Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2004 by Patricia Phillippy

Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff, eds. Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women.

Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies. Cranbury, NJ and London: University of Delaware Press/AUP, 2003. 400 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $48.50. ISBN: 0-87413-825-6.

This is the fourth in a series of volumes, spanning a decade, recording the proceedings of the "Attending to Women" symposia sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland. Like its predecessors, this collection is impressive in the scope of its inquiry, its rich interdisciplinarity, and its concern for both scholarly and pedagogical issues emergent in contemporary approaches to early modern women, their works, and their lives. In addition to fifteen remarkable essays, the volume offers substantial summaries of thirty-one workshops held during the November 2000 symposium, and describes "applications"--stagings of seventeenth-century plays by women writers and developing technologies for the study of early modern women on the World Wide Web--which attest to the progressive and pragmatic qualities of current scholarship in the field.

At the same time, the essays address methodological and theoretical issues with uniform sophistication and insight. In the first group of essays, gathered under the rubric of "Stories," Anne Lake Prescott's astute discussion of Marguerite de Navarre's interpretations by Tudor diplomats, Wendy Heller's fascinating work on the gendering of seventeenth-century Venetian opera, and Garthine Walker's engrossing examination of early modern Englishwomen's legal narratives of infanticide employ different but complementary approaches to their subjects and suggest the wealth and breadth of the textual, visual, and cultural documents and practices studied in the collection. Diane Purkiss's keynote address examines the qualified access to women's subjectivity available in court records of the sixteenth-century Scottish witch trials and describes disparate versions of these narratives, marked by gender and class, produced to support rival desires and demands in early modern culture. A third section on "Goods" juxtaposes Jean Howard's subtle discussion of consumerism in London city drama and Jacqueline Maria Musacchio's similar concerns in her art historical treatment of the bride's donora in Renaissance Florence. A section entitled "Faiths" offers "an ecumenical study of pious Roman Catholic French, Protestant English, and Central European Jewish women" in excellent studies by Judith R. Baskins, Barbara B. Diefendorf, and Elaine V. Beilin, respectively (28). Finally, three pedagogical essays put forth advice on familiar obstacles confronting teachers of early modern women's works, from Sara Jayne Steen's promising navigation between the perils of intentionality, on the one hand, and the threat to women's works posed by postmodern appeals to "impersonal textuality" (304), on the other, to Laura Gowing's exploration of the uses of feminine modesty in early modern representations of the body, to Karen-edis Barzman's persuasive insistence that "the sexed body and gender [are] the result of certain discursive practices, rather than their origin or cause" and her masterful exposition of the implications of this argument for students of early modern women's works (336).

Perhaps the volume's most valuable contribution is Margaret Mikesell's introduction, which, through an overview of the four volumes in the series, surveys the last decade's work in women's studies. She describes three phases in the development of the field: an initial attempt to define feminist criticism against traditional scholarly discourses, a gradual focus on exploring the lives of ordinary women through studies of uncanonical texts and images, and the most recent phase, exemplified in the collection at hand, in which "the problem of how to read is foregrounded" with critical attention being given to the methodological implications of interdisciplinary study and the value and reliability of textual and material evidence (16). The introductory essay traces the fascinating movement from a self-consciously embattled scholarship to an engaging and vital exchange, undertaken on multiple fronts and from various points of view. If this coming-of-age story holds one disappointment, though, it is, as the volume itself demonstrates, that those attending to women are themselves almost exclusively women. No male contributors appear here, and only a handful of workshop organizers are men. One can only hope that the wealth of scholarly expertise contained in these essays--whose implications extend well beyond the field of women's studies proper--finds a wide readership not only among female academics and their students, but among their male colleagues as well.

PATRICIA PHILLIPPY

Texas A & M University