Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2005 by Carolyn D. Williams

Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women. Ed. by MARGARET MIKESELL and ADELE SEEFF. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 400 pp. $48.50. ISBN 0-87413-825-6.

This is the fourth volume in a series based on a series of symposia, beginning in 1990, at the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland. The contributions cover a rich variety of place, period, topic, and culture, and bear witness to an outstandingly diverse range of participants, from plenary speakers of international eminence to graduate students organizing workshops. There was also a more varied audience than is normally enjoyed by academic conferences: Adele Seeff, the Director, notes in her preface that, as well as engaging with 'the university community' and 'cultural institutions' in Maryland, the Center 'has ongoing partnerships with many Maryland school districts and individual schools and offers statewide and national professional development programs for secondary school teachers of the humanities and performing arts' (p. 9).

Four sections, headed 'Stories', 'Goods', 'Faiths', and 'Pedagogies', contain plenary addresses followed by relevant workshop summaries. In every section, especially the last, contributors can be found expressing their individual reactions to their experiences of teaching, learning, and research. This approach is also demonstrated in an evocative keynote address by Diana Purkiss, 'Losing Babies, Losing Stories: Attending to Women's Confessions in Scottish Witch-Trials', in which she maintains that 'to attend to such stories does not mean to intellectualize them, but to allow them to work on feelings and on guts' (p. 143). The sixth section, 'Applications', deserves special notice. It contains multi-authored accounts of made-for-video performances of scenes from plays by Mary Wroth, Jane Cavendish, Elizabeth Brackley, and Margaret Cavendish, and of a database on early modern women; these bring to a logical conclusion the stress on subjectivity, interpretative creativity, and appropriate use of new technology which has run through the whole volume. Last but not least is the index--a feature too often omitted from collections of essays, but vital if they are to become cohesive volumes.

Cohesion is the preoccupation of Margaret Mikesell's introduction, which reaches beyond the boundaries of the present publication, using 'the forty-plus essays in the four proceedings volumes to trace the contours of scholarship on early modern women' (p. 11), and finding a common motif in the concept of '"conversation"'(p. 36). Yet this book does raise problems of definition. Although there has never been universal agreement about the beginning and ending of the 'early modern' period, most scholars would probably agree that Jacqueline Marie Musacchio's scrupulously researched and engagingly illustrated discussion of dowries in Renaissance Florence, dealing with events from 1425 onwards, starts rather early. Karen-Edis Barzman's chapter on Jemima Wilkinson, who died in 1819, pushes the envelope in the other direction. Yet nobody would wish to be deprived of either, in the interests of mere temporal tidiness. Barzman herself is more concerned with the fluidity of another term: 'woman'. What problems arise when it is applied to a person who, like Wilkinson, declared she was neither man nor woman, but the '"Publick Universal Friend"' (p. 337)? One solution to this dilemma would be the inclusion of everything we now think of as Women's Studies in the wider remit of Gender. Paying greater attention to men, on occasion, might actually help to sharpen our focus on women's position. For example, Laura Gowing uses the story of a midwife interrogating a woman in labour, in order to discover the child's father, to support her observation that 'At the heart of many historical documents is an assumption that, when it really matters, women cannot or will not speak the truth about their bodies' (p. 322). Yet the fact that this was deemed necessary indicates that the men in the case could not be trusted to tell the truth either. Nevertheless, whatever we call it, this project has encouraged its contributors to think freshly and critically about their own investigations; it is to be hoped that it will have a similar effect on its readers.

CAROLYN D. WILLIAMS

UNIVERSITY OF READING