A thought-provoking and carefully organized collection, this volume of scholarly essays reveals the diverse nature of the expressions in writing made by early modern women over 150 years of English history, from the Reformation through the Restoration. The women writers examined here communicate through a variety of textual media, including funeral monuments, recipe collections, polemical pamphlets, genealogical narratives, and interior domestic landscapes, and, consequently, through other creative productions in early modern Europe and the Americas. Patricia Phillippy's introduction lays out the impetus for the complex but invaluable theoretical structure of the collection as intending an “integrated literary history” of early modern women's writing, which would set this volume apart from those of the four preceding decades (6).

To achieve this, Phillippy creates temporal and thematic order, intertwining twenty-two chapters. Part 1 features four preeminent scholars addressing four critical debates that have engaged scholars of early modern women's writing: “Recoveries and Transmissions,” “Authorial Agency and Identity Politics,” “Subversion, Orthodoxy, and the Canon,” and “Tradition and Truth in the Archives.” The subsequent eighteen chapters of parts 2–4 fall within one of three eras of English literary history: “The Tudor Era,” “The Early Stuart Period,” and “Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration,” while engaging six distinct themes: “Reformations,” “Collaborations and Coteries,” “Transmissions,” “Transnationalities,” “Form and Genre,” and “Material Textualities.” To guide the reader at any point during the process of studying the essays, Phillippy presents a visual for her organizational scheme with the table that appears on page 7—e.g., the first theme, “Reformations,” includes part 2's chapter 5, “Common and Competing Faiths,” by Susan M. Felch; part 3's chapter 11, “Aemilia Lanyer's Radical Art: ‘The Passion of Christ,’” by Pamela J. Benson; and part 4's chapter 17, “Prophecy, Power, and Religious Dissent,” by W. Scott Howard. The intent of this structure is to foster “synchronic comparisons” of the diverse early modern texts within the six “subject areas that traverse the period and change over time” (6). The well-conceived organization and the quality of the scholarship within this frame will lend itself fruitfully to all scholars working on women writers in this or any period but may be especially productive for advanced graduate students and young scholars finding their own footing in the field.

Part 1's lead essay, by Margaret J. M. Ezell, “Invisibility Optics,” argues that we must avoid erasures of women from the perspective of “authorship as an isolated individual act” and instead continue our efforts to “view the cultural context in which texts are created and consumed” so as to broaden our ideas of authorship, creation, and production of canonical and noncanonical texts by both men and women (35). Ezell concludes, however, with a warning about our dependence on new technologies to recover and preserve women's texts, as these may pose new threats of erasure without “the safety nets of traditional print publications” (45). Jaime Goodrich, considering identity politics, views writing as the nexus of analysis, since sex and gender are but two facets of a complex identity, an issue scholars have been wrestling with over at least the past four decades that preceded this work. Patricia Pender argues that approaches that are not multifaceted become problematic for creating viable editions of early modern women's writing. Megan Matchinske cautions against scholars prejudicing quantity of evidence over quality in search of a truth about women's lives or their writings that may not be attainable considering the “holes [in the primary evidence] that we cannot fill but must instead simply attempt to imagine” (91)—a caveat of which scholars of ancient and medieval texts by women have long been aware.

The limits of this review prevent a detailed assessment of the twenty-two extremely insightful essays uncovering the profound challenges faced by scholars examining the textual production of early modern women, as these are expressed in public and private, vis-à-vis religious, political, and cultural media during a fraught period of English history. Patricia Phillippy achieves her intention, producing an “integrated literary history” of early modern women's writings, compelling us to investigate such writings multidirectionally rather than along any one path of inquiry, all the while interrogating our sources and our own intentions.