Response to Review of Mediatrix: Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early Modern England

I thank Alice Ferron (University College London) for her generous and insightful review of my book, Mediatrix: Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early Modern England, and wanted to write a few things in response. First, in addition to its ‘unique close readings of some of Early Modern England’s most famous aristocratic women’s texts and biographies’, Mediatrix also offers sustained (and, I hope, unique) readings of a wide range of texts by men as well, including Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (both Old and New), which is the subject of the first chapter, and John Donne’s verse letters, epigrams, and (to a lesser extent) Holy Sonnets, which are the subject of the third. In regard to Margaret Hoby and Lucy Harington Russell’s literary production (as compared to the more obvious cases of Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s), a key part of my argument is that patronage and reading are also forms of literary production and inseparable from the more obvious cases of editing and writing. Margaret Ezell pointed out years ago that printed texts represent only a fraction of the ways in which women participated in literary culture, and Mediatrix thus looks not only at manuscript production, but also at patronage, dedicatory epistles and petitions, textual exchange, co-reading, and reading. In particular, the chapter on Margaret Hoby argues that, far more than a ‘consumer’ of texts, Hoby was a reader, annotator, and discussant who promoted and kept ‘ideas and arguments alive that had officially gone underground’ in the period in which she kept her diary. Hoby’s reading made the books she read ‘pertinent and alive for occasion and contexts other than the ones for which they were originally written’, reminding us that texts and textual meanings are produced in moments of consumption as well as creation, and that ‘reading was an active form of literary production – as much a form of publication as either of its related, and arguably more permanent, technologies’ (p. 27). Recipes are in fact far less common in Hoby’s diary than her records of ‘writing in her notes and testament’; co-reading controversial puritan works with a wide range of political actors; delivering notes to political activists in London; and exchanging letters and attending sermons with a wide range of interlocutors. Similarly, the chapter on Donne and the Countess of Bedford argues that their myriad forms of textual exchange, including sharing and responding to each others poems, were a mode of literary production. The poems that contributed to and resulted from these exchanges both bear the traces of the exchanges, and produced new modes of circulation and, in turn, new meanings. Rather than positing an empirical grounding to prove that women who weren’t (titular) authors ‘played any role in literary productio,,’ Mediatrix argues that the separation between women who produced – as in published (either in manuscript or print) their ‘own’ literary texts – and those who supported, read, and circulated them, is a false one. Like other forms of ‘practically active’ or ‘political’ humanism, the literary activities in which these women were involved were inseparable from the other forms of activism to which they were committed and thus from the other uses to which they and their allies put their pens.