The driving conviction of World-Making Renaissance Women is that “a well-rounded version of literary history” would take stock of women's participation in the formal conditions of literary worldmaking (13). To begin this project, the collection offers “discrete, illustrative examples” of women's writing that shaped genres, impacted histories, and imagined worlds both large and small (3). The need for this work is self-evident; since the publication of Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking (1978), few major works seriously consider women's participation in early modern worldmaking. One notable exception, Mary Baine Campbell's Wonder and Science (1999), suggests possibilities by reading Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn alongside Francis Bacon and Giordano Bruno. Building on this work and others like it, this collection offers new readings on women's participation in shaping early modern literary transmission, temporality, science, religion, politics, and domesticity. The organization of the collection into four separate sections is suggestive without being overly prescriptive; several themes thread their way cohesively throughout the collection.
The collection's commitment to form underwrites the breadth of genres it covers. Lara Dodds's chapter on Cavendish illustrates this commitment well, asking a question that echoes throughout the collection: “How can we understand women's writing within categories created by a male-dominated profession that does not acknowledge the gendered nature of its values?” (147). Her own answer—that we reevaluate Cavendish's “antipathy to form” as concealing “a highly developed understanding of [its] affordances”—illustrates the critical reassessment of women's writing that many of the chapters offer (136).
Several chapters explore form in relation to geopolitical space, including Elaine Hobby's contribution on Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, in which the settings of Naples and the moon provide a “refuge from . . . the reign of James I and VII” (200). Marion Wynne-Davies questions the “small, domestic space” critics often associate with closet drama, instead uncovering an expansive conception of space that liberates sexual politics and regenders war (89). And Suzanne Trill's contribution explores the tension between English and Scottish religion and politics that emerge in the writings of Anne, Lady Halkett.
Other approaches foreground temporality, illuminating female sexuality or futurity as disruptive of imagined political stability. Marshelle Woodward examines Hester Pulter's apocalyptic visions of global dissolution to express “anxieties about the redeemability of creation” (169). Erin Murphy argues that typology in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judeorum “enables the imaginings of a homoerotic touch across time” that interrupts heteronormative aristocratic lineages (20). Jaime Goodrich invites readers to consider nuns as characters that resist what Lee Edelman defines as reproductive futurism. Indeed, lineage, both literary and genealogical, is central to several contributions, from Victoria E. Burke's recovery of Madame de Sable's underappreciated influence on the maxim to Brandi R. Siegfried's capacious account of Irish literary resistance through the figure of Grace O'Malley to Paul Salzman's careful publication history of Behn's work. Naomi J. Miller and Lisa Walters's survey of early modern women on the modern screen offers a sobering reminder of the gender biases that we have inherited from early modernity, including a tendency to read early modern women as subordinates to powerful men.
A final major theme revolves around the tensions between self-authorization and domesticity or intimate feminine worlds. Catherine Loomis explores the extent to which women's lived experience can be reconstructed from male-authored works featuring a first-person female narrator. Pamela S. Hammons introduces authors who resisted stereotypes about mothers and widows in their manuscript writings, and Laura De Furio traces self-disclosure as autobiography in Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. David Cunning and Elizabeth Hodgson both explore female authority and solidarity, while Tina Skouen and Henriette Kolle illuminate how melancholic withdraw, for Cavendish, enabled authorship.
Several assertions emerge in the course of these essays: that women's playful engagement with genres shaped literary worlds, that this shaping can be documented, that women's worldmaking participated in early modern culture and politics, and that critics overlook domesticity or intimacy as a site of worldmaking. While chapters occasionally contained less in-depth theorizing about early modern worldmaking than a reader might desire, this is understandable and even appropriate for a collection that maps new critical territory rather than surveying well-established fields.
In the end, the volume thoroughly accomplishes what it sets out to do: it offers a selection of compelling test-cases that soundly demonstrate both the need and direction for more sustained work on women's participation in early modern worldmaking.
