Rosalind Smith

Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: The Politics of Withdrawal

o s EP HI N E Roberts’ edition of the poems of Lady Mary Wroth has allowed the widespread dissemination of the sequence Pumphiliu to J Amphilunthus, and has been instrumental in establishing Wroth as a primary example of the Renaissance woman poet. Coupled with the text of Wroth’s poems is Roberts’ history of the text’s reception, a narrative of women’s limited textual agency and constraint in the public sphere.’ Roberts’ introduction provides evidence for the Uruniu’s status as a roman i clef, and indicates that one episode, outlining the violent and coercive behavior of the characters of Seralius and his father-in-law, was read by Edward Denny as an attack upon himself and his family. Denny responded with two letters and a poem of revenge, “To Pamphilia from the father-in-law of Seralius,” which begins by accusing Wroth of being a “Hermophradite in show,” and concludes by encouraging women’s textual silence and confinement to religious activity: “Work o th’ Workes leave idle bookes alone / For wise and worthyer women have writte none” (pp. 32-33). Roberts records a poem written by Wroth in response that rebuffs Denny’s intimidation but emphasizes his use of chscourses of gender in his attack upon her by quoting from his letters a section recommending that Wroth “redeem the time with writing as large a volume of heavenly lays and holy love as you have of lascivious tales and amorous toys; that at the last you may follow the example of your virtuous and learned aunt.” As a part of her response to Denny, Roberts reports, Wroth “even wrote to the Duke ofBuckingham” defending her innocence, claiming to have stopped the sale of the text, and seeking his aid in recovering the copies of Uruniu which had already been sold. The Uruniu was entered in the Stationers’ Register on July 13 , 1621; by De-

‘In a mirrour clere’: Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok’s Miserere mei Deus

In 1560, Anne Lok published a translation of four of Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38, prefaced by a dedicatory epistle to Catherine Brandon and followed by a sonnet sequence in two parts — five sonnets ‘expressing the passioned minde of the penitent sinner’, followed by a longer sequence paraphrasing the 51st psalm.1 It is an unsettling text in a number of ways. Generically anomalous, it contains the first sonnet sequence not only to be written in English, but to combine the Petrarchan genre of the sonnet sequence with that of psalm paraphrase. Compiled by a middle-class woman from the community of Protestant exiles in Geneva, it emerges from beyond the English court, in contrast to the texts of aristocratic women surrounding Catherine Parr which form the major precedent for women’s publication in England before 1560. The text’s strangeness disturbs the practice which underpins criticism on early modern women’s writing of this period: characterizing women’s textual activity in terms of a restricted class of aristocratic authors, in a secondary or derivative relationship to male-authored texts, and confined to religious genres and topoi. Lok’s text draws upon largely male-authored French Calvinist and Anglo-Genevan traditions of psalm paraphrase to construct a text in which textual virtuosity works to out-trope the sonnets and psalm paraphrases of Thomas Wyatt, Lok’s main poetic predecessor in England.

‘Le pouvoir de faire dire’: Marginalia in Mary Queen of Scots’ Book of Hours

Recent work on early modern women’s marginalia has already revealed much about the ways in which early modern women read and wrote, using the materials of manuscript and print as markers of relationships and as tools for self-positioning.1 However, as Heidi Brayman Hackel has argued, such traces are thought to be relatively rare, and, to date, studies of substantial archives of marginalia have centred on books annotated by two authors: Margaret Hoby and Anne Clifford.2 In this chapter, I would like to begin to examine a third significant archive: Mary Queen of Scots’ diverse collection of marginalia in her Book of Hours.3 This illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript was given to Mary during her time in the French court and was added to over her lifetime and beyond.4 It contains three different types of marginalia: the queen’s independent marks of ownership, ten other signatures and fourteen quatrains, or fragments of quatrains, some signed and all written in French in Mary Stuart’s very clear italic hand. This chapter examines all three of these types of marginalia in order to reconstruct what Jason Scott-Warren describes as ‘the anthropology of the book’: evidence not only for reading but also for understanding the place of this Book of Hours in the individual, social and material fabric of the lives of its owners and readers over half a century.5

Reading Mary Stuart's Casket Sonnets: Reception, Authorship, and Early Modern Women's Writing

The reception history of the casket sonnets attributed to Mary Queen of Scots is a rich archive of material, revealing the complex ways in which histories of reading intersect with the early modern woman writers relationship to the institutions of authorship. By tracing the reception of these sonnets over four centuries, I argue that competing religious, historical, and geopolitical formations work to privilege or occlude Mary Stuarts authorship at different historical moments. Understanding these formations and their relationships to authorship and gender allows a new perspective on the canonical biases still at work in the field of early modern womens writing.

From Paratext to Epitext: Mapping the Authorial Apparatus in Early Modern Women's Writing

Our focus on Early Modern Womens Writing and the Apparatus of Authorship in this special issue of Parergon responds to emerging trends in early modern womens studies that emphasize the importance of the material text to the literary, historical, and political analysis of womens works in the long early modern period. Attention to the material contexts of womens works is not new; it has, for instance, been a staple of the invaluable critical introductions to early modern womens texts that have been produced in the past thirty years. However, it is also the case that, until relatively recently, such scholarship has remained something of a specialist concern, standing in paratexual relationship to the text proper, as an introduction to the work that follows. This relationship has been reinforced in criticism that considers the literary interpretation of early modern womens writing before, or outside of, its material and textual specificity. If there has been something of a time lag in the material turn in early modern womens studies, this might be attributed, as Sarah C. E. Ross suggests in her introduction, to the fields initial focus on the recovery of the historical woman writer and the assumption that gender provides the most pertinent interpretive crux to her text.3 While the past thirty years of scholarship has complicated this focus by incorporating analyses of rank, race, learning, sexuality, geographical location, and political and religious affiliation into the picture, the historical conditions that make a critical focus on gender valid and generative have by no means disappeared. The essays collected here share a continued focus on gender as a crucial feature of early modern womens writing, but they explore this focus in ways that attempt to unhinge it from immutable or essential associations with the body of the woman writer and insist instead on genders shifting, contingent, productive, and performative relationships to the corpus of womens writing as we inherit it.

Babysitter killers and daughters of death: women, true crime and the media in 1970s Australia

Daughters of Death is a popular collection of true crime stories concerning women and murder, published in 1973 as a special issue of the Great Australian Crimes series. Sold at 50c through newsagents, it contains a collection of 13 historical stories written by the veteran journalist Hugh Buggy, enclosed by a wraparound contemporary feature, ‘Babysitters Turn Killers!’, by a younger journalist, Ian Moffitt. Both titles appear on the cover: the main coverline Daughters of Death is placed above a grainy, enlarged black and white image of the faces of two girls, identified as the babysitter killers in a minor coverline slashed across the bottom right-hand corner of the image. The collection follows a tradition of mid-century true crime miscellanies that use women as an organising category, such as James Holledge’s 1963 Australia’s Wicked Women. However, in its idiosyncratic bundling of two types of true crime journalism, historical and contemporary, the magazine links this interest in women and criminality to shifts in technologies of the popular media and in the genre of true crime itself. The juxtapositions of the collection mark a shift in true crime writing in Australia, from a tradition centred on individual crimes, criminals and the authoritative narrator, to a form of journalism informed by contemporary developments in criminology which deflects criminal responsibility to society and its media representations. These twin strands of true crime writing still exist in the genre: historical accounts of significant Australian crimes continue to be published beside accounts of individual crimes, often unresolved, which bring a sociological focus to their amateur criminology. In this magazine, however, the sociological new journalism of ‘Babysitters Turn Killers’ is literally wrapped around the older collection of historical accounts of women and true crime contained within Daughters of Death, juxtaposing in stark contrast the old and new forms of the genre. This article examines how this apparently teleological shift towards an increased self-referentiality might be understood, in a genre which has been read as pointing to, in all its forms, the ‘media apriori [sic] in modern society’ (Seltzer 2007, 17). Using media self-referentiality as the starting point of analysis, I use the juxtapositions of this text to open up new ways of thinking about how the forms through which the genre’s media a priori are expressed differ according to local historical contexts and their attendant media technologies. Beneath the opposing rhetorics of certainty and incoherence that characterise the two forms of the genre are surprising continuities, particularly in the troping of women as figures of blame. Yet at the same time, differing technologies of media alter the ways in which such tropes are made explicit or disguised, and their curious juxtaposition in this hybrid form denaturalises the genre’s functioning in its different modes. Despite the cover image identifying the

Narrow Confines: Marginalia, Devotional Books and the Prison in Early Modern Women’s Writing

ABSTRACT This essay examines sixteenth-century women’s marginalia in devotional books as a mode of transmission, particularly in circumstances of where early modern women themselves were in circumstance of limited circulation, under house arrest or imprisoned. Recent work on prison literature has highlighted the importance of the prison as a crucible for writing in early modern England. However, it has focused less on the material cultures through which such texts were circulated, which for women writers in particular included marginal annotations to texts then circulated through domestic and coterie circles to a broader world. Anne Boleyn, Jane Dudley, Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart all circulated writing as marginalia while under forms of imprisonment, providing a means of political engagement through lamentation, critique and protest. This essay uncovers the ways in which such texts constructed and disguised their political objectives, as well as the material means through which these prison poems were transmitted, showing the ways in which material and rhetorical cultures operated together to make meaning in this neglected group of texts.

Paratextual Marginalia, Early Modern Women, and Collaboration

This chapter examines examples of paratextual marginalia by Elizabeth I and Anne Poyntz, inscribed in the fly leaves and endpapers of a print New Testament and Psalter in the years directly before Elizabeth’s accession to the throne. Tracing the ways in which this marginalia constitutes textual collaboration at multiple levels, within and without the text it appends, the chapter argues that this web of collaborative practices provide a vehicle for the queen and her subject to circulate covert political messages to her coterie readers. Elizabeth’s limited access to means of textual circulation while under house arrest in Mary Tudor’s reign meant that collaboration through marginal annotation took on a new political significance in this context, providing insights into a largely undocumented period of Elizabeth’s life and exemplifying the ways in which early modern women used marginalia as a site for active reading, and writing, for political effect.

Introduction: Early Modern Women’s Material Texts: Production, Transmission and Reception

The material conditions that influenced early modern women’s writing are crucial to understanding what women wrote and how their work can be read. Like all material artefacts, early modern women’s texts do not reach readers in isolation, but emerge through complex systems of production, transmission and reception. Criticism of early modern women’s writing in the last decade has increasingly emphasised their engagement with different generic forms and modes of circulation, expanding the parameters of the field beyond literary interpretation of the texts themselves to an engagement with their intricate textual histories. The current volume builds upon this work to produce a wide- ranging account of the rich and diverse material cultures through which early modern women’s writing was produced, transmitted and received. It focuses on the ways in which this writing was culturally mediated: how it was originally packaged and promoted, how it circulated in its contemporary contexts, and how it was read and received in later revisions and redactions. In doing so, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing aims to illuminate not only the ways in which we read, analyse and value early modern women’s writing, but also to expand our understanding of the production, transmission and reception of early modern literature more broadly.