Early Modern Women Poets (1520-1700): An Anthology, edited by
Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), lii + 585pp, ISBN 0199242577
Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson’s Early Modern Women Poets is a
much-anticipated and impressive new resource, the result of several
years’ delving, transcribing, and researching during the two scholars’
years at Warwick. Early Modern Women Poets anthologises the verse of
women who wrote in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland between the
years 1520 and 1700; crucially, it draws on a new and wide range of
printed, manuscript and epigraphic sources.
Women’s writing in the early modern period is a field of which our
cartography has changed and expanded rapidly over the last twenty years.
Virginia Woolf’s assumption that women were silent before Aphra Behn
was proved wrong by Germaine Greer et al.’s anthology, Kissing the Rod
(1988), and the critical studies of Margaret Ezell, Elaine Hobby and
others; in the 1990s, Nottingham Trent University’s Perdita Project has
begun to catalogue all manuscripts associated with women in the period.
Stevenson and Davidson step off from this work and add to it very
substantially.
Isabella Whitney, Lady Mary Wroth, An Collins and Mary Astell
are among the more familiar poets whose work is anthologised; alongside
them are women as diverse as the six-year-old Catholic Anna Alcox, the
prophetic pedlar Jane Hawkins, and the royalist gentlewoman Hester
Pulter. Stevenson and Davidson also include Greek and Latin verse by
Mildred Cecil (née Cooke), Lady Mary Cheke, Elizabeth Jane Leon (née
Weston) and others, illustrating their introductory assertion that these
languages 'were less of a male monopoly than they are sometimes thought
to be'. Greek, Latin and French are not the only languages represented;
Stevenson and Davidson expand our perceptions of verse by women in
early modern Britain even further, including verse from the ethnically and
linguistically distinct Celtic provinces. The diversity of the material they
have uncovered and selected enables them in their introduction to negate
sweepingly Elaine Showalter’s superficial suggestion that ‘English
women’s writing, until the past few decades, was racially homogenous
and regionally compact, with little ethnic, religious, or even class
diversity’.
Stevenson and Davidson arrange their anthology chronologically,
although it is inevitable that exact dates for women’s lives or writings are
not always clear. Each woman’s verse is preceded by a biographical and
contextual note, and in several cases, such as that of Anna Ley (née
Norman), these notes constitute important contributions to evolving
biographies.
Stevenson and Davidson's texts are conservatively
modernised: only u/v and i/j spellings are normalised, and skeletal
punctuation only is added to sparsely-punctuated manuscript texts. This
proves to be an effective editorial middle road: the texts produced are
clear and user-friendly, and annotation, at the end of each poem, is full
without being intrusive. Printed and manuscript sources are detailed
fully in an appendix to the volume.
Stevenson and Davidson’s anthology is a vital contribution to early
modern literary scholarship, making a comprehensive and hugely updated
selection of verse texts authored by early modern women available in a
major-press paperback. The clarity of its texts cater for a relatively
general readership and, in addition, its scholarly framework renders it a
summation of scholarly work on early modern female versifiers to date,
and a starting point for further investigation. Stevenson and Davidson’s
acknowledgement of Germaine Greer’s help and advice in the preparation
of the volume is fitting. Early Modern Women Poets is Kissing the Rod
two decades on; it should become the new text from which
undergraduates are taught, as well as the handbook for current and future
scholars in the field.
Sarah Ross
University of Warwick