Book Review: Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology

Abstract

Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology. Edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Thomas Festa. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. ISBN 978-0-86698-458-4. Pp. 386. $60.00 In this anthology, Michelle M. Dowd and Thomas Festa gather a varied selection of seventeenth-century women's writing inspired by the narrative of the Fall, particularly the character of Eve. As the editors note, Imagining Eve's voice in early modern England entailed direct engagement with the most issues of identity in political and social life (1-2). The authors of these texts engage such contentious issues, from education to breastfeeding to poetry to theology, as they explore the Fall as a basis for early modern theories about gender, society, and vocation. In publishing this anthology, Dowd and Festa hope to dispel the simplistic myth that religion functioned only to disempower women in the premodern era, or that the story of Eve's fall did not have a productive as well as a counterproductive force in English society (7). Including a wide range of writings inspired by the Fall narrative, the anthology illustrates the generative power of this tale to spark discussion, debate, and imaginative writing in the early modern period. Early Modern Women on the Fall includes relatively well-known voices, such as Aemelia Lanyer (selections from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum), Katherine Philips (To Antenor, on a Paper of Mine), and Mary Astell Serious Proposal to the Ladies) alongside texts that have never before appeared in a modern edition, including Dorothy Calthorpe's Description of the Garden of Eden and selections from Mary Roper's The Sacred History. Among the other texts are poems by Margaret Cavendish (Poets Have Most Pleasure In This Life), Lucy Hutchinson (selections from Order and Disorder), and Jane Barker (A Farewell to Poetry, With a Long Digression on Anatomy), and prose works by Bathsua Makin (An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen) and Elizabeth Clinton (The Countess of Lincolns Nursery). Along with their chronologically-ordered selection of poetry and prose, Dowd and Festa include appendices containing the first three chapters of Genesis in both the Geneva and Authorized (King James) versions of the Bible, the marriage service from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, biographical and textual notes, and a selected bibliography for further reading. Dowd and Festa address this anthology to both student readers and the general public. To that end, they ground their editorial practices in accessibility, describing their edited texts as standardized, Americanized, and lightly modernized (15). Their notes for each work are also geared toward accessibility and comprehension; for example, their first footnote to the selections from Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing places this work in its generic context as a mother's legacy, briefly explaining the genre and directing readers to further information on both genre and work (29nl). Dowd and Festa also use their notes to define unfamiliar terms and to gloss Biblical, literary, and historical mentions of such figures as Hannah (75n10), Nicostrata (151n95), or Brutus (276n57). In addition to providing this information, Dowd and Festa deliberately include as many complete texts as possible (such as those by Astell, Clinton, and Makin) rather than shorter selections, making these texts particularly useful for comprehensive discussion and inquiry (16). Through their editorial and selection practices as well as their careful notes, Dowd and Festa successfully create an anthology suitable for initial encounters with the rich world of seventeenth-century texts. A major strength of Early Modern Women on the Fall springs from another of its goals: inviting comparison of the selected works with each other and with others from the period. Dowd and Festa stress in their introduction that their purpose is emphatically not to re-segregate women's writing, expressing the hope that readers will place these texts in conversation with other works, perhaps beginning with the Fall as narrated in Milton's Paradise Lost (17). …