An exhilarating intervention in a growing field, Bernadette Andrea's The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture develops and extends the themes of her earlier articles and influential monograph, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2007), but importantly opens up new possibilities. The book is built around five case studies, each of which concerns the traces of five women from Dar-al-Islam in early modern Britain, and innovatively recovers their influence on British culture. Andrea assembles a rich theoretical cast—Derrida, Malieckal, Said, Subrahmanyam, Spivak, Vizenor—and uses poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist, and microhistorical approaches to counteract the ways in which these women have been insistently erased from an emerging Anglocentric discourse of empire, and overlooked by critics in recent decades.

The five women whose lives and influence Andrea reconstitutes came from different locations and had different trajectories, but their stories trace similar themes: Elen More, the “Black Beauty,” and Lucy Negro, often identified as Shakespeare's “dark lady,” who share probable West African origins before their arrival in Scotland and England; Ipolita “the Tartarian” who was acquired by English merchant-traveler Anthony Jenkinson in Astrakhan and gifted to Elizabeth I; and Teresa Sampsonia and Marian Khanim, both of whom arrived in Britain as the wives of idiosyncratic English diplomat-agents. Despite the paucity of evidence for their lives once they had arrived, Andrea skillfully connects the fragments that remain—inventories, marginalia, often slight literary allusions—and finds the impact of each meaningfully reverberating through visual and literary works.

The book argues that each of these women (none of whom can be straightforwardly identified as Islamic, as Andrea recognizes) in early modern Britain resisted subaltern status to express agency through various strategies of survivance, and that in different ways they had a fairly immediate impact on incipient discourses of empire—often through those involved in formulating those discourses. Their refracted representations are then traced. Following an overview of each of her case studies in the opening chapter, Andrea's second chapter focuses on Jenkinson's trafficking of Ipolita from Astrakhan to England as both overdetermined body and commodity, and her co-option by Elizabeth I. The third then follows these themes to closely investigate the ways in which they enable female authorship and authority in the context of imaginative empire building in Mary Wroth's The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, with its complex Persian and Tartarian engagements. The conjunction of Tartarian Ipolita with A Midsummer Night's Dream's Amazon Hippolyta leads to the introduction of Lucy Negro and the part she plays as audience and theme at the 1594 Gray's Inn New Year revels, including the Gesta Grayorum and the first performance of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Chapter 5 then offers a compelling reading of a much later Shakespearean play, Henry VIII, alongside Jacobean masquing forms, to consider the uneasy coexistence of imperial desire and anxiety in such performances and in the prominent role of royal blackface in Jonson's Masque of Blackness. Andrea's short final chapter then offers a striking reassessment of Teresa Sampsonia and Marian Khanim, whose complex agency challenges any easy assertion of British imperial destiny.

In asserting the constitutive role these women—who, if they have been considered at all, have routinely been marginalized—played in an explicitly male, Anglocentric, proto-imperial culture, Andrea makes a powerful feminist statement that reaffirms the rich potential and the ideological occlusions of the early modern archive. One of the book's strengths lies in the wide-ranging fashion in which it weaves its case studies out of many different literary and documentary forms, drawn from many different locations. In this and many other respects I found the book immensely enriching, but could not help occasionally wondering what an even wider range, potentially incorporating non-European sources, might have added. Similarly I felt that a more nuanced consideration of the religious faith of these women might have given further depth to the analysis. But these are minor quibbles: Andrea has produced an illuminating, important book that should be read well beyond its immediate field.