Combining interest in early modern reading practices, historical formalism, and feminist scholarship, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann’s Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry and Culture 1640–1680 embraces a broad definition of form in addressing early modern women writers’ relationships with their poetic predecessors as well as contemporaries. Scott-Baumann explores disparate formal elements, including marginalia, generic conventions, and allusion. Yet she displays an equal ambition regarding the number of primary texts: the book addresses much of Margaret Cavendish’s and Lucy Hutchinson’s oeuvres, along with the poetry of Katherine Philips, arguing that these writers invoke interlocutors “which they draw from and challenge and to the development of which they contribute” (4). For these writers, Scott-Baumann claims, “poetic form is a site for experimentation and engagement, and … women poets’ choices and uses of form reveal their close engagement with their literary and intellectual culture” (3).

In so arguing, Scott-Baumann covers much new and emerging ground. Cavendish’s repudiation of written authority is well known, but Forms of Engagement’s early chapters place it in the broader context of English intellectual history, while addressing Cavendish’s use of formal elements like the blazon — which, Scott-Baumann contends, connects her to the Cavalier tradition of Carew, Lovelace, and others. Such expanded critical context, along with Cavendish’s post-Restoration revisions to her previously published works, support “a shift in Cavendish’s self-characterization,” Scott-Baumann claims, from an “unlearned, defiantly idiosyncratic” writer to one who is “instead rational, objective, competent with literary form and philosophical exposition” (80).

A similar revisionist mindset underlies chapter 3’s discussion of Katherine Philips. Rejecting an unidirectional model of influence, Scott-Baumann argues that Philips and Abraham Cowley helped “direct and develop each other’s poetic identity alongside their own” in their treatments of country retreat and the ode, displaying a relationship of “community, dialogue, rebuke, correction, and self-correction” (111). Scott-Baumann then extends Philips’s influence to Marvell’s “The Garden,” noting similarity in the poets’ treatment of prelapsarian, solitary retreat and arguing for the poem’s post-Restoration composition.

In chapter 4, though, Philips is the poet manipulating earlier material, as Scott-Baumann explores how the Royalist Philips and the republican Hutchinson employ “explicit echo … to draw attention to their subsequent divergence from Donne” (125). According to Scott-Baumann, the writers embed the tropes of poems like “The Sun Rising” and “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” in “formally different poems” as “a way of negotiating political issues” (125). Thus, Scott-Baumann claims, “To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen” and other poems by Philips exploit Donne’s sun imagery and first-person-singular speaker to explore the first-person-plural voice in poems of female friendship. Hutchinson’s Elegies, though, capitalize on latent ambiguity in Donne’s poetry to articulate the loss of both her husband and her pre-Restoration political dreams.

Scott-Baumann continues exploring Hutchinson’s polemical tendencies in the book’s final two chapters. Drawing comparisons to the country-house poems of Lanyer and Jonson, Scott-Baumann notes the distinctly fallen, disordered estate of Hutchinson’s Elegies, while arguing that Hutchinson’s account of the Fall in Order and Disorder directly contrasts with Cowley’s and Milton’s biblical epics. Even as Hutchinson closes down interpretation by advocating a “poetics of not knowing,” marginal commentary encourages readers to look outside the poem, pointing readers to Hutchinson’s engagement in contemporary gendered religious polemic (193).

Forms of Engagement’s broad exploration does a valuable service for writers whose work, like Hutchinson’s, has only recently been made available in scholarly editions. Scott-Baumann’s painstaking documentation of Cavendish’s revisions, furthermore, exposes a new side of Cavendish’s authorial persona — or, as Scott-Baumann puts it, “the varying ‘Cavendishes’” (79). Yet the expansiveness of Scott-Baumann’s project also undermines it. Her desire to be “flexible” in her attention to form renders it difficult to define a unifying argument, and at times ideas emerge offhandedly or with little in-depth discussion (11). Consequently, claims like Cavendish’s specifically gender-based revision (65–67) and Hutchinson’s use of the Bible in her Memoirs feel weak and unsupported (193). Moreover, Scott-Baumann perhaps too casually claims allusive links between poets; her discussion of Philips, for instance, ignores earlier conceptions of solitary retreat that could have influenced Marvell (e.g., Shirley’s “The Garden”). Scott-Baumann may also overstate solar imagery’s Royalist connotations in regard to Hutchinson. Nevertheless, the book represents a refreshing formalist approach to these writers, and a useful engagement with texts unfamiliar to many scholars.