Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman Margaret J.M. Ezell Editing Early Modern Women, ed. Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2016. Pp. xii + 299. $99.99. This thought-provoking collection, produced by two highly regarded scholars of early modern women's writings and including contributions by established editors working with early modern women's texts, will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of anyone who teaches critical bibliography, scholarly editing, and/or who works with women's texts as part of their scholarship and in the classroom. Ms. Ross and Mr. Salzman's useful introduction gives an overview of the varied traditions of editing of early modern women's works. It also draws attention to the ways in which, in the twentieth century, these texts forced new editorial issues to be considered and dealt with that diverged from those codified by editions of mainstream canonical authors such as Jonson, Milton, and Melville. These are editorial choices that continue to be problematic today. "How do we edit texts that have no editorial history, or whose editorial history is concerned with oddity and exemplarity rather than canonicity?" is the first of their guiding questions, followed by "how do we edit texts that do not fit easily into conventional taxonomies of 'literature,' and what contexts should we present for them?" Finally, "how can digital methods of editing, archiving, and amassing early modern texts facilitate multiple editorial and literary-critical aims?" These are important, central questions confronting twenty-first-century editors in general and not just those devoted to the recovery and preservation of works by women or lesser-known male authors. The volume is divided into four parts. The first deals with "Editorial Ideologies," followed by "Editing Female Forms: Gender, Genre, and Editing," "Out of the Archives, Into the Classroom," and "Editorial Possibilities," the last dealing with editing in the digital age. Many of the essays deal with major figures and familiar texts produced by women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Danielle Clarke's "Producing Gender: Mary Sidney Herbert and Her Early Editors," Susan M. Felch's "The Backward Gaze: Editing Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Prayerbook," Ramona Wray on Elizabeth [End Page 166] Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Leah S. Marcus on editing Queen Elizabeth, and Mary Ellen Lamb on Mary Wroth's Urania. Other essays address generic issues, including editing women's letters for print publication by Diana G. Barnes and Marian WynneDavies's chapter on editing dramas for performance. Essays that will have particular interest for the readers of The Scriblerian include ones looking at women writing during the English Civil War, including Lucy Hutchinson, Anne, Lady Halkett, and Katherine Philips, as well as to what extent lesser-known women writing in the Interregnum and Restoration need modernization for the classroom. Elizabeth Clarke, Suzanne Trill, and Marie-Louise Coolahan tackle editing issues raised by individual texts and authors. Ms. Clarke, who is one of the team of editors producing the OUP complete works of Lucy Hutchinson, points out in "Contextualizing the Woman Writer: Editing Lucy Hutchinson's Religious Prose" that a male-authored, seventeenth-century theological treatise would be edited in the context of printed, public theological writings. However, Hutchinson's Principles is devised in the form of a long letter to her daughter Barbara. Hutchinson expects others will read her text, but she will not publish it: "I write not for the presse, to boast my owne weaknesses to the world but to imprint on your hart the characters I have received of God." Ms. Clarke thus argues the importance of situating the work in part in the context of the popular seventeenth-century women's genre, the "mother's legacy," suggesting that the choice of "a consciously feminized genre" is important in the assumptions the writer is making about her readers and the type of theological knowledge they will bring to the text. Similarly, in "Critical Categories: Towards an Archaeology of Anne, Lady Halkett's Archive," Ms. Trill looks at the way in which earlier editing of Halkett's "life and works" has created different "lives" in different times. She begins with...