The early modern canon and the construction of women’s writing

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I aim to provide an overview of the relationship between women’s writing and the ‘canon’, to suggest some reasons for its continuing marginality to that canon, and to outline briefly the ways in which the particular character and qualities of early modern women’s writing require a rethinking of many of our dominant narratives about the literary history of the period. In this I draw upon the work of many critics whose work has shaped my thinking, and who are mapping out exciting new trajectories for the future direction of this field. The second part of the article focuses on setting out some ways in which early modern women’s writing might provide productive challenges to current orthodoxies about the canon of Renaissance Literature. Finally, I turn to the future, and some ideas about how the category of ‘women’s writing’ itself needs to be repositioned and reconceived.

KEYWORDS:

• Canon
• women’s writing
• early modern
• Renaissance
• literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for a helpful overview, ‘Introduction’, in Patricia Phillippy (ed.), A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 18–20.

2 Margaret J.M. Ezell, ‘Invisibility Optics: Aphra Behn, Esther Inglis and the Fortunes of Women’s Works’, in Phillippy (ed.), pp. 27–45, pp. 27–8.

3 Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, ‘Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing’, Criticism, 62.2 (2020), pp. 169–93, p. 169; p. 176.

4 Dodds and Dowd, ‘Happy Accidents’, p. 175, 176.

5 Melinda Alliker Rabb, ‘The Work of Women in the Age of Electronic Reproduction: The Canon, Early Modern Women Writers and the Postmodern Reader’, in Anita Pacheco (ed.), A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 340–41.

6 See Rosalind Smith, ‘Authorship, Attribution, and Voice in Early Modern Women’s Writing’, in Danielle Clarke, Sarah C.E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 23-38.

7 Melissa E. Sanchez, ‘What Were Women Writers?’, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021), pp. 63–73, p. 65.

8 Rabb, ‘The Work of Women in the Age of Electronic Reproduction’, p. 342.

9 Full accounts of these collections, and of their loss can be found in Margaret J.M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), in Paul Salzman’s writings, in particular, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Editing and (Not) Canonizing Early Modern Women’s Writing’, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021), pp. 121–30; Paul Salzman, Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon 1825–1915 (Cham: Palgrave, 2018); and Paul Salzman, ‘How Alexander Dyce Assembled Specimens of British Poetesses: A Key Moment in the Transmission of Early Modern Women’s Writing’, Women’s Writing, 26 (2019), pp. 88–105. The essays in Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman (eds), Editing Early Modern Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) also track these histories using a range of case studies.

10 See Ross and Salzman (eds), Editing Early Modern Women, p. 4 on ‘protofeminism’ as an alternate form of exemplarity.

11 Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, esp. Ch. 4: ‘Not only were the numbers of editions of early women writers miniscule by the end of the century, but also the number and length of their entries in the anthologies were progressively eroded’ (p. 105).

12 I don’t have space to address this in detail, but examples would include using the ‘Eve’s Apologie’ section of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, or representing Cary’s Mariam solely through the opening speech. See Danielle Clarke, Nostalgia, Anachronism and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts’, TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Scholarship, 15 (2003), pp. 187–209.

13 Dodds and Dowd, ‘Happy Accidents’, p. 171; Alice Eardley, ‘Recreating the Canon: Women Writers and Anthologies of Early Modern Verse’, Women’s Writing, 14.2 (2007), pp. 270–89, p. 273.

14 The phrase is Dodds and Dowd’s, quoted in Jaime Goodrich and Paula McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity: The Future(s) of Early Modern Women Writers’, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021), pp. 1–21, p. 4.

15 Goodrich and McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity’, p. 4.

16 Special double issue of Jaime Goodrich and Paula McQuade (eds), Criticism 63.1–2 (2021).

17 See Rabb, ‘The Work of Women in the Age of Electronic Reproduction’, pp. 339–60 for an effort to leverage the sociology of texts (as defined by D.F. McKenzie) as a means for broader inclusion, p. 351.

18 Goodrich and McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity’, p. 4.

19 See Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Loss and Longevity: Rhetorics and Tactics of Early Modern Women’s Writing’, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021), pp. 23–32.

20 Rabb, ‘The Work of Women in the Age of Electronic Reproduction’, p. 344.

21 See Danielle Clarke, ‘Mid-Tudor Poetry', in Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, eds. The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 422-438.

22 Goodrich and McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity’, p. 4.

23 See Ezell and Paul Salzman. Dodd and Dowd make a similar argument, although theirs is framed specifically by literary-critical and theoretical approaches, rather than editorial or textual ones.

24 See Dodds and Dowd and Salzman, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’.

25 ‘Dark Ladies: Women, Social History, and English Renaissance Literature’, in Viviane Comensoli and Paul Stevens (eds), Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 62. See also Eardley, ‘Recreating the Canon’, p. 273: ‘Women’s writing is … perceived as a practical interaction with the social environment rather than as a literary achievement’.

26 Refs.

27 On the politics of editing, see Clarke, ‘Nostalgia’.

28 Eardley, ‘Recreating the Canon’, p. 271. See, for example, the gendered framing of Mary Sidney Herbert’s practices of textual revision by Coburn Freer, in Music for a King: George Herbert’s Style and Metrical Psalms (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 74.

29 Eardley, ‘Recreating the Canon’, p. 271.

30 Goodrich and McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity’, p. 1; Ezell ‘Invisibility Optics’, p. 45.

31 See Clarke, ‘Mid-Tudor Poetry’.

32 Stephen Greenblatt, George Logan and Katherine Eisaman Maus (eds), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol B, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, 10th edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co), subsequently abbreviated as NAEL. See for example the various ‘intertexts’ sections on ‘Faith in Conlict’ (pp. 143–70), or ‘The Wider World’ (pp. 609–57) which sits between Sidney and Marlowe; Ralegh’s travel writing is gathered with his poetry, hinting at the primacy of the author as a principle of arrangement.

33 See The Folger Private Libraries in Renaissance England. https://plre.folger.edu/ [Date accessed: 16 July 2021], and Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

34 See Ross and Salzman (eds), Editing Early Modern Women.

35 This marginality is arguably self-perpetuating; scholars who work on women’s writing are themselves overwhelmingly female, and the job market is increasingly focussed on the figure of Shakespeare. See Goodrich and McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity’, pp. 2–3, and Erin A McCarthy, ‘Is There Room for Judith Shakespeare and Her Brother, Too?’, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021), pp. 33–44.

36 Goodrich and McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity’, p. 3. The key example of the trend to blame the field of early modern women’s writing, rather than the ways in which cultural capital operates is Diane Purkiss, ‘Rooms of All Our Own’, Times Literary Supplement, 6046 (February 2019).

37 Eardley, ‘Recreating the Canon’, p. 273; 275.

38 Kimberley Anne Coles, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson, ‘BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies’, MLA Profession. https://profession.mla.org/blackkkshakespearean-a-call-to-action-for-medieval-and-early-modern-studies/ [Date accessed: 16 July 2021].

39 See Kimberly Anne Coles, ‘“Undisciplined”: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Urgency of Scholarly Action’, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021), pp. 55–61.

40 See, for developments of this argument with specific respect to race, Sanchez and Joyce MacDonald, ‘How Race Might Help us Find “Lost” Women’s Writing’, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021), pp. 45–53.

41 On the exclusion of women’s drama from Norton (and other anthologies), see Goodrich and McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity’, p. 2, Salzman, ‘Hidden’, pp. 121–22, and Ramona Wray, ‘Receiving Early Modern Women’s Drama’, in Clarke, Ross and Scott-Baumann (eds), pp. 157-171.

42 See Mais Nayel Al-Shara’h, ‘Documenting Gender Equity in Renaissance Anthologies: A Study of the Contemporary Anthologization of Early Modern Women Writers’, PhD dissertation (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2018), especially figures 17–20, on pp. 88–91.

43 I owe this formulation to Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, whose scholarship is omnipresent in this article.

44 See Goodrich and McQuade, ‘Beyond Canonicity’, p. 4.

45 A recent example is the series of linked panels at the Renaissance Society of America virtual conference (April 2021), ‘Literary Form after Matter’, the development of a conference organised by Dianne Mitchell and Katherine Hunt in 2018, expanded to include Liza Blake and Whitney Trettien. The striking thing about these panels was the way in which questions of gender were incorporated into discussions of form, materiality and textuality, but were not the primary term around which texts were organised or hierarchised.

46 Martha Moulsworth provides a useful example, see ODNB entry. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/47074 [Date accessed: 16 July 2021], and discussion of the archival traces by Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life Writing, vol. 2, Early Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Chapter 10.

47 See Cristina Léon Alfar, and Emily G. Sherwood (eds), Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2021).

48 Wendell V. Harris, ‘Canonicity’, PMLA, 106.1 (1991), p. 117.

49 Charles Altieri, ‘An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon’, Critical Inquiry, 10.1 (1983), pp. 37–60.

50 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).

51 Guillory, Cultural Capital, p. 16.

52 Mikko Tolonen, Mark J. Hill, Ali Zeeshan Ijaz, Ville Vaara and Leo Lahti, ‘Examining the Early Modern Canon: The English Short Title Catalogue and Large-Scale Patterns of Cultural Production’, in Ian Baird (ed.), Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Cham: Palgrave, 2021), pp. 64, 80.

53 Tolonen, et al., ‘Examining the Early Modern Canon’, pp. 101–2.

54 See Sarah Kunjummen, ‘Reading Milton Like a Woman’, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021), pp. 75–85.

55 For a fuller account of the relationship between genre and the canon, see Alastair Fowler, ‘Genre and the Literary Canon’, New Literary History, 11.1 (1979), pp. 97–119.

56 Eardley, ‘Recreating the Canon’, p. 284. For a list of Perdita document genres, see https://web.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/ [Date accessed: 16 July 2021].

57 See Eardley, ‘Recreating the Canon’, p. 272.

58 Ibid., p. 282.

59 Dodds and Dowd, ‘Happy Accidents’, p. 170.

60 See Eardley, ‘Recreating the Canon’, p. 273, ‘feminist discomfort with considering the relationship between writing by women and established notions of literary form originally derived from a canon of male writers’.

61 Dodds and Dowd, ‘Happy Accidents’, p. 178.

62 Phillippy, A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, p. 19.