Openly building on the foundational New Historicist work of the 1980s and 1990s on early modern women’s writing, this book offers new, highly politicized readings of Mary Sidney, Margaret Hoby, Lucy Russell, and Mary Wroth. In so doing it commits itself to certain well-recognized agendas, among them the belief that the subordinate stands in paradoxical relation to power. The English nobility in the early modern period is thus presented as less disempowered than discontented, and — in its articulations of resistance against an increasingly centralized monarchy — as oppositional and self-assertive: in a word, powerful. Happily, this “strong nobility included women” (200), and the book focuses on ways in which, through promoting the interests of (almost exclusively) men, these four figures appropriated much of that strength for themselves. These women are shown to be politically engaged as readers, writers, patrons, and dedicatees, allowing them to be seen not as “mere support staff” (10), but rather as the heads of the formidable family alliance — the Leicester-Sidney-Essex faction — that for several generations articulated this resistance in the form of a politically activist and interventionist, militant, international Protestantism.

The resistance to tyranny — and the strength, moral as well as political, to which it gave rise — is naturally presented as a good thing. All the same, these nobles were perfectly capable of behaving tyrannically themselves. One example — provided to demonstrate the strength and “capacities” of Mary Sidney — is the way in which she maintained her family’s “seigneurial hold” of land in Wales in spite of violent popular protest (the walls of Ludlow Castle were torn down). As Crawford notes in parenthesis, this “act of resistance” seems to rebut the fantasy Jonson famously unfolds in “To Penshurst” — where there are none who dwell about the estate’s walls that “wish them downe” — since “clearly there were many who wished to see Ludlow’s razed to the ground.” Thus, where court and country are read in the typical relation whereby a retreat to the latter is taken as resistance to the former, it does not follow that the country thereby becomes a libertarian haven to the folk who live there. On the contrary, whether in Wales or the pages of the Arcadia or the Urania, popular rebellion is ruthlessly crushed by the “reigning seigneur” (20).

This contradiction is explained by means of “resistance theory”: since the aim of the nobles was not to destroy power but to share it, the Leicester-Sidney-Essex faction was both “oppositional and consiliary” (9). This doctrine certainly had the support of contemporary political theorists, among them Justus Lipsius. All the same, it puts serious strain on the iconic image of this book — that of the constant woman — in ways that could do with being addressed. Neo-Stoic fortitude in the face of what cannot be overcome is taken as a model for this particular form of aristocratic resistance, and no better model seems to have been found than that of the abused woman: as if her moral probity and silent reproach toward masculine tyranny were somehow capable of shaming the beast into submission if not reform. The “love of a virtuous woman” (56) is presumed capable of a similar effect.

But this constant woman is humiliated, betrayed, intimidated, incarcerated, tortured, and all but raped. Indeed, between them, Greville’s “Honourable Lady,” Pamela and Philoclea in the Arcadia, and Pamphilia in the Urania could all be said to qualify as battered women. They might be lionized as heroines of aristocratic resistance — as “the ‘metaphorics’ of a ‘discontented nobility’” (11) — but it is questionable how much comfort they or we can draw from this given that they are entirely powerless and have absolutely no recourse. Their only option, like the beasts of Sidney’s “Ister Bank” poem, is “in patience [to] bide your hell.” This seems less a bracing rally to the moral high ground and more a counsel of despair, a document in madness. Such women are doubly abused: by their faithless husbands and lovers, and by a doctrine that condemns them to being poster girls for a republicanism in which they can never participate (the formula goes back at least as far as Lucretia). That such constancy is best understood “not as passive or patient suffering, but rather as an active achievement of the will, and thus as a statement of power” (45) seems, in the circumstances, a particularly invidious instance of the New Historicist co-optation of the dialectic of master and slave.