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

Sonnets and the English
Woman Writer, 1560–1621
The Politics of Absence

Rosalind Smith


Early Modern Literature in History
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
Jocelyn Catty
WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Unbridled Speech
Dermot Cavanagh
LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY
Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors)
‘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
Sarah M. Dunnigan
EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI
Andrew Hadfield
SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN
William M. Hamlin
TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND


Elizabeth Heale
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

ª Rosalind Smith 2005
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Smith, Rosalind, 1968–

Sonnets and the English woman writer, 1560–1621 : the politics of
absence / Rosalind Smith.
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Contents
Preface

viii

List of Abbreviations

xii

Introduction: Gender, Genre and Attribution in Early
Modern Women’s Sonnet Sequences and Collections
1

2

‘In a mirrour clere’: Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus as
Admonitory Protestantism
Attribution and agency in early modern women’s
writing: The case of the Meditation
The politics of dedication and circulation
Out-troping Wyatt

1
13
15
26
31

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart
The casket sonnets: Attribution, circulation and sovereign
textuality
The politics of absence: The casket sonnets and the
feminine erotic lyric
The devotional sonnets

39

3

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets
The Pandora sonnets: Translations from Desportes
Ventriloquizing Elizabeth I
The politics of prosopopoeia

61
65
72
79

4

The Politics of Withdrawal: Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia
to Amphilanthus and Lindamira’s Complaint
‘Bard . . . of Light’: Spenserian negotiations in Pamphilia
to Amphilanthus
‘I thus goe arm’d to field’: Lindamira’s Complaint

40
46
55

88
92
109

Conclusion

119

Notes

123

Bibliography

145

Index

165
vii


Preface
This book examines why English women writers contributed to a central
Renaissance lyric form, the sonnet sequence, in such small numbers and
at such odd times in the development of the genre. It might seem
perverse to concentrate upon absence rather than presence at this stage
of research in the field of early modern women’s literary history, especially given the wealth of new writing uncovered in recent feminist
scholarship. However, this book uses the example of this single, idiosyncratic genre for two purposes. First, it aims to denaturalize any general
assumption of women’s absence or exclusion from particular modes of
writing in the period. Such instances of absence do not constitute
natural examples of feminine limitation that can pass unremarked, but
phenomena themselves that might be examined, questioned and analyzed. Second, the study highlights the surprisingly significant consequences arising from the operation of such unexamined assumptions of
absence in the field of early modern women’s writing. Taken collectively
for the first time, the texts under examination here are shown to radically change the shape of early modern women’s writing in England.
Their history shows moments of startling innovation, agency and possibility, as well as a single instance of textual circulation that may have

effectively closed down women’s secular lyric activity in print for fifty
years. This book argues that this instance – the casket sonnets attributed
to Mary Queen of Scots and widely circulated in print as Protestant
propaganda from 1571 – involved a scandalous narrative of rape and
adulterous love that made the genres of the sonnet sequence and female
complaint unavailable to English women writers in print until Mary
Wroth’s unfashionably late 1621 sequences in the Urania. This specific
and local instance of textual circulation worked with a set of cultural
prescriptions surrounding women’s conduct to preclude women’s participation in the genre at its height in the late Elizabethan period.
This book therefore challenges the critical commonplace that the
gender encodings of the genre of the Petrarchan sonnet themselves
limited or prevented women’s use of the genre. It does so by highlighting the ways in which women in England practised the genre before the
publication of the casket sonnets and in their wake, and by comparing
the English tradition to a surprisingly prolific Continental tradition of
women’s sonnet writing in the Italian and French Renaissances. In line
viii


Preface ix

with much recent work on women’s writing in the field of early modern
studies, this book also challenges the idea that when women writers
used the genre, they did so in ways essentially or predictably different to
the practice of their male counterparts. Gender does make differences
here to women’s practice within the genre, but these are not differences
that always manifest themselves in the same ways – especially not
through a consistent interest in the ‘private’ emotional or domestic
concerns that have been argued in the past. The study’s concentration
on the particular conditions of production, circulation and reception of
these sequences seeks to illuminate a more complex understanding of

the way in which gender and genre intersect in the period. In different
ways, these texts all operated as political interventions underwritten by
Protestantism; but what Protestantism meant in each of these contexts,
and the agency that it afforded or denied women authors and constructions of women’s writing, differs radically in each literary history
traced here.
An early reader of this material commented that she could not see
how anyone could make an argument from such a strange collection of
poetry. 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 Elizabethan
lyric. But there is a sense that the material examined here is at the far
reaches of this literary marginality. This is in part because the texts
appear in anomalous circumstances, where an early history of secular
lyric agency and innovation in the genres of sonnet and complaint is
almost immediately foreclosed. These early conventions of sonnet and
complaint, never repeated in the history of the Elizabethan lyric, remain
odd and unfamiliar. But the marginality of many of the texts under
consideration here also derives from their status as works of uncertain
attribution. Considered neither as a secure part of the canon of women’s
writing nor as male-authored texts, their unresolved problems of
authorship means that they have remained at the edges of literary
history. This book uses the uncertainty surrounding these texts to
expose a set of methodological problems and omissions in the field of
early 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 of
authorship to women writers in the hope of falsely bolstering the number and diversity of women’s texts in the period. Contested attributions
need detailed and scrupulous attention, and the possibility of male

x

Preface

authorship of texts circulated under women’s signatures needs to be
entertained if we are to gain a sense of what might have been historical
women’s writing practice in the English Renaissance. On the other
hand, this book argues that if an attribution remains unresolved, the
text can still be productively analyzed and, in some cases, this analysis
may still be undertaken within the field of early modern women’s writing. Indeed, such texts allude to the ghostly presence of an historical
woman writer through a set of paratextual signals such as signature and
circulation practice, but correspond unpredictably to the originating
presence of such a writer. In this process, they illuminate a surprising
set of conventions and possibilities surrounding ideas of women’s writing in the early modern period. This study regards female authorship
and female writing as separate but related categories, and in doing so
attempts to extend the boundaries of what is understood to constitute
early modern women’s writing. Further, if the impact of texts of uncertain authorship in this single genre is such as to alter the direction of
women’s lyric agency in the period, it raises the question of the impact
of other texts of disputed attribution in other genres. How might their
consideration alter our understanding of not only women’s textual
practice in the period, but early modern writing in general?
This work began as a thesis at the University of Oxford, under the
exemplary, rigorous and inspiring supervision of David Norbrook. It also
benefited in its early stages from the influence of a mentor, colleague
and friend, Lorna Hutson, and the input of Terence Cave, Diana Birch
and Ros Ballaster. I received a number of grants in this period that
allowed me to complete my primary research. I would like to thank
Exeter College, the University of Sydney and the Newberry Library for
their assistance. My time at Oxford was made infinitely more enjoyable

because of my friends there: Scott Ashley, Hannah Betts, Brad Hoylman,
Simon Hudson, Margaret Kean, Eleri Larkum, William O’Reilly, Michelle
O’Callaghan, Bruce Taylor and Clare Taylor. More recently, colleagues at
the University of Newcastle have given me a sustaining level of friendship and support; I would like to thank Hugh Craig, David Boyd, Therese
Davis, Tim Dolin, Lucy Dugan, Ivor Indyk, David Matthews, Chris
Pollnitz, Imre Salusinszky and especially David Kelly for their collegiality and conversations over the years. But my particular thanks must go
to two colleagues and friends who helped me beyond the call of duty in
preparing this manuscript for publication: Mark Gauntlett and Dianne
Osland. Both interrogated my arguments and improved my writing
beyond measure; their own prose styles are models of elegance and
clarity, and any infelicities of expression remaining in this book are


Preface xi

my own. I would also like to thank Hugh Lindsay for assisting me with
some Latin translations. I am grateful to the University of Newcastle for
providing me with crucial periods of research time and grants that
allowed me to rewrite my thesis as a book. Finally, my greatest debt is
owed to my family. This project would never have been finished as a
thesis without the emotional and material support of Marie Lewin,
Gwen Smith and Ian Smith, and it became a book only with the support
and inspiration of my husband Mark Prince and my beautiful children:
Felix, Isobel and our newest addition. Without you, ‘my wordes be but
wind’.
I am grateful to the librarians of the British Library and the Bodleian
Library for permission to reprint material from manuscript sources.
I would also like to thank Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke for
including an earlier version of Chapter 1 in ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered
Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). A section of Chapter 3 appeared in ‘The Sonnets of the Countess of Oxford

and Elizabeth I: Translations from Desportes’, Notes and Queries 239
(1994): 446–50. Earlier versions of two sections of Chapter 4 have also
appeared in print: ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: The
Politics 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 grateful to the editors and to the publishers of these works for permission to
publish revised versions of this material in this book.


List of Abbreviations
ANQ
BL
ELH
ELR
Geneva Bible

JWCI
NLH
NQ
PRO
SEL

American Notes and Queries
British Library
English Literary History
English Literary Renaissance
The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro.
Lloyd E. Berry (Madison and London: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1969). Unless otherwise stated, all
biblical references are to this edition.
Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes

New Literary History
Notes and Queries
Public Record Office
Studies in English Literature

Where possible, the texts of the poetry and letters reproduced here are
all based on original manuscript sources, or early modern print sources
when no manuscript source is extant. Punctuation and orthography are
derived from the original source with minimal modernization, except
for the long /s/ and the expansion of the abbreviated superscript /t/ and
other contractions. There has been no normalization of /u/, /v/, /w/ and
/i/, /j/, and Lowland Scots terminology such as ‘quhilk’ has not been
translated. 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 that
extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was
capable of a song or sonnet.
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own1
Virginia Woolf’s influential construction of the Renaissance woman
writer as silent, isolated and embattled has undergone significant revision in feminist literary scholarship. The historical sources of such
assumptions have been exposed in analyses of canon formation, and a

new set of texts, genres and modes of writing has been introduced to
accommodate early modern women’s diverse contributions to the
literary field.2 However, in the process of redrawing the boundaries of
early modern textuality, the ‘perennial puzzle’ that Woolf identifies has
remained unexamined: Why did women contribute to some of the
vernacular lyric traditions of the English Renaissance in such small numbers? This book reconsiders this question in one of the period’s primary
lyric genres, the sonnet sequence. Structured around the detailed local
histories of each text’s production and circulation, it seeks to construct a
generic history that accommodates rupture and hiatus without recourse
to assumed absence, invented tradition or uncritical reinforcement of the
male-authored tradition as normative. The scarcity of English women
sonneteers at the height of the male-authored genre presents a problem,
or puzzle, for examination rather than a straightforward example of
feminine limitation in the period. This study argues that the peculiar
conditions of circulation, reception, prosopopoeia and politics attached
to these sequences changed the shape of early modern English women’s
textuality, and it demonstrates the importance of attending to specific
generic histories in the study of early modern women’s writing.
1


2

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Only five sequences and collections were published in England under
the signatures of women between 1560 and 1621, and at least two of
these are of very doubtful attribution. The first sonnet sequence in
English, published in 1560, has been attributed to Anne Lock, and was
followed in 1571 by probably the most widely circulated example of

poetry under a feminine signature in the period – the casket sonnets –
attributed in the text to Mary Queen of Scots and published in George
Buchanan’s multiply reprinted Ane Detectiovn.3 The success of this
scandalous text as Protestant propaganda marked a hiatus in sonnet
sequences attributed to women. With the exception of a sequence
misleadingly attributed in the text of Pandora to the Countess of Oxford,
Anne Cecil de Vere, in 1584, no further sequences were circulated under
feminine signatures until Lady Mary Wroth’s unfashionably late
Jacobean sequences published in the Urania in 1621.4 This idiosyncratic
history challenges simplistic claims of women’s exclusion from the
genre, and raises larger questions about the ways in which the related
concepts of gender, genre and textuality might be constructed in the
period. The generic shape formed by this set of texts is an unfamiliar
one, especially compared to the existing narrative of the development of
the sonnet sequence in the English Renaissance, beginning with the
forms provided by Wyatt’s and Surrey’s Petrarchan imitations and
culminating in the multitude of sequences published in the 1590s.5 It
also differs from the sometimes prolific and self-reflexive European
traditions of women’s sonnet writing. Clustered at either end of the
development of the genre, and marked by a remarkable absence at its
height, 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 its
comparison with a European tradition, in which women writers in Italy
and France published widely circulated sequences participating in and
modifying Petrarchan conventions. In Italy especially, the period from
the beginning of the sixteenth century to the closing of the Council of
Trent in 1563 was one of significant expansion for women writers.
Rinaldina Russell claims that between 1538 and the end of the sixteenth
century, over 200 books contained examples of feminine authorship:

either authored by women, anthologies of women’s writing, or general
anthologies that included contributions by women. Similarly, Laura
Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie list 105 published women poets
active in the sixteenth century alone in addition to the 19 whose works
they anthologize.6 The best known of these poets, Vittoria Colonna,
Veronica Gambara and Gaspara Stampa, all composed substantial


Introduction 3

sonnet sequences. Vittoria Colonna’s first published poem in 1535 was a
sonnet, ‘Ahi quanto fu al mio sol contrario il fato’, followed by editions
of her poems containing erotic and divine sonnet sequences and
collections in 1538, 1544, 1558 and 1559.7 Although the love sonnets
of Veronica Gambara’s Rime were uncollected at her death in 1550, they
were circulated in manuscript and appeared in many sixteenth-century
collections of poetry.8 Both were eclipsed, however, by the posthumous
output of Gaspara Stampa: after her death in 1553 her sister Cassandra
published her Rime, containing over 221 sonnets in her Rime Amore and
62 in her Rime Varie.9 The Petrarchan sonnet was a form widely used by
the many women poets of the Italian Renaissance, and recent scholarship
has identified a set of other important practitioners of the form, including
Laura Battiferri, Olimpia Malipiera, Tullia d’Aragona, Chiara Matraini,
Laura Bacio Terracina, Isabella di Morra and Isabella Andreini.10 The
Italian tradition of women’s sonnet writing was a self-reflexive one
through which women registered in poems, written or dedicated to
one another, their debts and connections in a complex and vibrant
feminine literary economy grounded in Petrarchism.11
This tradition of women writing secular lyric poetry arose from a
cultural context distinct in many ways from that operating in the corresponding period in England. It encompassed a number of earlier women

writers, from the fourteenth-century poets Leonora della Genga, Ortensia
di Guglielmo, Livia del Chiavello and Giustina Levi Perotti to a set of
humanist writers of the fifteenth century. Writing predominantly in
Latin and Greek, humanist scholars such as Battista Malatesta, Laura
Cereta, Cassandra Fedele and Ginevra and Isotta Nogarola indirectly
provided role models for later generations of women writers, and their
influence was supplemented by the women who wrote poetry in the
Tuscan vernacular: Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, Lucrezia Tornabuoni
de’ Medici and Antonia Giannotti Pulci.12 The humanist education of
some royal, patrician and courtly women, which included the Italian
vernacular poets Dante and Petrarch, contributed to the concentration
of women vernacular poets in the sixteenth century. Women’s lyric
agency was also fostered by local court cultures in which aristocratic
women had a new status as patrons of the arts, whether as members of
ruling families or separately: three widows of rulers, Giulia Gonzaga at
Mantua, Veronica Gambara at Correggio, and Vittoria Colonna at
Pescara, used their independent positions as rulers to foster cultural
centres at their courts.13 The status associated with women’s literary
education in Italy extended to the cortegiane honorate, whose humanist
education included training in the composition of vernacular poetry.


4

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Mediated through the writing of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, the conventions of the Petrarchan tradition were not only available to a range of
women writers in the Italian Renaissance, but also became one of the
foundations of their education and, for some, a marker of their virtuosity.
On a smaller scale, women writers of the French Renaissance also

participated in the genre of the sonnet sequence, or drew upon the
conventions 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-sonnet
sequence; it was followed by three more editions in 1556, two at Lyon
and one at Rouen.14 Lyon’s position as a trade crossroads, as the staging
area for successive French military invasions of northern Italy, and as a
printing and publishing centre meant that it was closer to Italian Renaissance influence than other areas of France.15 As in parts of Italy, a
humanist education was increasingly available to wealthy women, and
coupled with the appearance in print of the works of Christine de Pisan
and Marguerite de Navarre, this milieu also produced the generically
diverse Les Rymes by Pernette du Guillet, first published in 1545, and
rapidly republished with expansions in Paris in 1546 and 1547 and again
in Lyon in 1552.16 In Poitiers, Madeleine and Catherine des Roches
published sonnets as part of their collected works Les Oeuvres in 1578,
followed by a second edition in 1579 containing additional pieces
including Catherine des Roches’ ‘Sonnets de Sincero et Charite’; Les
Missives were published in 1586 and Les Secondes Oeuvres in 1583.17
While these examples do not compare with the number of women
writing sonnet sequences in the Italian Renaissance, they nonetheless
provide examples of women’s participation in the genre that raise
questions about the poverty and untimeliness of women’s sonnet
writing in England.
The difference between English and Italian women’s sonnet writing is
surprising, particularly given that many of the critical responses to
individual sonnet sequences within the English tradition have assumed
that the gender roles encoded within the genre itself limited or
prevented women’s use of the genre. The first group of critics to break
from early gynocritical readings of these sequences developed an
argument that framed women’s writing in terms of its limitations, in

which language itself ‘provided women poets only gaps, silences, the
role of other, within male discourse’, and within which women were
seen to be ‘struggling into discourse’.18 The male-authored Petrarchan
sonnet sequence was seen to be defined by a set of strictly delineated
gender roles, in which the male Petrarchan subject formed his erotic,


Introduction 5

textual and political subjectivity against the body of his silenced female
beloved, and his desiring gaze reflected back towards himself to construct, according to John Freccero’s analysis, a self-enclosed, idolatrous
trinity.19 As Ann Rosalind Jones’ early and nuanced analysis of the
poetry of Louise Labe´ and Pernette du Guillet argues, the woman subject
did not simply appropriate the male subject position, but wrote ‘within
but against the center of the traditions that surrounded them, using
Petrarchan and Neoplatonic discourse in revisionary and interrogatory
ways’.20 However, in the first analyses of the English sonnet sequences,
gender was seen not only to shape but to circumscribe the woman
writer’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 of
devotion to active speaking subject was so difficult as to institutionalize
‘a wholesale gagging of women readers and writers’.21 A number of
critical analyses of English women’s sonnet sequences followed this
approach, characterizing the poetry in terms of circumscription, silence
and enclosure and denying the writers all but the most limited textual
agency even as their participation in the genre is discussed. It is a curious
stance, marked by the uneasy intersection of liberal feminism and early
new historicism, which attempts to find a universal marker for the
difference of women’s writing within this genre in discourses of containment and control. What is found to be ‘feminine’ or different here are
qualities associated with the containment of women within the private

sphere. This approach ignored the new historicist rewriting of the
male-authored sonnet sequence as a charged political vehicle used by
courtiers as a means of advancing their status in the court and asserting
a textual authority as they become increasingly disenfranchised from
political power. Instead, it was implied that, for women, love was still
love; they used the Petrarchan love sequence in a private context.22 The
terms ‘women’ and ‘genre’ here formed monolithic categories, overriding
differences in class, political status and affiliation attaching to specific
women 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 in
particular on the separation of the sequences from the wider genre of
the male-authored sonnet sequence and from courtly or political
concerns. Heather DuBrow’s Echoes of Desire addresses the new historicist tendency to read Petrarchism as an exercise in domination and
silencing, arguing that Arthur Marotti’s corrective formulation against
reading 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


6

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

ambitions, but instead becomes a site of confusion of gender and reinterpretation of speech and silence. The male-authored sequence is no
longer understood as an empowered masculine subjectivity constructed
against a silenced feminine object, but as a more contingent and volatile
space for the unresolved ‘tossing back and forth between representations
of success and failure, agency and impotence, and control and
helplessness’.23 The destabilized subject position of the Petrarchan
speaker afforded by this model is one balanced by a construction of

the feminine beloved in terms more complex than silence and objectification; the female voice is subject within the genre to a number of
modes, including reported and direct speech, praise and challenge, in
forms of aestheticization that do not always equate with ‘objectification
and diminution’.24 A similar critique is offered by Barbara Estrin, where
the Petrarchan poem becomes a ‘disputed space’ with ‘overlapping
counter-voices’ and where a woman may be ‘sometimes the ‘‘subject of
consciousness’’ ’.25 These reconsiderations of the dynamics of Petrarchism
challenge earlier formulations of the English genre in terms of reductive
and distinct gender encoding, with significant ramifications for work in
early modern women’s poetry. DuBrow’s call for a historicized used of
psychoanalytical modes of differentiation has been mirrored in other,
more recent analyses, which attend to the complexity and historical
specificity of individual sequences.
In particular, the sequences at the beginning and the end of the
English tradition, attributed to Anne Lock and Lady Mary Wroth, have
been reconsidered as engagements with local and political Protestantism,
although keyed to very different moments in its development. In this
process, the sequences have been aligned with, rather than automatically precluded from, contemporary male-authored literary groupings.26
Yet these new readings are not without their problems. The focus upon
local contexts reflects a desire to avoid essentialist generalizations and to
attend to specific histories, but has tended to mask any connections
within women’s textual practice that might fall outside immediate
familial, social and literary networks. The generic field remains characterized by disconnection and anomalous exceptions. Even recent
approaches to early modern women’s writing through genre assume
an absence of specific feminine generic traditions outside the feminineencoded genres of letters, diaries and life writing. Instead, they address
the broad category of early modern women’s engagement with
Petrarchism rather than their participation in specific genres such as
the sonnet sequence or complaint.27 In addition, this narrative of anomaly
is reinforced by uncertainties of authorship attaching to the genre of the

Introduction 7

sonnet sequence: with the exception of the two sequences published by
Lady Mary Wroth in the Urania, all of these sequences are troubled by
questions of attribution. Especially in the most problematic cases of the
sonnets attributed, in print, to Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Cecil de
Vere, the uncertainty of their authorship has left these texts at the edges
of literary history. Neither women’s writing nor canonical male-authored
texts, they have either been considered only in terms of their attribution, often on unconvincingly partisan grounds, or been excluded from
discussion altogether. Yet by virtue of their circulation as texts under
women’s signatures, they impacted upon the shape of the genre and
women’s agency within it in significant and surprising ways. Their
reconsideration here not only alters local formations of gender and
genre, but raises larger questions about the current methodologies
underpinning the category of women’s writing itself.
This book has three aims. For the first time, it examines as a whole the
genre of sonnet sequences and collections written by and attributed to
women in the English Renaissance. It maps an unfamiliar generic
history that runs parallel to the male-authored tradition, but inverts its
trajectory. The female-authored genre is characterized by moments of
innovation and agency in the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, but is almost entirely absent in the late Elizabethan period,
when, as Woolf remarks, ‘every other man, it seemed, was capable of a
song 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 unusual
history. These include an examination of the ways in which the publication of these sequences impacted upon each another, and upon women’s
lyric agency in the period. The second aim of the book is to reconsider the
individual sequences in the particular historical contexts of their production and circulation. These local studies address questions of attribution,
political agency and critical reception: they aim to provide a detailed
analysis of the differences that discourses of gender actually made to each

of these texts at particular historical moments. In this process, they resist
generalized 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 to
interrogate the ways in which women’s writing is defined in the period.
The attribution difficulties surrounding many of these sequences raise
questions about a set of unexamined critical assumptions that give
legitimacy to those texts securely identified with historical women
writers, yet ignore others of less certain provenance. The book highlights,
through the example of a single genre, the problems that such simplistic


8

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

constructions of author, text and signature create, and suggests that our
understanding of the field of early modern women’s writing might be
entirely different if such problematic texts were admitted.
In examining the curious genre of sonnet sequences and collections
written by and attributed to women in the English Renaissance as a
whole, this book first argues for a specifically feminine, and increasingly
self-reflexive, generic practice, one characterized by moments of extraordinary innovation and possibility as well as rupture and difficulty. The
comparative examples of women’s sonnet sequences in Italy and France,
together with recent reformulations of the encodings of gender within
the genre, suggest that the idiosyncratic formation of the English tradition cannot be attributed to the dynamics of the genre alone. This book
proposes a more complex set of forces at work to produce the shape of
the English tradition, attributable in part to the discourses surrounding
women and secular writing at particular historical instances in the
Elizabethan and Jacobean courts and in part to the circulation histories

of the particular poems under consideration. While the book employs a
historical specificity in its analysis of the politics of individual texts and
its focus on a single genre, it also suggests that examples of individual
textual 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 the
female subject to negotiate certain gender codes. However, the generic
history of the sonnet sequence also indicates that such precedents were
not always positive or empowering for other women writers. The book
argues that the complex and scandalous circulation history of Mary
Stuart’s casket sonnets, which detail the female speaker’s rape and
continuing adulterous relationship, both opened up a set of textual
possibilities for secular women poets and simultaneously closed off the
genre to women writers for 50 years. The widespread circulation of the
casket sonnets created in part the generic hiatus that has been figured in
critical terms as simple absence and exclusion.
However, the impact of this sequence worked in conjunction with a
complex set of other cultural discourses to inform women’s engagement
with the genre. This book secondly attempts to reconstruct the local historical circumstances of each text’s production and circulation, including a
detailed attention to questions of authorship and attribution, in order to
examine the differences that gender might make in a particular context.
Rather than seeing these as texts directed towards a limited audience and
predominantly concerned with domestic or emotional interests, the study


Introduction 9

challenges the idea that women did not use the genre of the sonnet
sequence as male courtiers did, for political purposes, and it seeks to

reposition these sequences and writers in terms of their engagement with
courtly and political concerns. Although the terms of their political articulations differ from the sequences circulated under male signatures, these
differences are not always consistent, nor attributable to a single model of
femininity. They alter according to the class, mobility and access to shifting
sites of power of their authors, the way the text is circulated, the investments of its audience and the extent of its political engagement. Neither
are they wholly political texts: the practice of combining the Petrarchan
sonnet with penitential meditation, elegy and complaint in these
sequences constantly mediates and disguises the political within alternative frames, often linked to questions of personal faith, familial concerns
or the pursuit of material self-interest. The insertion of the woman subject into the genre of the sonnet sequence becomes a complex process of
the negotiation of limits, where the extent of agency shifts according to
the local circumstances of a text’s production and circulation.
One surprising result of these local analyses is the recurrence of
Protestantism as a central discourse variously underwriting the political
interventions 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 of
admonitory instruction to the sovereign, seeking to direct religious
policy in the early Elizabethan state in response to a Calvinist anxiety
concerning Elizabeth’s uncertain religious alliances. The casket sonnets
of Mary Stuart were circulated in print from 1571 in George Buchanan’s
Ane Detectiovn as Protestant propaganda, immediately positioning their
erotic content in a public context and providing a damaging alternative
to the chaste poetics of sovereignty practised by Elizabeth I. In a later
parallel to the 1560 Meditation sonnets, the examples of prosopopoeia
attributed in the text of John Soowthern’s Pandora to Anne Cecil de Vere
and Elizabeth I are also informed by a radical Protestant agenda, directed
towards Elizabethan reluctance towards military involvement in the
Netherlands, with an element of admonitory instruction towards the
sovereign. Finally, the sonnet sequences Lindamira’s Complaint and
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth are aligned with the

writing of the Spenserians, a group of radical Protestant writers in the
Jacobean court, and use a Spenserian nostalgia for Elizabeth’s reign both
to present a utopian Protestant court and to transfer the multi-valency
surrounding the sovereign which characterizes the Elizabethan sonnet
sequence to the Jacobean court.


10 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

It is now a critical commonplace to suggest that in England women
writers had a Reformation rather than a Renaissance, and that religion
enabled a degree of textual agency for women writers in the period.28 Yet
these discussions have emphasized women’s participation in forms of
religious textual practice such as translation, prayer and meditation rather
than their participation in secular genres such as the erotic lyric. The
specific histories outlined here modify this argument by demonstrating
the 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 a
plainant speaking in colloquy to God, provided fruitful correspondences
to the relationship of the Petrarchan subject to a distant lover and were
repeatedly capitalized upon in these sequences as authorizing strategies
producing a decorous secular subjectivity for the ‘woman writer’. They are
mirrored by other biblical precedents open to assertions of female lyric
agency: particularly that of the female erotic subject speaking to Christ as
lover and bridegroom and using the blazon in the Song of Songs.29 An
examination of the genre as a whole, however, shows that this is not a
simple narrative equating religion with agency: the Protestant political
contexts at work here both constructed authorizing strategies for some
writers and prevented access to the genre for others.

The impact of the casket sonnets within the genre of the sonnet
sequence also raises questions as to their influence upon the wider field
of secular women’s writing in the English Renaissance. Josephine
Roberts’ suggestion that the popularity of mimed female discourse,
particularly in the genre of complaint, ‘may well have been a contributing
factor in discouraging sixteenth-century Englishwomen from writing
their own lyric poetry’ is here given specific force, inviting speculation
that the casket sonnets might have contributed to the national bias
towards religious writing in contrast to women’s parallel traditions in
Europe.30 Capitalizing on the much-rehearsed, but nascent, association
between women’s textuality and sexuality, Elizabeth’s early propaganda
policies intensified the very discourses they exploited in circulating the
details of the speaker’s rape and continuing adultery with her married
lover in the casket sonnets. These are familiar elements of the female
complaint, another genre only employed by women outside its height
in the male-authored tradition: the examples of the Meditation’s plainant
David in 1560 and Isabella Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter (1567) and
A Sweet Nosgay (1573) again are not repeated until Mary Wroth’s
Lindamira’s Complaint in the Urania in 1621. Recovering a specific generic history provides a new perspective on generalized claims of the


Introduction 11

effect of cultural construction of women’s sexuality and textuality
in England, associations which operated less restrictively in parallel
European contexts and to shifting degrees within an English context
itself.31 For the casket sonnets to be effective as propaganda defaming
Mary Stuart’s character, they needed to be believable as the work of a
woman poet, albeit a foreign one. This indicates a very different set of
expectations and assumptions about women’s secular lyric agency operating in the late 1560s and early 1570s compared to the late Elizabethan

period. Although recent caveats warn against the duplicities and strains
of the construction of feminine literary traditions, this restricted analysis of genre through an examination of local contexts indicates the value
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 not
just a set of texts, but a forgotten generic tradition. The third aim of this
book is thus to examine the processes that led to the genre’s neglect, and
to reconsider the boundaries of what might be considered feminine
textuality in the early modern period. The uneasy status conferred upon
four 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 the
material conventions of textual circulation rather than in the body of
the author. These conventions of signature and circulation practice
create paratextual signals that might both foreground the role of a
woman writer, through a direct textual attribution in print, or occlude
her identity, through the use of initials. However, as this collection of
histories shows, these strategies correspond unpredictably to the authorial presence of an historical woman writer. Much work has been done in
recent scholarship to modify some of our modern assumptions regarding
the 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 textual
ownership and literary indebtedness.32 However, these revisions have
only recently been applied to the field of early modern women’s writing,
largely because the gynocritical project that has brought almost all of
these writers to critical view was concerned with establishing the existence of a body of historical women writers in response to assumptions of
their absence or the poverty of their textual activity.33 This project of
recovery 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 keep
historical women writing subjects in view. But it approaches the necessary

12 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

uncertainties attached to the process of attributing authorship as part of
a text’s interpretative context, rather than simply a register of its legitimacy as ‘women’s writing’. A different privilege attached to authenticity, and a different methodology uncoupling the necessary association
of the gender of the author and the gender of the text, newly allows the
examination of these sonnet sequences as instances of local textual
practice and as part of a generic history.
Genre looks different here; it becomes a hyperbolized version of the
openness which Rosalie Colie identifies as typical of Renaissance writing,
and which Lyotard identifies in his flexible and contingent theory of
genre as ‘modes of linking’, both dependent upon a set of prior texts and
altering at each moment of utterance.34 While offering, in Colie’s terms,
‘a set of interpretations, of ‘‘fixes’’ or ‘‘frames’’ on the world’, genre also
offers for these writers both a frame and a site of innovation, a safety net
and a familiar language as well as a place for the insertion of the
unfamiliar voice of the female Petrarchan subject. This group of texts
also destabilizes current constructions of the figure of the early modern
woman writer: the literary history uncovered here indicates an early
history of secular lyric agency and innovation as well as the later repressive mechanisms of its containment. These shifts are linked to specific,
and highly contingent, local circumstances of the production and
circulation of texts, which mean that this generic history is shadowed
by a set of alternatives that allow for a different trajectory of women’s
writing in the English Renaissance, one closer to the more productive
histories of feminine secular writing in Italy and France. Without the
circulation 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 history

nonetheless resists the idea that women’s secular textual agency was
necessarily limited in England, by examining the specific set of events
that produced its particular exclusions and emphases.35 Finally, this
generic history, made up of real and imagined women writers, extends
the boundaries of what might constitute women’s writing in the early
modern period. It is the texts of uncertain attribution that tell us most
about constructions of women and writing, gender and genre in this
history, and their impact in the study of this single genre suggests that
their inclusion in the literary field as a whole might construct a very
different sense of what constituted the separate but related categories of
early modern female authorship, writing and voice in England.36