Rosalind smith sonnets and the english woman writer, 1560 1621 the politics of absence early modern literature in history 2005

Introduction: Gender, Genre and Attribution in Early Modern Women’s Sonnet Sequences and Collections 1 1 ‘In a mirrour clere’: Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus as Attribution and agency in

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

The Politics of Absence

Rosalind Smith

General Editors: Cedric C Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton

Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford

Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures Titles include:

Cedric C Brown and Arthur F Marotti (editors)

TEXTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Martin Butler (editor)

RE-PRESENTING BEN JONSON

Text, History, Performance

‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’

Gendered Writing in Early Modern England

James Daybell (editor)

EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700

Jerome De Groot

ROYALIST IDENTITIES

John Dolan

POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH

Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox (editors)

BETRAYING OUR SELVES

Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE

Chronicles of the Self

Pauline Kiernan

STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE

Ronald Knowles (editor)

SHAKESPEARE AND CARNIVAL

After Bakhtin

Arthur F Marotti (editor)

CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS Jennifer Richards (editor)

EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES

Sasha Roberts

READING SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Rosalind Smith

SONNETS AND THE ENGLISH WOMAN WRITER, 1560–1621

The Politics of Absence

Mark Thornton Burnett

CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE

MASTERS AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CULTURE Authority and Obedience

The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.

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Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

The Politics of Absence

Rosalind Smith

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1 Sonnets, EnglishHistory and criticism 2 English poetryWomen authorsHistory and criticism 3 English poetryEarly modern, 1500
1700History and criticism 4 Women and literature Great BritainHistory16th century 5 Women and literature Great BritainHistory17th century 6 PoetryAuthorshipSex differencesHistory16th century 7 PoetryAuthorshipSex differencesHistory17th century I Title II Early modern literature in history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))

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Introduction: Gender, Genre and Attribution in Early

Modern Women’s Sonnet Sequences and Collections 1

1 ‘In a mirrour clere’: Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus as

Attribution and agency in early modern women’s

2 Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 39The casket sonnets: Attribution, circulation and sovereign

The politics of absence: The casket sonnets and the

3 The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 61The Pandora sonnets: Translations from Desportes 65

4 The Politics of Withdrawal: Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia

‘Bard of Light’: Spenserian negotiations in Pamphilia

espe-to Mary Queen of Scots and widely circulated in print as Protestantpropaganda from 1571 – involved a scandalous narrative of rape andadulterous love that made the genres of the sonnet sequence and femalecomplaint unavailable to English women writers in print until MaryWroth’s unfashionably late 1621 sequences in the Urania This specificand local instance of textual circulation worked with a set of culturalprescriptions surrounding women’s conduct to preclude women’s partici-pation in the genre at its height in the late Elizabethan period.

This book therefore challenges the critical commonplace that thegender encodings of the genre of the Petrarchan sonnet themselveslimited or prevented women’s use of the genre It does so by highlight-ing the ways in which women in England practised the genre before thepublication of the casket sonnets and in their wake, and by comparingthe English tradition to a surprisingly prolific Continental tradition ofwomen’s sonnet writing in the Italian and French Renaissances In line

viii

with much recent work on women’s writing in the field of early modernstudies, this book also challenges the idea that when women writersused the genre, they did so in ways essentially or predictably different tothe practice of their male counterparts Gender does make differenceshere to women’s practice within the genre, but these are not differencesthat always manifest themselves in the same ways – especially notthrough a consistent interest in the ‘private’ emotional or domesticconcerns that have been argued in the past The study’s concentration

on the particular conditions of production, circulation and reception ofthese sequences seeks to illuminate a more complex understanding ofthe way in which gender and genre intersect in the period In differentways, these texts all operated as political interventions underwritten byProtestantism; but what Protestantism meant in each of these contexts,and the agency that it afforded or denied women authors and con-structions of women’s writing, differs radically in each literary historytraced here

An early reader of this material commented that she could not seehow anyone could make an argument from such a strange collection ofpoetry In this respect, this book is the product of its critical generation,which favours the obscure over the canonical: neglected poetic coteries;once overlooked genres such as the newsbook, pamphlet, or sermon;and marginal practitioners such as the pornographers of the Elizabethanlyric But there is a sense that the material examined here is at the farreaches of this literary marginality This is in part because the textsappear in anomalous circumstances, where an early history of secularlyric agency and innovation in the genres of sonnet and complaint isalmost immediately foreclosed These early conventions of sonnet andcomplaint, never repeated in the history of the Elizabethan lyric, remainodd and unfamiliar But the marginality of many of the texts underconsideration here also derives from their status as works of uncertainattribution Considered neither as a secure part of the canon of women’swriting nor as male-authored texts, their unresolved problems ofauthorship means that they have remained at the edges of literaryhistory This book uses the uncertainty surrounding these texts toexpose a set of methodological problems and omissions in the field ofearly modern women’s writing

On one hand, this study argues that questions of attribution matter It

is not enough to make strained and poorly supported ascriptions ofauthorship to women writers in the hope of falsely bolstering the num-ber and diversity of women’s texts in the period Contested attributionsneed detailed and scrupulous attention, and the possibility of male

authorship of texts circulated under women’s signatures needs to beentertained if we are to gain a sense of what might have been historicalwomen’s writing practice in the English Renaissance On the otherhand, this book argues that if an attribution remains unresolved, thetext can still be productively analyzed and, in some cases, this analysismay still be undertaken within the field of early modern women’s writ-ing Indeed, such texts allude to the ghostly presence of an historicalwoman writer through a set of paratextual signals such as signature andcirculation practice, but correspond unpredictably to the originatingpresence of such a writer In this process, they illuminate a surprisingset of conventions and possibilities surrounding ideas of women’s writ-ing in the early modern period This study regards female authorshipand female writing as separate but related categories, and in doing soattempts to extend the boundaries of what is understood to constituteearly modern women’s writing Further, if the impact of texts of uncer-tain authorship in this single genre is such as to alter the direction ofwomen’s lyric agency in the period, it raises the question of the impact

of other texts of disputed attribution in other genres How might theirconsideration alter our understanding of not only women’s textualpractice in the period, but early modern writing in general?

This work began as a thesis at the University of Oxford, under theexemplary, rigorous and inspiring supervision of David Norbrook It alsobenefited in its early stages from the influence of a mentor, colleagueand friend, Lorna Hutson, and the input of Terence Cave, Diana Birchand Ros Ballaster I received a number of grants in this period thatallowed me to complete my primary research I would like to thankExeter College, the University of Sydney and the Newberry Library fortheir assistance My time at Oxford was made infinitely more enjoyablebecause of my friends there: Scott Ashley, Hannah Betts, Brad Hoylman,Simon Hudson, Margaret Kean, Eleri Larkum, William O’Reilly, MichelleO’Callaghan, Bruce Taylor and Clare Taylor More recently, colleagues atthe University of Newcastle have given me a sustaining level of friend-ship and support; I would like to thank Hugh Craig, David Boyd, ThereseDavis, Tim Dolin, Lucy Dugan, Ivor Indyk, David Matthews, ChrisPollnitz, Imre Salusinszky and especially David Kelly for their collegial-ity and conversations over the years But my particular thanks must go

to two colleagues and friends who helped me beyond the call of duty inpreparing this manuscript for publication: Mark Gauntlett and DianneOsland Both interrogated my arguments and improved my writingbeyond measure; their own prose styles are models of elegance andclarity, and any infelicities of expression remaining in this book are

my own I would also like to thank Hugh Lindsay for assisting me withsome Latin translations I am grateful to the University of Newcastle forproviding me with crucial periods of research time and grants thatallowed me to rewrite my thesis as a book Finally, my greatest debt isowed to my family This project would never have been finished as athesis without the emotional and material support of Marie Lewin,Gwen Smith and Ian Smith, and it became a book only with the supportand inspiration of my husband Mark Prince and my beautiful children:Felix, Isobel and our newest addition Without you, ‘my wordes be butwind’.

I am grateful to the librarians of the British Library and the BodleianLibrary for permission to reprint material from manuscript sources

I would also like to thank Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke forincluding an earlier version of Chapter 1 in ‘This Double Voice’: GenderedWriting in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) A sec-tion of Chapter 3 appeared in ‘The Sonnets of the Countess of Oxfordand Elizabeth I: Translations from Desportes’, Notes and Queries 239(1994): 446–50 Earlier versions of two sections of Chapter 4 have alsoappeared in print: ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: ThePolitics of Withdrawal’, ELR 30:3 (2000): 408–31; and ‘ ‘‘I thus goe arm’d

to field’’: Lindamira’s Complaint’, Meridian 18:1 (2001): 73–85 I am ful to the editors and to the publishers of these works for permission topublish revised versions of this material in this book

grate-List of Abbreviations

ANQ American Notes and Queries

ELH English Literary History

ELR English Literary Renaissance

Geneva Bible The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro

Lloyd E Berry (Madison and London: University ofWisconsin Press, 1969) Unless otherwise stated, allbiblical references are to this edition

JWCI Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes

SEL Studies in English Literature

Where possible, the texts of the poetry and letters reproduced here areall based on original manuscript sources, or early modern print sourceswhen no manuscript source is extant Punctuation and orthography arederived from the original source with minimal modernization, exceptfor the long /s/ and the expansion of the abbreviated superscript /t/ andother contractions There has been no normalization of /u/, /v/, /w/ and/i/, /j/, and Lowland Scots terminology such as ‘quhilk’ has not beentranslated Omissions of words and lines are indicated in square brackets.Publishers have been given for texts published after 1800

xii

Introduction: Gender, Genre and Attribution in Early Modern

Women’s Sonnet Sequences and Collections

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of thatextraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, wascapable of a song or sonnet

– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own1

Virginia Woolf’s influential construction of the Renaissance womanwriter as silent, isolated and embattled has undergone significant revi-sion in feminist literary scholarship The historical sources of suchassumptions have been exposed in analyses of canon formation, and anew set of texts, genres and modes of writing has been introduced toaccommodate early modern women’s diverse contributions to theliterary field.2However, in the process of redrawing the boundaries ofearly modern textuality, the ‘perennial puzzle’ that Woolf identifies hasremained unexamined: Why did women contribute to some of thevernacular lyric traditions of the English Renaissance in such small num-bers? This book reconsiders this question in one of the period’s primarylyric genres, the sonnet sequence Structured around the detailed localhistories of each text’s production and circulation, it seeks to construct ageneric history that accommodates rupture and hiatus without recourse

to assumed absence, invented tradition or uncritical reinforcement of themale-authored tradition as normative The scarcity of English womensonneteers at the height of the male-authored genre presents a problem,

or puzzle, for examination rather than a straightforward example offeminine limitation in the period This study argues that the peculiarconditions of circulation, reception, prosopopoeia and politics attached

to these sequences changed the shape of early modern English women’stextuality, and it demonstrates the importance of attending to specificgeneric histories in the study of early modern women’s writing

1

Only five sequences and collections were published in England underthe signatures of women between 1560 and 1621, and at least two ofthese are of very doubtful attribution The first sonnet sequence inEnglish, published in 1560, has been attributed to Anne Lock, and wasfollowed in 1571 by probably the most widely circulated example ofpoetry under a feminine signature in the period – the casket sonnets –attributed in the text to Mary Queen of Scots and published in GeorgeBuchanan’s multiply reprinted Ane Detectiovn.3 The success of thisscandalous text as Protestant propaganda marked a hiatus in sonnetsequences attributed to women With the exception of a sequencemisleadingly attributed in the text of Pandora to the Countess of Oxford,Anne Cecil de Vere, in 1584, no further sequences were circulated underfeminine signatures until Lady Mary Wroth’s unfashionably lateJacobean sequences published in the Urania in 1621.4This idiosyncratichistory challenges simplistic claims of women’s exclusion from thegenre, and raises larger questions about the ways in which the relatedconcepts of gender, genre and textuality might be constructed in theperiod The generic shape formed by this set of texts is an unfamiliarone, especially compared to the existing narrative of the development ofthe sonnet sequence in the English Renaissance, beginning with theforms provided by Wyatt’s and Surrey’s Petrarchan imitations andculminating in the multitude of sequences published in the 1590s.5Italso differs from the sometimes prolific and self-reflexive Europeantraditions of women’s sonnet writing Clustered at either end of thedevelopment of the genre, and marked by a remarkable absence at itsheight, English early modern women’s sonnet sequences appear at first

to be a collection of anomalous exceptions

The idiosyncratic form of the English tradition is highlighted by itscomparison with a European tradition, in which women writers in Italyand France published widely circulated sequences participating in andmodifying Petrarchan conventions In Italy especially, the period fromthe beginning of the sixteenth century to the closing of the Council ofTrent in 1563 was one of significant expansion for women writers.Rinaldina Russell claims that between 1538 and the end of the sixteenthcentury, over 200 books contained examples of feminine authorship:either authored by women, anthologies of women’s writing, or generalanthologies that included contributions by women Similarly, LauraAnna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie list 105 published women poetsactive in the sixteenth century alone in addition to the 19 whose worksthey anthologize.6 The best known of these poets, Vittoria Colonna,Veronica Gambara and Gaspara Stampa, all composed substantial

sonnet sequences Vittoria Colonna’s first published poem in 1535 was asonnet, ‘Ahi quanto fu al mio sol contrario il fato’, followed by editions

of her poems containing erotic and divine sonnet sequences andcollections in 1538, 1544, 1558 and 1559.7Although the love sonnets

of Veronica Gambara’s Rime were uncollected at her death in 1550, theywere circulated in manuscript and appeared in many sixteenth-centurycollections of poetry.8Both were eclipsed, however, by the posthumousoutput of Gaspara Stampa: after her death in 1553 her sister Cassandrapublished her Rime, containing over 221 sonnets in her Rime Amore and

62 in her Rime Varie.9The Petrarchan sonnet was a form widely used bythe many women poets of the Italian Renaissance, and recent scholarshiphas identified a set of other important practitioners of the form, includingLaura Battiferri, Olimpia Malipiera, Tullia d’Aragona, Chiara Matraini,Laura Bacio Terracina, Isabella di Morra and Isabella Andreini.10TheItalian tradition of women’s sonnet writing was a self-reflexive onethrough which women registered in poems, written or dedicated toone another, their debts and connections in a complex and vibrantfeminine literary economy grounded in Petrarchism.11

This tradition of women writing secular lyric poetry arose from acultural context distinct in many ways from that operating in the corres-ponding period in England It encompassed a number of earlier womenwriters, from the fourteenth-century poets Leonora della Genga, Ortensia

di Guglielmo, Livia del Chiavello and Giustina Levi Perotti to a set ofhumanist writers of the fifteenth century Writing predominantly inLatin and Greek, humanist scholars such as Battista Malatesta, LauraCereta, Cassandra Fedele and Ginevra and Isotta Nogarola indirectlyprovided role models for later generations of women writers, and theirinfluence was supplemented by the women who wrote poetry in theTuscan vernacular: Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, Lucrezia Tornabuonide’ Medici and Antonia Giannotti Pulci.12The humanist education ofsome royal, patrician and courtly women, which included the Italianvernacular poets Dante and Petrarch, contributed to the concentration

of women vernacular poets in the sixteenth century Women’s lyricagency was also fostered by local court cultures in which aristocraticwomen had a new status as patrons of the arts, whether as members ofruling families or separately: three widows of rulers, Giulia Gonzaga atMantua, Veronica Gambara at Correggio, and Vittoria Colonna atPescara, used their independent positions as rulers to foster culturalcentres at their courts.13 The status associated with women’s literaryeducation in Italy extended to the cortegiane honorate, whose humanisteducation included training in the composition of vernacular poetry

Mediated through the writing of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, the tions of the Petrarchan tradition were not only available to a range ofwomen writers in the Italian Renaissance, but also became one of thefoundations of their education and, for some, a marker of their virtuosity.

conven-On a smaller scale, women writers of the French Renaissance alsoparticipated in the genre of the sonnet sequence, or drew upon theconventions and forms of Petrarchism in other lyric genres Louise Labe´published her Oeuvres Poe´tiques in 1555, containing a dedicatory epistle,the prose ‘Debate Between Folly and Love’, three elegies and a 24-sonnetsequence; it was followed by three more editions in 1556, two at Lyonand one at Rouen.14Lyon’s position as a trade crossroads, as the stagingarea for successive French military invasions of northern Italy, and as aprinting and publishing centre meant that it was closer to Italian Renais-sance influence than other areas of France.15 As in parts of Italy, ahumanist education was increasingly available to wealthy women, andcoupled with the appearance in print of the works of Christine de Pisanand Marguerite de Navarre, this milieu also produced the genericallydiverse Les Rymes by Pernette du Guillet, first published in 1545, andrapidly republished with expansions in Paris in 1546 and 1547 and again

in Lyon in 1552.16 In Poitiers, Madeleine and Catherine des Rochespublished sonnets as part of their collected works Les Oeuvres in 1578,followed by a second edition in 1579 containing additional piecesincluding Catherine des Roches’ ‘Sonnets de Sincero et Charite’; LesMissives were published in 1586 and Les Secondes Oeuvres in 1583.17While these examples do not compare with the number of womenwriting sonnet sequences in the Italian Renaissance, they nonethelessprovide examples of women’s participation in the genre that raisequestions about the poverty and untimeliness of women’s sonnetwriting in England

The difference between English and Italian women’s sonnet writing issurprising, particularly given that many of the critical responses toindividual sonnet sequences within the English tradition have assumedthat the gender roles encoded within the genre itself limited orprevented women’s use of the genre The first group of critics to breakfrom early gynocritical readings of these sequences developed anargument that framed women’s writing in terms of its limitations, inwhich language itself ‘provided women poets only gaps, silences, therole of other, within male discourse’, and within which women wereseen to be ‘struggling into discourse’.18The male-authored Petrarchansonnet sequence was seen to be defined by a set of strictly delineatedgender roles, in which the male Petrarchan subject formed his erotic,

textual and political subjectivity against the body of his silenced femalebeloved, and his desiring gaze reflected back towards himself to con-struct, according to John Freccero’s analysis, a self-enclosed, idolatroustrinity.19 As Ann Rosalind Jones’ early and nuanced analysis of thepoetry of Louise Labe´ and Pernette du Guillet argues, the woman subjectdid not simply appropriate the male subject position, but wrote ‘withinbut against the center of the traditions that surrounded them, usingPetrarchan and Neoplatonic discourse in revisionary and interrogatoryways’.20However, in the first analyses of the English sonnet sequences,gender was seen not only to shape but to circumscribe the womanwriter’s engagement with the genre, and even to preclude its possibility:Gary Waller goes so far as to argue that the shift from passive object ofdevotion to active speaking subject was so difficult as to institutionalize

‘a wholesale gagging of women readers and writers’.21 A number ofcritical analyses of English women’s sonnet sequences followed thisapproach, characterizing the poetry in terms of circumscription, silenceand enclosure and denying the writers all but the most limited textualagency even as their participation in the genre is discussed It is a curiousstance, marked by the uneasy intersection of liberal feminism and earlynew historicism, which attempts to find a universal marker for thedifference of women’s writing within this genre in discourses of contain-ment and control What is found to be ‘feminine’ or different here arequalities associated with the containment of women within the privatesphere This approach ignored the new historicist rewriting of themale-authored sonnet sequence as a charged political vehicle used bycourtiers as a means of advancing their status in the court and asserting

a textual authority as they become increasingly disenfranchised frompolitical power Instead, it was implied that, for women, love was stilllove; they used the Petrarchan love sequence in a private context.22Theterms ‘women’ and ‘genre’ here formed monolithic categories, overridingdifferences in class, political status and affiliation attaching to specificwomen writers and ignoring shifts within the genre itself

The critical problems associated with such readings have been subject

to revision since the mid-1990s, and these revisions have focused inparticular on the separation of the sequences from the wider genre ofthe male-authored sonnet sequence and from courtly or politicalconcerns Heather DuBrow’s Echoes of Desire addresses the new histori-cist tendency to read Petrarchism as an exercise in domination andsilencing, arguing that Arthur Marotti’s corrective formulation againstreading love as love in the genre has been taken too far In this reading,the figure of Laura is more than a decoy enabling the speaker’s political

ambitions, but instead becomes a site of confusion of gender and pretation of speech and silence The male-authored sequence is nolonger understood as an empowered masculine subjectivity constructedagainst a silenced feminine object, but as a more contingent and volatilespace for the unresolved ‘tossing back and forth between representations

reinter-of success and failure, agency and impotence, and control andhelplessness’.23 The destabilized subject position of the Petrarchanspeaker afforded by this model is one balanced by a construction ofthe feminine beloved in terms more complex than silence and object-ification; the female voice is subject within the genre to a number ofmodes, including reported and direct speech, praise and challenge, informs of aestheticization that do not always equate with ‘objectificationand diminution’.24A similar critique is offered by Barbara Estrin, wherethe Petrarchan poem becomes a ‘disputed space’ with ‘overlappingcounter-voices’ and where a woman may be ‘sometimes the ‘‘subject ofconsciousness’’ ’.25These reconsiderations of the dynamics of Petrarchismchallenge earlier formulations of the English genre in terms of reductiveand distinct gender encoding, with significant ramifications for work inearly modern women’s poetry DuBrow’s call for a historicized used ofpsychoanalytical modes of differentiation has been mirrored in other,more recent analyses, which attend to the complexity and historicalspecificity of individual sequences

In particular, the sequences at the beginning and the end of theEnglish tradition, attributed to Anne Lock and Lady Mary Wroth, havebeen reconsidered as engagements with local and political Protestantism,although keyed to very different moments in its development In thisprocess, the sequences have been aligned with, rather than automatic-ally precluded from, contemporary male-authored literary groupings.26Yet these new readings are not without their problems The focus uponlocal contexts reflects a desire to avoid essentialist generalizations and toattend to specific histories, but has tended to mask any connectionswithin women’s textual practice that might fall outside immediatefamilial, social and literary networks The generic field remains charac-terized by disconnection and anomalous exceptions Even recentapproaches to early modern women’s writing through genre assume

an absence of specific feminine generic traditions outside the encoded genres of letters, diaries and life writing Instead, they addressthe broad category of early modern women’s engagement withPetrarchism rather than their participation in specific genres such asthe sonnet sequence or complaint.27In addition, this narrative of anomaly

feminine-is reinforced by uncertainties of authorship attaching to the genre of the

sonnet sequence: with the exception of the two sequences published byLady Mary Wroth in the Urania, all of these sequences are troubled byquestions of attribution Especially in the most problematic cases of thesonnets attributed, in print, to Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Cecil deVere, the uncertainty of their authorship has left these texts at the edges

of literary history Neither women’s writing nor canonical male-authoredtexts, they have either been considered only in terms of their attribu-tion, often on unconvincingly partisan grounds, or been excluded fromdiscussion altogether Yet by virtue of their circulation as texts underwomen’s signatures, they impacted upon the shape of the genre andwomen’s agency within it in significant and surprising ways Theirreconsideration here not only alters local formations of gender andgenre, but raises larger questions about the current methodologiesunderpinning the category of women’s writing itself

This book has three aims For the first time, it examines as a whole thegenre of sonnet sequences and collections written by and attributed towomen in the English Renaissance It maps an unfamiliar generichistory that runs parallel to the male-authored tradition, but inverts itstrajectory The female-authored genre is characterized by moments ofinnovation and agency in the mid-sixteenth century and the early seven-teenth century, but is almost entirely absent in the late Elizabethan period,when, as Woolf remarks, ‘every other man, it seemed, was capable of asong or sonnet’ The book’s first aim is to construct a map of the genre,and to explore the cultural and social factors that shaped this unusualhistory These include an examination of the ways in which the publica-tion of these sequences impacted upon each another, and upon women’slyric agency in the period The second aim of the book is to reconsider theindividual sequences in the particular historical contexts of their produc-tion and circulation These local studies address questions of attribution,political agency and critical reception: they aim to provide a detailedanalysis of the differences that discourses of gender actually made to each

of these texts at particular historical moments In this process, they resistgeneralized claims about the operation of gender and genre in the period

in favour of a specific, constantly shifting narrative of different forms

of ‘feminine’ textual practice Finally, the third aim of the book is tointerrogate the ways in which women’s writing is defined in the period.The attribution difficulties surrounding many of these sequences raisequestions about a set of unexamined critical assumptions that givelegitimacy to those texts securely identified with historical womenwriters, yet ignore others of less certain provenance The book highlights,through the example of a single genre, the problems that such simplistic

constructions of author, text and signature create, and suggests that ourunderstanding of the field of early modern women’s writing might beentirely different if such problematic texts were admitted.

In examining the curious genre of sonnet sequences and collectionswritten by and attributed to women in the English Renaissance as awhole, this book first argues for a specifically feminine, and increasinglyself-reflexive, generic practice, one characterized by moments of extra-ordinary innovation and possibility as well as rupture and difficulty Thecomparative examples of women’s sonnet sequences in Italy and France,together with recent reformulations of the encodings of gender withinthe genre, suggest that the idiosyncratic formation of the English trad-ition cannot be attributed to the dynamics of the genre alone This bookproposes a more complex set of forces at work to produce the shape ofthe English tradition, attributable in part to the discourses surroundingwomen and secular writing at particular historical instances in theElizabethan and Jacobean courts and in part to the circulation histories

of the particular poems under consideration While the book employs ahistorical specificity in its analysis of the politics of individual texts andits focus on a single genre, it also suggests that examples of individualtextual practice circulated under feminine signatures had an impact on

a wider literary field than that contained by immediate social networks.This impact took a number of forms, by providing precedents for modes

of textual circulation or possible generic combinations that enabled thefemale subject to negotiate certain gender codes However, the generichistory of the sonnet sequence also indicates that such precedents werenot always positive or empowering for other women writers The bookargues that the complex and scandalous circulation history of MaryStuart’s casket sonnets, which detail the female speaker’s rape andcontinuing adulterous relationship, both opened up a set of textualpossibilities for secular women poets and simultaneously closed off thegenre to women writers for 50 years The widespread circulation of thecasket sonnets created in part the generic hiatus that has been figured incritical terms as simple absence and exclusion

However, the impact of this sequence worked in conjunction with acomplex set of other cultural discourses to inform women’s engagementwith the genre This book secondly attempts to reconstruct the local histor-ical circumstances of each text’s production and circulation, including adetailed attention to questions of authorship and attribution, in order toexamine the differences that gender might make in a particular context.Rather than seeing these as texts directed towards a limited audience andpredominantly concerned with domestic or emotional interests, the study

challenges the idea that women did not use the genre of the sonnetsequence as male courtiers did, for political purposes, and it seeks toreposition these sequences and writers in terms of their engagement withcourtly and political concerns Although the terms of their political articu-lations differ from the sequences circulated under male signatures, thesedifferences are not always consistent, nor attributable to a single model offemininity They alter according to the class, mobility and access to shiftingsites of power of their authors, the way the text is circulated, the invest-ments of its audience and the extent of its political engagement Neitherare they wholly political texts: the practice of combining the Petrarchansonnet with penitential meditation, elegy and complaint in thesesequences constantly mediates and disguises the political within alterna-tive frames, often linked to questions of personal faith, familial concerns

or the pursuit of material self-interest The insertion of the woman ject into the genre of the sonnet sequence becomes a complex process ofthe negotiation of limits, where the extent of agency shifts according tothe local circumstances of a text’s production and circulation

sub-One surprising result of these local analyses is the recurrence ofProtestantism as a central discourse variously underwriting the politicalinterventions of each of these texts The Meditation sequence, attached

to Anne Lock’s translation of Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38, forms part

of a text that uses the twin figures of Hezekiah and David as models ofadmonitory instruction to the sovereign, seeking to direct religiouspolicy in the early Elizabethan state in response to a Calvinist anxietyconcerning Elizabeth’s uncertain religious alliances The casket sonnets

of Mary Stuart were circulated in print from 1571 in George Buchanan’sAne Detectiovn as Protestant propaganda, immediately positioning theirerotic content in a public context and providing a damaging alternative

to the chaste poetics of sovereignty practised by Elizabeth I In a laterparallel to the 1560 Meditation sonnets, the examples of prosopopoeiaattributed in the text of John Soowthern’s Pandora to Anne Cecil de Vereand Elizabeth I are also informed by a radical Protestant agenda, directedtowards Elizabethan reluctance towards military involvement in theNetherlands, with an element of admonitory instruction towards thesovereign Finally, the sonnet sequences Lindamira’s Complaint andPamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth are aligned with thewriting of the Spenserians, a group of radical Protestant writers in theJacobean court, and use a Spenserian nostalgia for Elizabeth’s reign both

to present a utopian Protestant court and to transfer the multi-valencysurrounding the sovereign which characterizes the Elizabethan sonnetsequence to the Jacobean court

It is now a critical commonplace to suggest that in England womenwriters had a Reformation rather than a Renaissance, and that religionenabled a degree of textual agency for women writers in the period.28Yetthese discussions have emphasized women’s participation in forms ofreligious textual practice such as translation, prayer and meditation ratherthan their participation in secular genres such as the erotic lyric Thespecific histories outlined here modify this argument by demonstratingthe role that Protestantism played, in both radical and conservative forms,

in the construction of actual and imagined women’s writing in England.The models provided by Pauline psalm meditation in particular, offering aplainant speaking in colloquy to God, provided fruitful correspondences

to the relationship of the Petrarchan subject to a distant lover and wererepeatedly capitalized upon in these sequences as authorizing strategiesproducing a decorous secular subjectivity for the ‘woman writer’ They aremirrored by other biblical precedents open to assertions of female lyricagency: particularly that of the female erotic subject speaking to Christ aslover and bridegroom and using the blazon in the Song of Songs.29Anexamination of the genre as a whole, however, shows that this is not asimple narrative equating religion with agency: the Protestant politicalcontexts at work here both constructed authorizing strategies for somewriters and prevented access to the genre for others

The impact of the casket sonnets within the genre of the sonnetsequence also raises questions as to their influence upon the wider field

of secular women’s writing in the English Renaissance JosephineRoberts’ suggestion that the popularity of mimed female discourse,particularly in the genre of complaint, ‘may well have been a contributingfactor in discouraging sixteenth-century Englishwomen from writingtheir own lyric poetry’ is here given specific force, inviting speculationthat the casket sonnets might have contributed to the national biastowards religious writing in contrast to women’s parallel traditions inEurope.30Capitalizing on the much-rehearsed, but nascent, associationbetween women’s textuality and sexuality, Elizabeth’s early propagandapolicies intensified the very discourses they exploited in circulating thedetails of the speaker’s rape and continuing adultery with her marriedlover in the casket sonnets These are familiar elements of the femalecomplaint, another genre only employed by women outside its height

in the male-authored tradition: the examples of the Meditation’s plainantDavid in 1560 and Isabella Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter (1567) and

A Sweet Nosgay (1573) again are not repeated until Mary Wroth’sLindamira’s Complaint in the Urania in 1621 Recovering a specific gen-eric history provides a new perspective on generalized claims of the

effect of cultural construction of women’s sexuality and textuality

in England, associations which operated less restrictively in parallelEuropean contexts and to shifting degrees within an English contextitself.31For the casket sonnets to be effective as propaganda defamingMary Stuart’s character, they needed to be believable as the work of awoman poet, albeit a foreign one This indicates a very different set ofexpectations and assumptions about women’s secular lyric agency oper-ating in the late 1560s and early 1570s compared to the late Elizabethanperiod Although recent caveats warn against the duplicities and strains

of the construction of feminine literary traditions, this restricted sis of genre through an examination of local contexts indicates the value

analy-of examining such partial and strange traditions for what they might tell

us about constructions of both gender and genre in the period

By attending to local literary histories, the book works to recover notjust a set of texts, but a forgotten generic tradition The third aim of thisbook is thus to examine the processes that led to the genre’s neglect, and

to reconsider the boundaries of what might be considered femininetextuality in the early modern period The uneasy status conferred uponfour of these texts by their uncertain attributions leads to the use here of

a model of women’s writing articulated in practice and located in thematerial conventions of textual circulation rather than in the body ofthe author These conventions of signature and circulation practicecreate paratextual signals that might both foreground the role of awoman writer, through a direct textual attribution in print, or occludeher identity, through the use of initials However, as this collection ofhistories shows, these strategies correspond unpredictably to the author-ial presence of an historical woman writer Much work has been done inrecent scholarship to modify some of our modern assumptions regardingthe author to accommodate the writing practices of the Renaissance,which included collaborative and coterie authorship, a range of strategies

of anonymity in publication, and unfamiliar constructions of textualownership and literary indebtedness.32However, these revisions haveonly recently been applied to the field of early modern women’s writing,largely because the gynocritical project that has brought almost all ofthese writers to critical view was concerned with establishing the exist-ence of a body of historical women writers in response to assumptions oftheir absence or the poverty of their textual activity.33This project ofrecovery has led to some strained and at times duplicitous attributions,and has left a large body of texts in a state of indeterminacy and neglect.This study seeks to keep the idea of attribution in play, in order to keephistorical women writing subjects in view But it approaches the necessary

uncertainties attached to the process of attributing authorship as part of

a text’s interpretative context, rather than simply a register of its imacy as ‘women’s writing’ A different privilege attached to authenti-city, and a different methodology uncoupling the necessary association

legit-of the gender legit-of the author and the gender legit-of the text, newly allows theexamination of these sonnet sequences as instances of local textualpractice and as part of a generic history

Genre looks different here; it becomes a hyperbolized version of theopenness which Rosalie Colie identifies as typical of Renaissance writing,and which Lyotard identifies in his flexible and contingent theory ofgenre as ‘modes of linking’, both dependent upon a set of prior texts andaltering at each moment of utterance.34While offering, in Colie’s terms,

‘a set of interpretations, of ‘‘fixes’’ or ‘‘frames’’ on the world’, genre alsooffers for these writers both a frame and a site of innovation, a safety netand a familiar language as well as a place for the insertion of theunfamiliar voice of the female Petrarchan subject This group of textsalso destabilizes current constructions of the figure of the early modernwoman writer: the literary history uncovered here indicates an earlyhistory of secular lyric agency and innovation as well as the later repres-sive mechanisms of its containment These shifts are linked to specific,and highly contingent, local circumstances of the production andcirculation of texts, which mean that this generic history is shadowed

by a set of alternatives that allow for a different trajectory of women’swriting in the English Renaissance, one closer to the more productivehistories of feminine secular writing in Italy and France Without thecirculation of the casket sonnets, our understanding of the parameters

of feminine textual agency in England might have been very different.While not seeking to re-invoke Jakob Burckhardt’s level playing field,significantly located in the Italian Renaissance, this generic historynonetheless resists the idea that women’s secular textual agency wasnecessarily limited in England, by examining the specific set of eventsthat produced its particular exclusions and emphases.35 Finally, thisgeneric history, made up of real and imagined women writers, extendsthe boundaries of what might constitute women’s writing in the earlymodern period It is the texts of uncertain attribution that tell us mostabout constructions of women and writing, gender and genre in thishistory, and their impact in the study of this single genre suggests thattheir inclusion in the literary field as a whole might construct a verydifferent sense of what constituted the separate but related categories ofearly modern female authorship, writing and voice in England.36

‘In a mirrour clere’: Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus as Admonitory Protestantism

In 1560, Anne Lock published under her initials a translation of four

of Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38, prefaced by a dedicatory epistle toCatherine Brandon and followed by a sonnet sequence, A Meditation of

a Penitent Sinner: Written in the Maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51 Psalme

of David The Meditation consists of two parts: five sonnets ‘expressingthe passioned minde of the penitent sinner’, followed by a longersequence paraphrasing the 51st Psalm It is an unsettling text in anumber of ways Generically anomalous, it contains the first sonnetsequence not only to be written in English, but also to combine thePetrarchan genre of sonnet sequence with psalm paraphrase Unlike thetexts of the circle of aristocratic women surrounding Catherine Parr,which form the major precedents for women’s publication in Englandbefore 1560, the text was compiled from the community of Protestantexiles in Geneva by a woman from a merchant family Its strangenessdisturbs some of the critical models applied to mid-sixteenth-centurywomen’s writing, models that characterize women’s textual activity interms of a restricted class of aristocratic authors, in a secondary orderivative relationship to male-authored texts, and generally confined

to religious genres and topoi In contrast to these constructions of earlyElizabethan women’s writing, I argue here that the Meditation usesFrench Calvinist and Anglo-Genevan traditions of psalm paraphrase tosurprisingly ambitious ends The sequence displays a textual virtuosity,expressed as innovative generic combination, which works to out-tropethe sonnets and psalm paraphrases of their main poetic predecessor inEngland, Thomas Wyatt Further, the text as a whole directs itself toearly Elizabethan religious policy by mobilizing the figures of Hezekiah

13

and David as complementary examples of an ideal Protestant eignty, in a bid to exert admonitory pressure upon a new queen whosereligious and political alliances appeared uncertain.

sover-Recent critical reception of the Meditation has celebrated its ation as the first English sonnet sequence, but it has been characterized

innov-by a reluctance to analyze its anomalous position or to acknowledge itsrhetorical ambition Moreover, this growing body of criticism hasengaged only partially with its significant problems of attribution.1Here

I attend to the text’s points of disruption in order to reposition it withinthe divergent male-authored traditions with which it engages, as well assuggesting a context for its innovation as the deployment of Petrarchism

in the pursuit of a specific political purpose: the promotion of Calvinistreligious policy in the early Elizabethan state In contesting much of itsrecent critical reception as private or explicitly feminine meditation, Iargue that the sequence engages in genres, traditions and politicalprojects closely aligned with canonical male-authored Protestant texts,and as such questions an unproblematic separation of men’s andwomen’s writing in this period.2If the text is indeed written by Lock,its apparent anomalies challenge the categories by which women’swriting in 1560 might be understood, and suggest that a broader, moreflexible and historically specific construction of women’s writing in thisperiod is required to accommodate its diversity

Lock came from a merchant background, the daughter of StephenVaughan – himself the son of a London mercer – who was closelyconnected with Thomas Cromwell and pursued a career in service tothe government, acting as a diplomatic agent from 1530 to 1544 and assole financial agent for the government in Antwerp trade circles from

1544 to 1546.3 Accused of heresy in 1531, he became increasinglyaligned with a Protestant position, a shift registered by his choice ofsecond wife: in 1546 he married Margery Brinkelow whose firsthusband, Henry Brinkelow, wrote two Protestant tracts, The Complaynt

of Roderyck Mors and The Lamentacyon of a Christen agaynst the Cytye ofLondon.4 When Vaughan’s daughter Anne married Henry Lock, shemarried into a milieu very much like that of her upbringing, a prosperousmerchant-class family linked to the Tudor court and the promotion ofProtestantism Like her father, her new husband was also a merchantwith connections in Antwerp and came from a wealthy family AnneLock went on to marry the radical Protestant preacher Edward Dering in

1572, and an Exeter merchant, Richard Prowse, in 1583; under the nameAnne Prowse, she published a translation of John Taffin’s Of the Markes

of the Children of God in 1590, dedicated to the Countess of Warwick.5

Lock was also a friend of John Knox, and a section of their ence survives in the form of letters from Knox to Lock between 1556 and

correspond-1559, in which Knox urged Lock to join the community of Protestantexiles in Geneva.6She arrived in Geneva in May 1557 and used as thesource for her translation the unpublished sermons on Isaiah preached

by Calvin as ‘his ordinary weekday sermons’ from 16 July 1556, recorded

in six manuscript volumes by the French refugee Denis Raguenier.Lock must have used as her copytext volume three, consisting of 67sermons on Isaiah 30–41, given between 4 August and 31 December

1556.7 Her partial English translation of these sermons is their firstpublication in 1560; they were later published in French by Franc¸oiseE´stienne in 1562.8

Attribution and agency in early modern women’s writing:The case of the Meditation

Published under the initials A.L., even the translation has only beenattributed to Lock on the basis of an inscription in the British Librarycopy that identifies the book as a gift: ‘Liber Henrici Lock ex dono Annaeuxoris suae 1559.’9However, the presence of a disclaimer directly beforethe poetic sections of the text, claiming that the sonnets were ‘delivered

me by my frend’, complicates any straightforward attribution of thesesections to Lock The complex attribution questions surrounding thepoems are considered in some detail here mainly because many of thecritics who have analyzed the sonnets recently have discussed the ques-tion of attribution very selectively or simply have taken Lock’s author-ship for granted While a substantial body of evidence for the attribution

to Lock exists, it remains troubled by a set of unresolved problems,including the disclaimer and a significant dissimilarity to the othermajor poem attributed to Lock Rather than expediently ignoring theseattribution difficulties in a bid to recruit the poems to the canon ofwomen’s writing, this study retains the ambiguity of their status in order

to raise questions about some of the methodologies at work in earlymodern women’s writing, especially in relation to questions of ano-nymity As Marcy North argues, even the use of initials is anomaloushere: surprisingly few early modern women writers used them as a means

of disguising their gender and avoiding the stigma of public expression,and she ‘wonders if we would even be discussing the gender of A.L if itwere not for the British Library copy of the Sermons’.10In keeping openquestions of attribution and attending to the different strategies ofanonymity employed by this text, this book uses the Meditation as the

first of a set of examples illuminating current problems in the field ofearly modern women’s writing Specifically, I am concerned with theways in which a restricted definition of women’s writing, necessarilylinking the body of an historical author with the text and ignoring anyproblems with this association, underwrites our understanding of individ-ual texts, genres and the field itself Following North’s suggestion that werecognize female voice and female authorship as ‘two differentconventions that do not always work together’, I begin this exploration

of Lock’s Meditation by attending to its status as a female-authored text.11Not only is the text as a whole published under the initials A.L., whichmeant that it was not automatically read as women’s writing by ageneral early modern audience, but its concluding sequences arepreceded by a disclaimer of authorship:

I haue added this meditation folowyng vnto the ende of this boke, not

as a parcell of maister Caluines worke, but for thatit well agreeth withthe same argument, and was deliuered me by my frend with whom

I knew I might be so bolde to vse & publishe it as pleased me (Aa1v)The disclaimer raises interpretative problems of its own, and attracts twopolarized responses The first takes the statement at face value andidentifies the ‘frend’ who delivered the text as John Knox, while thesecond expediently ignores the statement in making an uncomplicatedattribution of the sequence to Lock Both readings are problematized bythe textual practices of the overlapping manuscript and print cultures inthe sixteenth-century court A literal reading fails to register thestatement’s rhetorical status and its place within the culture of thecourt, where the circulation of a text in print carried marked classimplications that a writer might wish to disguise Theories of the ‘stigma

of print’ argue that participation in private coteries of manuscriptexchange in the late sixteenth century upheld the boundaries ofaristocratic culture against a rising middle class.12A refusal to circulatetexts in print, which was Sidney’s response to the emergent printculture, provided one means of negotiating the stigma of print and itsclass implications; the disclaimer, or the author’s declaration of ignorance

of the text’s circulation in print until after the fact, provided anothermeans of denying the extent of a writer’s participation in print culture.Tottel justifies publication in terms of a nationalistic promotion of thevernacular, associating manuscript circulation with ‘ungentle horders’,while early writers such as Barnabe Googe and Nicholas Grimald assertthat they published through the urgings or actions of friends.13 Yet,

unlike the assertion in Lock’s text that the sonnets were supplied by afriend, they claim authorship of their texts but minimize their respon-sibility for circulating them in print This crucial difference means thatthe disclaimer in the 1560 text cannot simply be read, in Roland Greene’sterms, as ‘a circumlocution that generates an understanding beyond what

it actually says, an acknowledgement that ‘‘I wrote this book.’’ ’14

The presence of a disclaimer at all, in a text written precisely from theemergent middle class against whom the mechanisms of aristocraticmanuscript circulation were a protection, is surprising It raises thepossibility that it may have been prompted as much by the gender ofthe author as her class Little precedent existed within the Englishtradition at this point for women’s publication of poetry, apart fromCatherine Parr’s two volumes of meditations, the lost text of psalms andproverbs by Lady Elizabeth Fane, and Elizabeth’s meditation on Psalm

13 following her translation of A Godly Meditation of the Soul.15The 1560Mediation is indebted to these pieces in a number of ways: Parr’s 1545text also expands upon a canonical piece of devotional writing as itssource, Thomas a` Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, and her 1547 text claims

to have been ‘set furth at the instaunt desire’ of Catherine Brandon.Elizabeth’s combination of a translation and a concluding psalmmeditation corresponds to the 1560 text’s generic practice, and bothtexts have strong associations with the Protestant cause However, thetexts by Parr and Elizabeth have access to aristocratic and royal authorityunavailable to a woman writer from a merchant background In thislight, the unprecedented status of this text and its author in early printculture might have prompted a disclaimer of authorship.16 The dis-claimer might additionally register the text’s aspirations towards acourtly circulation, as signalled by its dedication to Catherine Brandon.That is, the disclaimer might be understood as an attempt to key intothe cultural authorization within the court implicit in a reluctance topublish Wendy Wall has located an impulse in mid-sixteenth-centurywriters towards a manipulation of the stigma of print as a discoursesimultaneously rhetorically reproduced and displaced In this argument,the preface to Tottel’s Miscellany, in referring to pieces of poetry as

‘parcelles’, kept alive a sense of the circulation of the poems in coteriecircles and made visible the stigma of print as paradoxical authorization

of their printed circulation Its encoding operated as a means of findingsocial as well as literary legitimization.17Whether a reflection of anx-ieties related to gender, class or their intersection, the disclaimerremains a sufficiently problematic statement that it cannot be ignored

in considering the question of the text’s attribution However, it operates

less as a determining factor in establishing attribution than as a register

of the unstable site of mid-sixteenth-century attitudes towards modes oftextual circulation

Equally problematic are the literal readings of the disclaimer thatidentify the friend who delivered the text to Lock as John Knox Theseare based on the personal relationship of Lock and Knox, and Lock’s role

in supplying some of Knox’s work to the publisher John Field in 1583.18These are highly speculative foundations for the attribution to Knox,and are made even less likely given that his sole publication of poetryconsisted of the psalms in The Book of Common Prayer, which correspond

so closely to the Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalter that they are not sidered to be Knox’s work Knox’s Psalms and Liturgy contains 41 Psalmsspecific to the Scottish edition, but these were written by William Kethe,William Whittingham, John Pulleyn, Robert Pont and I.C., probably theEdinburgh minister John Craig.19Lock’s text was prepared during hertime in Geneva, between mid-1557 and 1559, yet the detailed andconsistent correspondence from Knox to Lock in this period makes nomention of the sonnets, although, as Roland Greene points out, Knoxdoes mention the book of ‘Calvine upun Isaie’ as one of the works heneeded Lock to send to him.20 Knox’s silence on the matter of thesonnets contrasts with his clear instructions concerning Lock’s commu-nication of the texts of his letters during that period The current move-ment towards making an uncomplicated attribution of the sonnets toLock has been partly generated by the weakness of the case attributingthem to Knox, but little more has been offered to offset the problemsgenerated by the disclaimer prefacing the sonnets

con-The only other argument suggested by critics in support of theattribution to Lock rests with her later publishing history Lock’s 1590translation of Jean Taffin’s Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu, dedicated tothe Countess of Warwick, is also concluded by a long poem which is not

in the copytext of Taffin’s revised third edition published in 1588.21Lock’s translation does not include Taffin’s two eight-line prefatorypoems, nor the poems concluding the thirteenth chapter of medita-tions.22The difference between the contents in the Lock’ text and hercopytext goes some way towards establishing her authorship of thepoems included in her text But any simple connection between Lock’sauthorship of the translation and the text’s concluding poem is problem-atized by later French and Dutch editions of the text which containconcluding poems inserted by either the translator or the publisher Thefirst edition of the text in Dutch appeared in 1588 and was followed by asecond impression in 1590; both contained Dutch translations of the

prefatory and concluding Taffin poems found in the third edition inFrench However, in 1597 Taffin released a revised edition of the text inFrench which kept the same concluding poems but replaced the openingprophetic poems with a sonnet ‘Sur le sujet de ce liure.’23A translation

of the sonnet also appeared one year later in a 1598 Dutch translation ofTaffin’s revised fifth edition Later Dutch editions used a translation ofTaffin’s fifth edition by Jacobus Viverius that not only retained a transla-tion of the Taffin sonnet, but also concluded with a long paraphrase ofthe 119th Psalm in 46 quatrains by Viverius.24 All English editions ofLock’s translation reprinted ‘The necessitie and benefite of Affliction’ asthe concluding poem, but a French edition of Taffin’s text published in

1601 contains four unattributed sonnets distinct from any poetic materialincluded by Taffin or his translators in earlier texts and added, according

to the publisher, ‘afin que les pages suyvantes ne restassent vuydes’.25Two important elements in the attribution debate surrounding Lock’spoetic output are indicated here First, it is clear that the poem conclud-ing Lock’s text, ‘The necessitie and benefite of Affliction’, was not atranslation from Taffin’s own poetry in French editions of the text.Secondly, it indicates a tradition in which the translator or editor, as well

as the author, supplemented the Taffin text with a concluding poemproviding a precedent for Lock in her 1590 version of the text Onepublisher’s expedient addition of a sonnet sequence unrelated to Taffinproblematizes any straightforward assumption of Lock’s authorship ofthe poem; however, some further evidence suggesting her authorshipcan be gained from the fact that Lock had poetic material available toher, which she might have translated, but instead a poem was insertedunrelated to this material

The 1560 sonnet sequence and the 1590 long poem share a thematicand structural similarity: each focuses on an Old Testament figure –David and Job respectively – to dramatize the affliction of the sinner.However, the correspondences between the two pieces do not extendmuch further ‘The necessitie and benefite of Affliction’ is in quatrains,with regular iambic rhythms and alternating eight and six syllable lines:

Iob lost his friends, he lost his wealth,and comfort of his wife:

He lost his children and his health,yea, all but wretched life

The poem’s simplicity contrasts with the more complex rhythmic andmetrical structures of the earlier sequence While the 1560 Meditation

also uses tropes that are largely simple and structural – consisting mainly

of repetition, alliteration and metaphor – they are of a different register

to the more subdued language of the later poem, as the second sonnetindicates:

So I blinde wretch, whome Gods enflamed ire

With pearcing stroke hath throwne unto the grou[n]d,

Amidde my sinnes still groueling in the myre,

Finde not the way that other oft haue found,

Whome cherefull glimse of gods abounding grace

Hath oft releued and oft with shyning light

Hath brought to ioy out of the vgglye place,

Where I in darke of euerlasting night

Bewayle my woefull and unhappy case,

And fret my dyeing soule with gnawing paine

Yet blinde, alas, I groape about for grace,

While blinde for grace I groape about in vaine,

My fainting breath I gather vp and straine,

Mercie, mercie to crye and crye againe

These stylistic differences might be a function of difference in genre:indeed, it might be that the pressures of the Petrarchan traditionintensify the tropes used in the Protestant plain speech of the earliersonnet sequence But there is a significant difference between the drama-tized and internalized dilation of the penitent sinner in the sonnetsequence, and the flat, third-person use of Job as example in the laterpoem This disparity in technique and perspective makes the piecesseem less particular to a single author than to authorship by writerswithin a Protestant tradition.26 Contrary to the current criticalorthodoxy, the later poem, itself of uncertain attribution, provides littlesupport for the attribution of the sonnet sequence to Lock However, aLatin lyric in the Bartholo Silva manuscript attributed to Lock andsupporting the radical religious politics of her second husband, EdwardDering, provides more secure evidence of her status as a poet.27She isalso listed among a group of ‘noble Gentlewomen famous for theirleaning, as the right honorable Lady Burleigh, my Lady Russel, my LadyBacon, Mistresse Dering, with others’, in James Sanford’s preface to his

1576 edition of The Garden of Pleasure This listing links her work withthat of the Cooke sisters who were both poets and translators.28More significant support of the attribution to Lock can be found inconnections within the different sections of the 1560 text itself:

between Lock’s dedicatory epistle to Catherine Brandon, her translation

of the sermons, and the sonnet sequence Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38centre upon the figure of Hezekiah, his physical affliction and divinecure, and the ramifications for the political state of a godly sovereign Inthe dedicatory epistle, Lock specifically links Hezekiah and David, thefocus of the sonnet sequence, as complementary examples of the sameprinciple:

And that you maye be assured, that this kinde of medicine is nothurtfull: two moste excellent kinges, Ezechias and Dauid, beside aninfinite numbre haue tasted the lyke before you, and haue foundehealth therin, (A4r)

In a text which goes on to offer Hezekiah in the sermons and David inthe psalm paraphrase as examples of those suffering affliction redeemedand cured by God’s mercy, these two biblical sovereigns are offered asthe models through which the text’s medicine is administered, and bywhom the reader should be assured of its efficacy Their linking in theepistle is a strong indication that the concluding sonnet sequences wereincluded by Lock as a complement to her translation of the sermons onHezekiah.29Yet there is still a caveat This connection is not necessarilyevidence for authorship of the sequence, but may be a gloss on hereditorial method, reinforcing the line in the disclaimer that the medita-tion has been added ‘for thatit well agreeth with the same argument’.The connection between Hezekiah and David is supplemented by ashared use of Petrarchan imagery in both the epistle and the sequences.Calvin’s account of Hezekiah’s suffering and restoration to health in thesermons works largely metaphorically in presenting a model of rightand godly government Lock’s text, on the other hand, expands uponthe Calvinist text in both the dedication and the sonnet sequence instressing the physicality of that affliction, its effects upon the body ofthe king Calvin’s recreation of Hezekiah’s suffering is given this gloss inLock’s dedicatory epistle:

So here this good soules Physicia[n] hath brought you where youmaye se lyinge before youre face the good king Ezechias, somtimechillinge and chattering with colde, somtime languishing & meltyngaway with heate, nowe fresing, now fryeng, nowe spechelesse, nowecrying out, with other suche piteous panges & passions wrought inhis tender afflicted spirit, by giltie conscie[n]ce of his owne fault .You se him sometyme yeldyngly stretch oute, sometyme struglinglye

throwe his weakned legges not able to sustein his feble body: time he casteth abrode, or holdeth vp his white & blodless handtoward the place where his soule longeth: (A7v–A8r)

some-This anatomizing of Hezekiah’s body in illness, the poetic ment of this sick body, offers a particularly Petrarchan blazon It issupplemented by the Petrarchan tropes of freezing and burning, whichwere repeated to the point of ubiquity in the Renaissance But in 1560 inthe Elizabethan court, such tropes would have had a freshness that theylater lost, and their appearance in Lock’s epistle suggests an interest inPetrarchism consistent with her composition of a Petrarchan sonnetsequence at the end of the text Further, the sonnets construct David’ssinful body in the same idiom of a physically detailed account of disease:

dismember-‘leprous bodie and defiled face’ (Aa4r–v)

In a text seeking to present the figures of Hezekiah and David asadmonitory models of princeliness, Lock’s curiously material emphasis

on the diseased body of the sovereign constructs a consistent anxietyaround the body of the ruler This anxiety is ultimately related to ananxiety about Elizabeth I, which exceeds the text of Calvin’s sermonsand reinforces a sense of political instability circulating at the beginning

of Elizabeth’s reign Following the early deaths of Edward VI and MaryTudor, the illness of the sovereign carried with it a potential for politicaland religious change deeply disturbing to a Protestant community still

in exile following Mary’s reign Hezekiah’s restoration to health fromillness was in response to his prayer reminding God ‘how I have walkedbefore thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that which

is good in thy sight’.30 The real potential of Elizabeth’s death fromillness and the prospect of another period of exile for the Protestantchurch were seen to be dependent on her heeding the admonitions ofsuch texts and following the examples of Hezekiah’s godly life.31TheCalvinist model of godly kingship is here invested with an anxiousmateriality in these marginal sections of the text And this anxiety ismanifest in an anomalous use of Petrarchan discourse that suggests acommon authorship of both sections

Anomaly may also be recruited as some support for Lock’s authorship

of the sequences, as the use of the sonnet form for the meditationsconcluding Lock’s text has no precedent in the English tradition ofpsalm paraphrase In this combination of Petrarchan and Protestantgenres, the sequence sits uncomfortably with some aspects of the nativeliterary tradition in England Although a tradition of psalm paraphrase,developed in the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI, was paralleled by a

broader tradition of the publication of ‘holye songes’ and meditations towhich the Parr circle contributed, they dealt with a restricted register ofpsalms that generally excluded the 51st Psalm and they rarely experi-mented with Petrarchan lyric forms.32Even in John King’s revisions tothe narrative of the development of Reformation poetry as a corrective

to the rise of profane love poetry, he still asserts that in Edward VI’scourt secular love lyrics and gospelling verse were seen as genericallydistinct.33But the text’s marginality to the canon of Reformation litera-ture is matched by its liminal position in terms of dates of publication,positioned as it is between the securely Protestant reign of Edward VIand the beginning of that of the less certainly Protestant PrincessElizabeth I Its combination of the imported courtly form of the sonnetand the scriptural text of psalm paraphrase might be seen to look back to

a Reformation tradition while commenting upon the direction ofpoetics in the new Elizabethan court Published in the second year ofElizabeth’s reign, the Meditation could be seen to participate in thebeginning of the Petrarchan cult surrounding the queen The precedentsupplied by Elizabeth’s psalm translation is supplemented by her trans-lation of lines 1–90 of Petrarch’s Triumph of Eternity, copied into theArundel Harington manuscript early in Elizabeth’s reign.34The 1560sequence bridges the Edwardian and Elizabethan courts, by combiningpenitential meditation grounded in a series of feminine precedentscentred on the Parr circle with the sonnet, part of an emergentPetrarchan tradition specifically associated with Elizabeth’s own textualagency This idiosyncratic generic combination marks an attempt totransfer the models of the court of Edward VI to the new Elizabethancourt, and to place Elizabeth’s own early interest in Petrarch under adidactic Protestant pressure

The major sonneteers in the English tradition up to 1560 were Surreyand, more particularly, Wyatt, who also translated the psalms including

a paraphrase of Psalm 51 Although Wyatt and Surrey wrote in theearlier half of the sixteenth century, the delay in their publication gives

an originality to the form for a reader such as Lock, whose merchantupbringing may have excluded her from access to or knowledge of themanuscript versions of these poems circulating in the court Wyatt’sPenitential Psalms were first printed in 1549, but more significantly thewidely circulated first edition of Tottel’s Miscellany was published in

1557 This context makes the choice of the sonnet form for Lock’smeditation seem less unfashionable Six editions of Tottel were pub-lished by the end of 1559; its influence on the sequence in Lock’s text

is indicated by the adoption in her sonnet sequence of the specifically

‘English’ rhyme scheme and its closing couplet invented and used byWyatt and Surrey.35

Lock’s position in the Genevan community would have supplementedthese generic models by providing her with access to the French andAnglo-Genevan traditions of sonnet and psalm paraphrase For Lock,and indeed for any of the traditions in which she operated, thepublication of Louise Labe´’s Oeuvres in 1556 offered the only precedent

of published and accessible woman-authored sonnets.36Lock also wouldhave had available to her the published poems of Margaret of Navarre,who, like Catherine Parr, published a series of pious meditations.Although none is a sonnet, these meditations adopted a variety of lyricforms, displaying a level of formal experimentation that exceeds the Parrtexts A parallel can be drawn with the male-authored tradition of psalmparaphrase in France and England: Sternhold’s counterpart in the Frenchcourt was Cle´ment Marot, whose metrical psalm paraphrases used a widevariety of lyric forms and rhyme schemes and a less literal interpretativecompass than those of Sternhold.37Unlike Sternhold, Marot paraphrasedthe 51st Psalm, and the method of aggregation of the 1560 sonnets, eachlinked to and expanding on a line from the psalm, follows a pattern used

by Marot in his quatrains on the text Although this impulse towards amore experimental tradition of psalm paraphrase may have been drawnupon by Lock, if she indeed wrote the 1560 sequences, scarcely moreprecedent exists within the French and Anglo-Genevan traditions thanthe English for the packaging of psalm meditations as sonnets Bordier’scollection of Huguenot songs contains only one sonnet: ‘Angoisse del’ame’ by Malingre, first published in Chansons spirituelles a l’honneur etlouange de Dieu in 1555.38As in England, the increased popularity of thesonnet form in the late sixteenth century in France gave rise to somedevotional sonnet sequences, but it was far from a standard genericcombination in 1560.39Nevertheless, the more interpretative cast of the

1560 sequence and its lyrical experimentation may indicate that Marot’sinfluence combined with the suggestive examples of sonnets in Tottel’sMiscellany to produce the generic combination of sonnet meditation Atranslator and poet such as Lock, with links to the gospelling tradition ofthe court of Edward VI and the Calvinist psalm paraphrases of Marot andBeza during her time in the Genevan exile community, seems perfectlypositioned to produce a sequence that would seem strangely anomalous

in its use of the sonnet genre if viewed in terms of an English tradition ofpsalm paraphrase alone

Although there is a reasonable amount of evidence supporting Lock’sauthorship of the sonnets, the disclaimer should not be expediently

erased Indeed, some of the uncertainty surrounding the question ofattribution challenges the ways in which women’s writing is currentlydefined Both sides of the critical response to the disclaimer privilegeauthorship as the sole ground for determining a text’s status as women’swriting And both exclude other forms of textual agency – such asediting – in a way that not only simplifies a concept of authorship inthe sixteenth century, but also restricts to an unnecessarily narrowcompass the relationship of text and gender As I show through theexample of Lock’s text, the political project of recovering early modernwomen writers has resulted in a disregard for problems of attributionthat stems from a desire to fit texts within the cultural and criticalcategory of women’s writing Ignoring the problematics raised byBarthes and Foucault surrounding the reduction of meaning in a text

to the single interpretative frame of authorial intention, gynocriticalmodels of women’s writing assume that the gender of the author unprob-lematically informs the gender of the text, without allowing for theambiguities and slippages of meaning inherent in every act of readingand interpretation The sense that gynocritical feminism is out of stepwith a wider critical context has been the subject of many critiques, and

a set of feminist critical alternatives have been offered in response Thesealternatives define women’s writing in terms of its content, its style, andthe gender of its audience But, as Elizabeth Grosz argues, these defin-itions also have their problems The construction of women’s writing interms of content identifies either a set of feminine preoccupations or afeminine sensibility, which depend upon defining ‘women’ as a homo-genous group Women are seen solely in terms of their relationship to

an oppressive patriarchy, rather than in terms of their specific position

in a complex intersection of cultural discourses including, for example,race or class The identification of a particularly gendered ‘style’ meetswith similar problems It assumes a consistently feminine writing pos-ition or relation to language that again writes out local difference Thestrategy of relating the gender of the text to the gender of its readerappears at first to sidestep the essentialism inherent in both gynocriticaland revisionary models, but, as Grosz points out, it still depends uponthe idea of a continuous, intentional subject, and so reduces the meaning

of a text to a single destination.40

A text such as the 1560 sonnets complicates such definitions ofwomen’s writing further: while probably attributable to Lock, andperhaps only read by a coterie audience as her work, its circulationunder the initials A.L meant that it was not generally read as an example

of feminine textual practice in an early modern context Thus it falls

outside even those paratextual conventions recently applied to expandthe definition of women’s writing to include, for example, texts circu-lated under feminine signatures.41Rather than ignoring its strategies ofanonymity, and anxiously placing this text in the problematic category

of women’s writing, I want to examine Lock’s text differently here.Jennifer Summit and Marcy North have recently differentiated the cat-egories of female authorship, writing and voice as critical conventionsthat do not always overlap, in an attempt to broaden the field of earlywomen’s writing and to analyze its exclusions and formations.42Thisdifferentiation is particularly useful in the case of the 1560 text, as even

in the different sections of the text itself, conventions of authorship,writing and voice are constantly reconfigured in a shifting and unstablerelationship to femininity The remainder of this chapter examinesthese shifts Specifically, it explores the ways in which the sonnetsmight be considered as instances of female writing, or female voice,even if they cannot be securely located in terms of female authorship.The politics of dedication and circulation

There is, I believe, at least a contingent sense in which the Sermons atleast might be categorized as an instance of female writing If the textwas translated and edited by Anne Lock, read as such by at least a smallcircle including family and friends, as the British Library inscriptionsuggests, and dedicated by Lock to Catherine Brandon, then at thatmoment in its circulation history it can indeed be understood as anexample of feminine textual practice My emphasis is on local contin-gency here, which need not be extended to encompass a universalidentification of the gender of its author or voice, nor to imply a single,unified reading subject Gender might then inflect the text in two ways:through its activation of a particular, feminized line of political pressuredirected towards the sovereign, and through the textual negotiationsnecessitated by the entry of a middle-class woman’s voice into print atthis moment in history The dedication to Catherine Brandon is verysignificant in this context Brandon was the subject of ten dedications

by authors, translators and editors, and was the patron of John Harington,another writer of mid-sixteenth-century devotional sonnets Incomparison, Mary Fitzroy received no dedications, Catherine Parr onlytwo, and Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, six dedications by writersand translators and two by booksellers The fact that Brandon wasidentified as a patron in so many texts arises from her enduring status

as a religious and political figure Mary Tudor’s reign suppressed the

activities of the two Protestant patrons of this group who remained inEngland, Anne Seymour and Mary Fitzroy, and with the accession ofElizabeth I, Anne Seymour remained in obscurity Catherine Brandon,

on the other hand, was exiled from England under Mary’s reign andbecame a popularized figure after her return She became the subject of aballad by Thomas Deloney and of a play by Thomas Drue, both centred

on the adventures of her exile and taking her return as symbolic of therestoration of peace and ‘prosperitie’ of ‘Queene Elizabethes happieraigne’.43 Her significance as a Protestant political figure is indicated

by a separate piece in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of those persecuted inMary’s reign.44The dedicatory epistle to Brandon associates the texttherefore with a figure with both a popular and a courtly identity, anidentity mobilized in the text’s project of disseminating God’s wordthrough Calvin to a wide audience However, I would like to suggestthat the dedication to Brandon might also have a more specific politicalfocus than a straightforward bid for patronage within the court and for apopular readership: it addresses through this patron a second femalereader, Elizabeth I

The Elizabethan state in 1559 and 1560 was characterized by ananxiety over Elizabeth’s religious allegiances, especially among theexiled Protestant communities The perceived fragility of Elizabeth’scommitment to Protestantism and her need for ‘counsel by her godlymale subjects’ are seen in Calvin’s letter to William Cecil, 1559:45

But since it is scarcely possible that in so disturbed and confused astate of affairs, she should not, in the beginning of her reign, bedistracted, held in suspense by perplexities, and often forced to hold

a vacillating course, I have taken the liberty of advising her thathaving once entered upon the right path, she should unflinchinglypersevere therein.46

It has been argued that Elizabeth was in fact a committed Protestant,who in 1559 determined and achieved her preferred religious settlement

in the face of conservative Catholic opposition.47 Revisions of thatposition argue that the religious settlement was made by a queen underconstraint and manipulated within the court, and that a document seen

to register her early Protestantism, such as her translation of A GodlyMeditation of the Soul, was a conservative piece recruited by John Bale forthe Protestant cause If Elizabeth’s political Protestantism has been ques-tioned, her religious conservatism, which had been dismissed by thosearguing for her commitment to Protestantism as expedient public