740 Reviews firmself-limitations contrast with Elizabeth I's alternate expressions of vulnerability and threats of potential force. The Queen's translations, poetry, letters, and proclamations all provide illustrations. Late Tudor conflicts also supply a context for her subject, Anne Dowriche, to adapt several narratives of Catholic-Protestant conflict in The French Historie (1589). Sondergard emphasizes Dowriche's 'compassionate and maternal' advocacy of patience (p. 69) and her revision of her sources to enhance their dramatic spiritual impact. Patience and spiritual heroism recur in Aemilia Lanyer's Polemic Passion', a wellunified examination of all sections of her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Sonder? gard correctly emphasizes Lanyer's amplification of rhetorical violence to label those who have defamed Eve and crucified Christ. Her male and female heroes practise altruism . Greater varieties of heroic behaviour appear in the secular works of Lanyer's contemporary, Lady Mary Wroth. The study emphasizes her entry into the 'violence and falsehood' of the romance narrative in order to transfer aggressiveness to female characters, explore the body's power as erotic signifier,and to demonstrate differing gendered responses to violent episodes. Again, all of Wroth's works?letters, sonnets, pastoral comedy, and romance?yield illustrations forthe argument. The final chapter, '"Tears woundes & blood": Lady Anne Southwell's Caustic Meditation on Domestic Survival', allows Sondergard to relate his studies of rhetor? ical violence to an excellent but less familiar author. As he traces Lady Anne's discus? sion of her unhappy marriage and her evolving control of her authorship, he also situates her in a spiritual context related to that of Askew and Dowriche. Like them, she portrays human revenge as destructive and, like Lanyer, she revises the figureof Eve. The book is valuable for its clear discussion relating language to identity. Sondergard 's thorough scholarship and his ease in discussing such male contemporaries as Foxe, Spenser, and Donne strengthen the presentation of each subject. Although he does not claim to include all important women writers of this era, a briefjustification forthe inclusion of six Protestant women would help the reader. A more overt concession that Christian stoicism, passivity, and nurturance also hold value for a number of early modern male writers might anticipate a reader's questions. Nevertheless, the study is valuable for specialists in language, theory, and early modern studies as well as for a general reader. University of Kansas Margaret J.Arnold Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. By Sarah M. Dunnigan. (Early Modern Literature in History) Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. x + 2i9pp. ?45. ISBN 0-333-91875-4. The series in which this important volume appears is, like most projects devoted to historicist readings of Renaissance literature, largely concerned with early modern England. Indeed, half the contributions to date have 'England' or 'English' in the title. This is a problem only if the underlying assumption is that 'early modern' or 'Renaissance' actually means English culture and history of the sixteenth and seven? teenth centuries. Leaving Europe aside, as a lot of this criticism tends to do, there is the small matter of Britain. Recent historical work on the period suggests that events in England are best understood in the context of developments in, and relations with, the other nations that make up the nascent British state. Yet with the exception of Ireland, the most troubled theatre of English colonial activities, which had the good fortune to play host to a major English canonical figure, Edmund Spenser, the new historicism has been as resolutely Anglocentric as the old. For Scotland, see Macbeth. Scotland only becomes of interestto English critics once James VI becomes James I. In this context, it is encouraging to see Sarah Dunnigan's engaging encounter with a MLR, 99.3, 2004 741 crucial aspect of Scottish literary culture take its place among more familiar English preoccupations. Dunnigan paints an exquisitely detailed picture of the Scottish court in the four decades prior to the Union of Crowns, a court steeped in continental culture and rich in poetic resources. She offers access to material gleaned almost exclusively from original manuscript sources, presented within a rigorously historicized and subtly theorized framework, coupling close readings of...