Feminist Formalisms and Early Modern Women's Writing gathers a stellar set of scholars and scholarly interventions. In their introductory essay, Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd deftly sketch the trajectories of formalism, feminism, and literary history over the last one hundred years, and effectively develop the exigence for this project. The editors then divide the analysis into three interconnected and cohesive sections, “Readings,” “Conversations,” and “Pedagogies,” which serve to demonstrate the power of the methods they explore.
Essays in the first section “offer detailed and innovative close readings of individual works by early modern women in a range of genres” that “consider how form and gender intersect in early modern women's works” (8). Analysis includes Jennifer Higginbotham, “Taking the Thread of Mary Wroth's ‘A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love’”; Liza Blake, “Margaret Cavendish's Forms: Literary Formalism and the Figures of Cavendish's Atom Poems”; Edith Snook, “Margaret Cavendish and the Recipe Form in Poems and Fancies”; Julie A. Eckerle, “Building/s with Form: Dorothy Calthorpe's Castle and Chapel”; and Victoria E. Burke, “Gendering the Emblem: Hester Pulter's Formal Experimentation.” As the editors note, taken together these chapters demonstrate “how feminist formalism provides opportunities to revive and expand the scope of close reading practices” (9). And, as Victoria Burke observes, “Gender can be an important category in formalist readings because it is another site of innovation for writers of traditional genres” (105).
“Conversations,” the second section, places women's compositions “in relationship to other writers, with a particular focus on how women's formal practices developed out of collaborative models of writing” and reveal “how feminist formalisms can be used to uncover . . . the varied configurations of gender, voice, and desire in texts by women” (11). Here, chapters include Dianne Mitchell, “Surface Desires: Reading Female Friendship in the Epistolary Archive”; Stephen Guy-Bray, “Katherine Philips's Monument: The Genre of ‘Wiston Vault”; and Marshelle Woodward, “Formalism Dispossessed: Pulter, Donne, and the Oblivated Urn.” For me, the standout is Paul Salzman, “Mary Wroth's Urania Manuscript: Poems in Their Proper Places,” in part because Salzman builds on an extensive body of knowledge and interpretation of Wroth's writing and offers a lovely, nuanced exploration of the complexities associated with circulation, editing, and anthologizing Wroth's poetry in the manuscript Urania and beyond. This section engages most explicitly with assessing the varied genres these texts deploy and the ways in which these writers joust amongst authorial lists, but this strategy is a strength of the volume as a whole.
The third section, “Pedagogies,” includes contributions by Lauren Shook, “Collaborative Close Readings: Anne Vaughan Lock's Sonnets in the Undergraduate Survey Course”; Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “Teaching Early Modern Women's Writing through Literary and Material Form”; Margaret J. M. Ezell, “Teaching the Modesty Trope: Early Modern Women's Texts in a Twenty-First-Century Classroom”; Sarah C. E. Ross, “The Idea of a Woman: Teaching Gender and Poetic Form in Early Modern Elegy”; and Andrew Black, “Quixotic Pedagogy and Attention in the Early Modern Literature Classroom.” This section offers a brilliant explication of theories at work, and provides concrete ways of weaving conversations about the ways we as teachers and students build together understanding of evaluative criteria we deploy as readers. They foreground as well a range of possibilities and sites of engagement with texts, authors, and lived experiences that can seem quite distant to students. These assessments demonstrate ways in which early modern texts become things to wrestle, to appropriate, to scrutinize, to inspire.
One important contribution the volume makes is to draw attention to compositions more generally categorized as literary but less often considered in earlier versions of the women's writing canon because so many of them were in manuscript (for example, Pulter). Relatedly, but conversely, it expands the scope of literary studies by considering forms traditionally diminished by their associations with women's culture (here, recipes) and instead reading them against wider trends such as histories of science to place them within frames such as the development of observational analysis in the seventeenth century. Moreover, attention across the essays to the material culture of the book, book history, digital humanities, archives, and editorial efforts of the last fifty years, provides compelling sources of analysis.
Feminist Formalisms and Early Modern Women's Writing marks a coming into its prime for the field of early modern women's literary studies. Indeed, the bibliographies associated with each of the essays across the volume provide an excellent overview of current and central scholarship for a wide range of writers and genres within and outside the standard “early modern women writers” canon and should serve as a welcome reference to anyone embarking upon a new investigation of their own. The essays themselves illuminate the strength and versatility of the methods for which Dodds, Dowd, and the contributors so adeptly advocate.
