Taylor, Jeremy, 124 Taylor, John, 17, 43, 195 Temple, William, 124 Tenth Muse, The (Bradstreet), 168–70 Testimonie of the Touch-Stone, A (Fell), 186 Thesaurus Oeconomiae (Case), 31 Thimelby, Edward, 166 Thimelby, Gertrude, 22, 164–7, 242 Thimelby, Winefrid, 22, 164, 167 Thirty-Nine Articles, 100 Thornton, Mrs Alice, 59–60, 125 Those that meet ... at the Steeplehouse (Travers), 110–11 Three Partes of Commentaries (Tymme), 135 Tilney, Edmund, 30, 39 Timber (Jonson), 164 Tixall Letters (A. Clifford), 164, 167 Tixall Poetry (A. Clifford), 164–8 ‘To the Angell Spirit of ... Sir Philip Sidney,’ 92 To the Priests and People of England (Cotton and Cole), 185 Tombeau de Margeurite de Valois, Le (DuBellay), 78 Tottel, Richard, 7 Tragedy of Mariam, The (E. Cary), 9, 52, 79, 94, 137, 175, 209–13 translation, scholarly approaches to, 64– 5, 73 transubstantiation, 21, 99–100

361

Index transvestism, 45, 280nn70, 71 Trapnel, Anna, 21, 188, 191–3, 242–3 Travers, Rebecca, 110–11 Travitsky, Betty, 8–9, 12 Treatise against Painting, A (Tuke), 50–1 Trent, Council of, 32 Tres Thomae (Stapleton), 71 Tribble, Evelyn, 24 Trill, Suzanne, 149–50, 205 Trionfo della Morte (Petrarch), 91, 198–9 Tristitia, De (More, trans. Basset), 28, 76–7 Triumph of Death, The (Sidney Herbert), 198–9 Trodden Down Strength (Hooker), 22 True Account, A (Evans and Chevers), 187 True discourse of ... Elizabeth Caldwell, A (Dugdale), 53–4 True Relation of ... Bloody Murther, A, 53 Trueth of ... Murthering, The, 53 Tuke, Thomas, 50–1 Turner, Jane, 22, 109 Tusser, Thomas, 51 Tutbury Castle, 16 Tuvil, Daniel, 43 Twelve Proposals (M. Cary), 189–91 Twysden, Lady Isabella, 123–4 Tyler, Margaret, 11, 19, 78, 89–91, 93 Tymme, Thomas, 135 Tyndale, William, 27, 99, 101 Tyrwhit, Lady Elizabeth, 63, 113–15, 118, 172 Tyrwhit, Sir Robert, 114–15 Udall, Nicholas, 32, 78 Urania. See Countess of Montgomery’s Urania Urban VIII, Pope, 35 Utley, Frances Lee, 10 Utopia (More), 228

362

Vaughan, Henry, 172, 193, 240 Vaughan, Robert, 38 Vautrollier, Jacqueline, 244 Velde, Jan van de, 141 Venn, Anne, 22, 109–10 Ventriloquized Voices (Harvey), 11 Verbrugge, Rita, 72–3 Verity Speech, 35 Verney, Lady Mary and Sir Ralph, 55 Vertuous Scholehous of Ungracious Women, The (Lyn), 33 Vir Bonus (Moundford), 154 virescit vulnere virtus (virtue flourishes by wounding), 16, 137 Virtue of Necessity (Hobby), 11 Visit to the Spirit in Prison, A (Blackborrow), 185 Vives, Juan Luis, 27, 29–32 Vogel, Paula, 71–2 Vulgate Bible, 69, 75 Waller, Edmund, 165, 172 Waller, Gary, 91 Walpole, Horace, 8 Ward, Mary, 34–6, 279n62 Warning from the Lord, A (Biddle), 185 Warren, Elizabeth, 107–8 Way of Reconciliation, A (Russell), 87–8 Wayne, Valerie, 30 Weamys, Anna, 18 Webster, John, 52, 142 Wentworth, Lady Anne, 96 Weston, Elizabeth Jane, 63, 129, 139–48 Westward-Hoe (Dekker and Webster), 142 Wharton, Edith, 203 Whatley, William, 50 Wheathill, Anne, 63, 113, 118–19, 242 White Devil, The (Webster), 52 White, Micheline, 65 Whitford, Richard, 113 Whitgift, Archbishop John, 87, 117

Index Whitney, Geoffrey, 130–1 Whitney, Isabella, 3, 6, 11, 19, 128–32, 242, 291–2nn129, 130 Widdrington, Lady Frances and Sir Thomas, 47, 57, 124–5 Wife of Bath, 34 Wight, Sarah, 22, 108–10, 189, 192 Wilkins, John, 227, 230 Wilkinson, Robert, 50 Williams, Gweno, 227 Willoughby, Lady Elizabeth and Sir Francis, 54–5 Willoughby, Percivall, 58–9 Wilson, Katharina M., 9 Wilton, 123 Wise Virgin’s Lamp Burning, A (Venn), 22, 109–10 Wither, George, 107 Woeirot, Pierre, 144, 194 Woman Killed with Kindness, A (Heywood), 52 Woman’s Bible, The (Stanton), 239 Woman’s Sharp Revenge, The (Tattle-well), 43 Women and Gender in Early Modern England (Cullen and Travitsky), 12 Women and Literature in Britain (Wilcox), 11

Women, Texts and Histories (Brant and Purkiss), 11 Women, Writing, History (Grundy and Wiseman), 11 Womens Speaking Justified (Fell), 186 Woodbridge, John, 168 Woodbridge, Linda, 17 Woods, Susanne, 149 Woolf, Virginia, 36, 226 Word in Season, A (M. Cary), 189 Worde, Wynkyn de, 5, 18, 65–6 Worth of Women, The (Ferrers), 45 Woudhuysen, Henry, 140 Wriothesley, Lord Chancellor Thomas, 101 writing as social craft: conditions of production, 12–14; genres of, 14 Writing Women in Jacobean England (Lewalski), 11 Wroth, Lady Mary, 10–11, 96, 129, 149, 155–9, 167, 175, 215–25 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 7, 193 Wyll and Testament (Whitney), 3, 132 Yeo, Elspeth, 140 Yong, Bartholomew, 217 Zaret, David, 243

363