Choice Review

In this insightful and original study, Matchinske (Univ. of North Carolina) considers the significance of gender identity to the relationship of the individual and the state. Contextualized by the shifting political and religious interests of the 16th and 17th centuries, Matchinske's study uses a textually grounded and rhetorically focused case-study approach to analyze four early modern women: Anne Askew, Margaret Clitherowe, Ester Sowernam, and Eleanor Davies. The author takes up such topics as historiography and martyrdom, narrative and hagiography, morality and legislation, and spiritual and secular apocalyptic writing. She offers insightful local analyses of texts and a more general critique of the religious and political imperatives leading up to and issuing from the English Civil War. This study is informed by, and effectively complements, the work of such scholars as Margaret King (Women of the Renaissance, CH, Jun'92) and Constance Jordan (Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models, 1990); its original contribution is its attention to the ways that the constructed, private sense of the gendered self informs the developing nationalistic concept of English identity during this era. Faculty, scholars, and upper-division undergraduate students will doubtless find much of interest in this engaging and challenging approach to the significance of women and women's writing in early modern England. C. S. Cox; University of Pittsburgh