Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England by Patricia Demers (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 235 ing,” and “Taking Liberties.” Within each of the five major sections, Cormack and Mazzio have additional subdivisions that further break down the various aspects of the book. The attentiveness throughout to the intimate and mutually influential interaction between the text on a page and the physical culture of that page in the production of meaning is excellent. In fact, the kind of relationship between text and page, between use and pleasure, that Cormack and Mazzio describe is also exemplified in their own text. This book’s greatest strength is in the unity of its formatting, layout, and organization with its own narrative trajectory. Though the content of Book Use, Book Theory is often sophisticated in its observations and in its ability to integrate a number of theoretical approaches to literary study, it nonetheless remains accessible to a beginning audience. It is deceptively simple in its organization; yet, this methodical approach makes for an easily digestible volume of material. The only lapse in this book is its tendency to confine its observations to early modern book production. As the title indicates, all of the examples of plates come from the period 1500 to 1700; the selection of these image, however , seems to be based upon their ability to illustrate a particular point about book use rather than act as exemplars from an historical time period. As a kind of generic example, therefore, these images are quite effective. Yet, in their presentation they are somewhat misleading in their status as prototypes. Many of the aspects of book use that Cormack and Mazzio describe do not have their origin in Renaissance era book production or even printed books, but rather in the medieval manuscripts of prior centuries. The great glossed bibles of the Middle Ages that first necessitated advances in layout and organization are integral to understanding how later books adapted rather than invented the means of navigating a reader through a text. Medieval marginalia, rubrication, differentiation of script size and type, catchwords, and other such utilitarian aspects of book use predate the examples given. Because of the breadth of its conceptual survey Book Use, Book Theory would be a valuable introduction to an undergraduate course in the culture of the book. Because it is based on an exhibition at the University of Chicago Library’s Special Collections Research Center, however, it does lack the kind of depth necessary to sustain a course in its entirety. The close reading present in the introduction is accordingly diminished in the commentary on most of the plates in the remainder of the book. The text accompanying each image is a slightly enhanced version of the kind of commentary one would expect on a placard alongside any museum exhibit. JENNIFER A. SMITH, English, UCLA Patricia Demers, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England (Toronto : University of Toronto Press 2005) x + 363 pp., ill. Gender studies have provided academics of many fields with fruitful areas of investigation, not least those who study history, literature, and literary theory. Patricia Demers, in her overview of early modern women’s writing in England, has taken the subject of women authors and women’s authority and set it cleanly in the context of early modern women’s history. The result is a fine introduction to the writings of women from the beginning of the fifteenth cen- REVIEWS 236 tury through the Restoration in the middle of the sixteenth. In her first chapter, Demers discusses the background of early modern gender studies, noting the “growth industry” of this particular academic pursuit. She also rightly complicates the problems of writing about the early modern world from a postmodern perspective, recognizing both the connections that might be made (such as a comparison between the rise of print culture and the rise of digital culture) and the limitations of those very connections that should make us hesitant to push them too far. In this sense, then, she perceives her work as additional commentary in the conversation about gender and writing in the early modern period, seeking to reveal multiplicities and complexities rather than make oversimplified, monolithic statements. Indeed, while Joan Kelly was brilliant in her conclusion that not all women had a Renaissance...