Jennifer Summit
Department of English
Stanford University
Stanford CA 94305-2087
summit@leland.stanford.edu
The first time I introduced women writers into an undergraduate survey class, I was alarmed by the fact that their works looked so different from the canonical male-authored texts on the syllabus. In contrast to the anthologies or paperback editions that enshrined the works of Wyatt, Sidney, or Spenser, the female-authored texts were, quite simply, messier: loose-leaf printouts from the Brown Women Writer's Project, black-letter copies from microfilm--physically, they carried none of the authority of their pristine, male-authored counterparts. Thankfully, these texts are now increasingly available in beautifully-produced editions and even in stalwarts like the Norton Anthology. In the meantime, however, I've come to see the messiness of women's writing as a positive feature, rather than a drawback; and while these new editions and anthologies have tremendous value and importance, I'm interested in teaching early women's writing from alternative sources as a way of "unediting the Renaissance" (to borrow Leah Marcus's productive phrase 1)--that is, excavating the earlier conditions of authorship that modern editing has tended to abstract and sanitize away.
Today I'll describe a course I taught for the first time last spring, called "Materials and Methods for the Study of Pre-Eighteenth Century Women Writers," which used the "messiness" of women's writing as a base for teaching archival research methods to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. My course, which modified an existing "Materials and Methods" course for graduate students in Stanford's English Department, was premised on the belief that studying early women's writing at advanced levels requires skill both in the traditional archival methodologies of paleography and codicology as well as in newer research tools like the web; and so on one level, it offered basic training in retrieving and reading original sources. Its second premise was that studying women writers from these original sources can produce a critical vantage point from which to rethink and rewrite the very models of authorship and canonicity that, institionalized in our curricula and editions, have long excluded women writers. In their Introduction to the Oxford series, "Women Writers in English, 1350-1850," Elizabeth Hageman and Suzanne Woods point out that many women writers featured in the series that "were well known and highly regarded until the professionalization of English studies in the later nineteenth century coincided with their excision from [the canon] and from the majority of literary histories."2 This observation touches the central concern of my class: If the idea of an exclusively male English literary canon is the invention of later periods, then what alternative, contemporary models of authorship and writing made it possible for early women writers to become visible--and even well known--in their own day? Recalling that we aren't the first readers to encounter these texts also creates new pedagogical challenges, which have to do less with placing women writers in literary history than with discovering the literary-historical forms in which they existed for an earlier time. To this end, my class approached its materials armed with a set of questions that aimed to uncover the meanings that early women's writing held for contemporary readers: in what ways were acts or artifacts of writing gendered in the early periods? What role did "the woman writer" play in the history of reading, authorship, and the book? What meanings and cultural valued defined "women's writing" at different historical moments? And how have women writers employed the various media and materials of writing to different ends and effects?3
In the space remaining, I want to explore some of these questions as they informed one section from the syllabus, on women's religious writing in print during and after the Reformation. This section brought together several early editions of writing by women that are available through RWO: The Examinations of Anne Askew (1546-7) and Elizabeth Tudor's translation of the Godly Medytacyon of the Cristen Sowle (1548), which are both online in the complete texts of their early editions, as well as Thomas Bentley's Monument of Matrons, a 1582 anthology of women's devotional writings--currently the RWO is offering an introduction to the text by John King, and I'm told that a significant portion of the book itself will be online soon. In these three editions, sixteenth-century women writers achieved unusual visibility and prominence; their editors, furthermore, left behind extensive introductory and concluding notes that demonstrate how models of female authorship could be shaped for the consumption of early modern readers. Together, these texts show that the figure of the woman writer has a long history in English literary culture, and one that is grounded in--even, in certain cases, central to--some of the broader historical concerns of the day. The immediate milieu of all three works is the Reformation, the series of events that transformed ideas about English writing and English national identity for the sixteenth century.eflect their own efforts to shape a model of female authorship for their readers' consumption. The question my class asked of them was a version of the question that Foucault poses in "What is an Author:" what made it possible for women writers to emerge in print at this particular moment in English literary history?
The Examinations of Anne Askew and Elizabeth Tudor's Godly Medytacyon of the Cristen Sowle were both edited by John Bale, better known as a Protestant polemicist during the Reformation. But in these two works, Bale shows how editing women's writing and supporting the Protestant cause could be conceived as complementary efforts. In his frequent editorial interpellations and lengthy introductions and conclusions, Bale stresses his two authors' femininity, even more than Askew and Elizabeth themselves do: where Askew deploys her gender strategically, for Bale, Askew's gender is a mark of her vulnerability, as he continually calls her "a woman, frayle, tendre, [and] yonge." Likewise, when the young Elizabeth manipulates gender in her self-description, Bale emphasises Elizabeth's authorship in gender-specific terms, calling attention to the book as "the work of a woman."
Bale's point in emphasising Askew's and Elizabeth's femininity is not to downplay or preclude the two women's authorship, but the opposite: in his editorial apparatus, it becomes clear that the figure of "the woman writer" bears a privileged relationship to English national identity. Bale's conclusion to his edition of Elizabeth's Godly Medytacyon proclaims that "no realme under the skye hath had more noble women, nor of more excellent graces, than have thys realme of Englande," and he goes on to list numerous learned English women who are Elizabeth's forerunners: such as "Claudia Rufina, a noble Briton, witty and learned in both Greek and Latin," and "Helena Flavia," who was the author of (as Bale writes) "a book of the providence of God, another of the immortality of the soul, with certain Greek poems, epistles, and diverse other treatises."
Yet if England is home to a glorious history of learned women, Bale laments that this history has remained for the most part unwritten. As he writes: "none in this land have yet done as did among the Greeks Plutarch and among the Latins Boccaccio . . . that is to say, left behind them catalogues or nomenclatures of famous and honorable women, yet hath it not at any time been barren of them." He blames this historical silence on the misogyny of medieval clerics, who have unjustly ignored or belittled the intellectual achievements of women. Thus in his First Examination of Anne Askew, Bale attacks the clerical writers responsible for misogynist works like "Contra doctrices mulieres, agaynst schole women, or els some otherlyke blynde Romysh beggeryes." Bale's description of clerical misogyny calls on a late medieval topos that saw women and clerks as natural enemies, which is implicit in Chaucer's opposition of the Wife of Bath with the clerk, as when the wife complains that "no woman of no clerk is praised." Bale shows that in the Reformation, the same topos could be turned on its head: if clerical misogyny made women into outsiders, it also identified them with a position of dissent against the Catholic church and its adherents (and for an illustration of this, I've given you a piece of Protestant Propaganda by Lucas Cranach the Elder, which shows monks and bishops being driven away by women). For Bale, the legendary hostility between women and clerks made medieval women into forerunners of English Protestantism, which likewise positioned itself against medieval monastic and clerical traditions.
For Bale, this imaginary history of dissident women forms the background for the work of Anne Askew and Elizabeth Tudor. He compares Anne Askew's martyrdom to that of Blandina, martyred by the Roman Emperor in the second century, while similarly comparing Elizabeth to "Voada," who was "a woman of wonderful force and heart [who] strongly armed herself, her two daughters, and five thousand women more of the Briton blood, in battle against the furious fierce Romans to suppress their tyranny and execrable filthiness in abusing maids, wives, and widows." These women's struggle against the misogynist Romans is continued by medieval women's religious struggles against the Roman Papacy in England, as he finds in examples such as Bede's Abbess Hild, who, as Bale writes approvingly, "openlye dysputed in [scriptures] agaynst the superstycyons of certen byshoppes." England's religious reformers constantly sought precedents for their work in the early history of the church: in The Acts and Monuments, John Foxe famously identifies the medieval Wycliffite heretics, the Lollards, as England's original Protestants in their struggle against the Church of Rome. Bale locates a parallel dissident legacy in the unchronicled history of women; thus his editions of Anne Askew and Elizabeth Tudor present his female authors as the return of England's radical repressed.
Bale is perhaps the first editor in England to define the project of recovering women's writing. But he also reveals that the task was not innocent of political motive--nor did it deem all women writers equally worthy of recovery. In his recuperation of women from England's past, Bale is notably selective. At the same time that he offers Voada or Abbess Hild as figures of a nascent Protestantism, he also rails misogynistically against Catholic female saints and anchoresses, who show that not all learned women in English history were figures of dissent. Thus even as he calls for a comprehensive history of learned women from the English past, in order to produce that history as a harbiner of Reformation, Bale leaves it necessarily incomplete.
In making the figure of the learned woman an icon of English Protestantism, Bale's work continued to shape the editing of women's writing in the later sixteenth century. One Elizabethan editor, Thomas Bentley, responded to Bale's call for "catalogues or nomenclatures of famous and honorable women" almost literally by producing a three-volume anthology of women's religious writing. Entitled The Monument of Matrones and published in 1582, Bentley's work compiles the pious writings of contemporary, ancient, and Biblical women into a massive collection. The scope of Bentley's focus is indicated in a table that opens the book, which is entitled "a breefe catalog of the memorable names of sundrie right famous Queenes, godlie Ladies, and vertuous women of all ages, which in their kind and countries were notablie learned." He makes his debt to Bale explicit on the following page, when he names Bale as one of his chief models: "Thus, good Readers, I haue set downe the names of some notable learned women to your consideration, referring such as desire to knowe further of their severall works to this treatise following, and to Gesnerus, Bale, Ludouicus Viues, the Chronicles, and such other writers of our time" [n.p.].
In his introduction to the massive work, Bentley stresses, like Bale, that England has been home to a long history of great women writers; and also like Bale, he laments the obscurity into which their work has fallen, since it has been, in his words, "obscured and worne cleane out of print, and so out of practice." Bentley's project, as he describes it, is to restore these works "to their former good and godly use in the church," once again identifying women's writing with an earlier, proto-Protestant past. Bentley's opening catalogue includes not only the names of women writers from Bale, such as "Anne Askew martyr," and Bale's proto-Protestant "Hilda," but also women who were icons of Catholic female literacy, including Saint Bridgit, Catherine of Siena, and even the shadowy "Elizabeth, an abbesse." Yet despite their inclusion in Bentley's catalogue, their work is omitted from the anthology that follows, showing that Bentley's "recovery" of lost women writers has been more selective than he first promises. Bentley follows Bale, then, not only by identifying Protestant literary history with the recovery of "lost" women writers, but also by selectively "losing" women writers who threaten his ability to picture "women's writing" as a coherent, Protestant category.
If Bale's work demonstrates the iconic value of the woman writer for the shaping of English national and religious identity, Bentley's fulfills this promise in ways that Bale could not. Following Bale, Bentley reproduces Elizabeth's Godly Medytacyon of the Cristen Sowle as the work's central text. But for Bentley, Elizabeth is not just a princess, turned into a Protestant female icon: she is the queen. And in The Monument of Matrones the Queen's own writing--as Bentley puts it in his dedication, "the admirable monuments of your owne Honourable works"--represents both the apex of a long history of women's writing and the model of Protestantism. By making Elizabeth I the exemplary Protestant author, Bentley's Monument of Matrones offers her as a figure in whom Reformation history and the pious woman writer come together to make women's religious writing the defining genre of the Protestant commonwealth.
Studying women writers within the material contexts in which they were first presented alters the terrain of Renaissance literary history as it is usually taught. Not only does this approach support Hageman's and Wood's contention that early women writers were known and read in their own age, it also illuminates the particular circumstances that enabled the figure of the woman writer to become visible. Bale and Bentley both challenge the assumption that early editors functioned soley as "gatekeepers" who sought to keep women's writing out of the public eye. At the same time, for both, an interest in publishing women's writing was driven by considerations of national and religious identity that became the political battlegrounds of the sixteenth century. It's my hope that, as texts by women writers become available through the RWO, they'll stimulate an interest in the place of women's writing in the broader history of writing, publishing and the book. The less sanitized these texts are--the more they preserve of their original contexts--the more they have to tell us about how women writers were received and read in an age before they disappeared from literary history.
1. Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York: Routledge, 1996)
2. Cited from Elizabeth H. Hageman and Suzanne Woods, "Foreword," The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), x.
3. These are questions that I explore at length in my forthcoming book, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13980.ctl; the readings I rehearse in this paper are worked out at greater length in my third chapter, "The Reformation of the Woman Writer."