For several decades, feminist scholars have labored in collective earnest to recover the perspectives of early women writers. As part of that ongoing effort, two editorial projects have influenced generations of readers: first, the Women Writers Project (which focuses on pre-Victorian women writing in English, and which originated at Brown University in 1988 before moving to Northeastern University in 2013); and second, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (which began at the University of Chicago in 1996 and then transferred to the University of Toronto in 2009). One of the welcome recent editions extending The Other Voice series is Poems and Meditations by Anne Bradstreet, edited by Margaret Olofson Thickstun.

Although two modern editions of Bradstreet's complete works exist, Thickstun goes further than past editors in presenting all Bradstreet's surviving writings with a greater array of readerly supports. Unlike her predecessor Jeannine Hensley, whose edition of Bradstreet's work, first published in 1967, is still in print, Thickstun provides a historical and literary introduction to Bradstreet's oeuvre, explanatory footnotes throughout the volume, and appendixes covering the prefatory matter to the two seventeenth-century editions of Bradstreet's poetry: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) and the posthumously published Several Poems (1678). Like Hensley, however, Thickstun structures her edition chronologically, such that part 1 offers the complete text of The Tenth Muse, part 2 includes the poems added to Several Poems, and part 3 comprises poems and meditations from the Andover Manuscript, which contains two works in Bradstreet's hand and more in the hand of her son Simon, who copied unpublished material of hers from a now-lost notebook. Consequently, Thickstun's edition, in its broad scope as well as its expansive apparatus, stands poised to overtake Hensley's as the standard scholarly text of Bradstreet. For Thickstun's edition “allow[s] readers to engage with the depth of her humanistic learning and the complexity of her art” (4).

One of the many strengths of Poems and Meditations is Thickstun's richly historical introduction, which probes not only the increasing political and religious tensions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society, but also and especially the ways that those tensions prompted Bradstreet's immediate and extended family to migrate from England to New England in 1630. Indeed, Thickstun traces the rise of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in detail, going so far as to describe, for example, Native American land stewardship and agricultural practices amidst epidemics instigated by “European pathogens” (9). It's easy to get caught up in the engrossing narrative, for 60 percent of it—twenty-three out of thirty-eight pages—historically contextualizes Bradstreet's life. Yet the emphasis sometimes lies more on historical contextualization than on Bradstreet's life, such that one may even forget about Bradstreet occasionally. When Thickstun does tie her historical account back to Bradstreet, readers may be disappointed to learn that Bradstreet had little, if anything, to say about much of that historical material. As a result, readers may wonder whether Thickstun could take more interpretive leaps, perhaps tempering, though not replacing, historical detail with more literary critical insight. For although she attends helpfully to “Anne Bradstreet's Art,” that section arrives near the end of the introduction and is just six pages long, and so offers only a light touch on the aesthetics of America's first muse.

One benefit of Thickstun's self-effacing editorial approach is that it will inspire readers to wonder about the fuller literary context for Bradstreet's artistic choices, as well as what is at stake in them. For example, Thickstun intriguingly observes that a passage from Bradstreet's “The Four Monarchies,” wherein the speaker declares, “Thus Kings, and Kingdoms, have their times and dates / Their standings, over-turnings, bounds, and fates” (lines 1715–16), evinces “the spirit of Ecclesiastes” (32). Yet a nearer parallel appears to occur in George Herbert's “The Church Militant” when the speaker observes about religion in America, “They have their period also and set times / Both for their vertuous actions and their crimes” (George Herbert, “The Church Militant,” in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox [2007]: 261–62). Could Herbert, whom Thickstun mentions briefly at the introduction's outset, have influenced Bradstreet? Thickstun doesn't say. But her critical restraint on this and other interpretive matters, perhaps influenced by Bradstreet's own personal reserve, helps to ensure that readers of her excellent edition will be moved to productive dialogue.