In this remarkable survey of early modern women's cultural encounter with the transatlantic world, Kate Chedgzoy maps a geography of the mind. As Chedgzoy writes, the book “contributes self-consciously to the feminist scholarly project of recollecting women's forgotten contributions to the cultural past” (69), but in so doing, it charts a feminist poetics for other scholars to pursue. Feminist critics have long been engaged, in the process of recuperation, with trying to describe the work that they recover in terms that do not reproduce the histories that rendered these texts invisible in the first place. This is neither to suggest that women's work was obscured at the site of production nor that all women's literary production remains obstinate to formalism or other conventional methodologies used to evaluate cultural work. But certainly a good deal of cultural, and even textual, practice carried out by women in the early modern period continues to be elusive to common critical procedure—as the arguments in a recent special issue of the journal Women's Writing (August 2007) attest. Chedgzoy's concentration upon sites of memory, and the textual materials that record those sites, allows her to move fluidly from the local and particular histories preserved by women's domestic work (diaries, receipt books, family Bibles) to the national concerns of politics and place described by women in a larger—and enlarging—Anglophone world. She thus demonstrates the continuity between the preservation efforts of the domestic sphere and the memorial projects of the public domain—correlative endeavors precisely because of the early modern configuration of “the domestic [as] a microcosm of the public and national” (21).

This is an ambitious project. In her charting of “memory's travels” (the rubric to her final chapter), Chedgzoy traverses not only the spaces in which memory accrues but also the various forms of cultural production in which memory is recorded and the technologies by which it is produced. Her study contends with both oral and written culture, manuscript and print, verse, drama, and prose in the languages of the English archipelago. But her study is not confined to the British Isles; rather, its female subjects are located within the complex, fraught, transforming, and transformative British Atlantic world that frames their shared cultural perspective. With such a diversity of place, language, genre, and transmission complicating the cultural objects under research, Chedgzoy focuses upon the memorial construction that made them possible. She chooses memory as the connective tissue because of the function of history and memory in the formation of place—and of nation. Spaces, she contends, both little and large, are never absent the histories and social interactions that endow them with meaning. “Memory work,” then, “is the textual site where the intimate, domestic echoes of national crisis can most insistently be heard” (12).

The first chapter of Women's Writing in the British Atlantic World encounters women's memory work and the metaphors that govern its practice; chapter 2 takes up the technologies of its transmission. Chedgzoy displays the network of gendered meanings that collect around memory and that render memory such fertile ground for female cultural and literary production. She then examines the persistence of women's oral cultures and how these intersect and interact with literate cultures. Such an interaction is particularly fraught in early modern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, where oral poetic traditions held a unique place. This does not mean that oral composition and transmission yielded to competition from print—on the contrary, they seem to have been remarkably durable—but the political processes of change that threatened the erasure of the past lent a degree of urgency to the cultural forms of memory work. The “decline of bardic institutions,” the “rise of print,” and “the changing politics of language use” (59) opened space for female intervention in the oral cultural production of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but as Chedgzoy shows, this intervention carried special problems for women in the wake of bardic traditions.

Chapter 3 takes each cultural geography as its own case: focusing upon Caitlín Dubh, Elizabeth Dowdall, and Alice Thornton in Ireland; Elizabeth Melville, Anna Hume, Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (a.k.a. Mary McLeod), and Diorbhail Nic a’ Bhruthainn in Scotland; and Katherine Philips, Jane Vaughan, Catrin ferch Gruffydd, Catherin Owen, and Magdalen Lloyd in Wales. This is not to say that Chedgzoy examines female contributions to the Celtic poetic tradition in an atomized way. To the contrary, her use of Katherine Philips, an English migrant to Wales, to begin her discussion of that region and Magdalen Lloyd, a Welsh migrant worker in England, to close it only exemplifies her rich and complicated exfoliation of female cultural production and the politics that attend it. She surveys a landscape of poetry and life writing in order to provide a “provisional map of women's diverse engagements with the shifting politics of place and memory that shaped the volatile histories” of these regions in an early modern world of unstable religious, political, linguistic, and national affiliation (124).

The fourth chapter foregrounds the English Civil War(s) and considers the perspectives of female subjects from various situations throughout the transatlantic nation. Examining the writings of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Brackley, Jane Cavendish, Hester Pulter, and Lucy Hutchinson, Chedgzoy tries to access and understand how women use the historical past in order to make sense of the present moment of national crisis. In the midst of the precariousness of both history and place, these women attempt to stabilize the present by reconstructing a comfortable past. Through domestic drama, autobiography, and diverse poetic forms, the women of this study remember political figures or landscapes now absent, in order to embody their religious, political, and social agendas. From both sides of the political spectrum, and both sides of the Atlantic, the specter of civil war compels the art of memory from women situated in a nation whose borders, religion, and governing system are uncertain.

The cultural politics of trauma persist into the final chapter, where Chedgzoy looks at the birth of the Atlantic world through the profoundly disruptive encounters that form it. The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko seem to have little in common, but Chedgzoy weaves these together as texts that record the inevitable and brutal collision that marks the creation, and the subjects, of a “new” England. In spite of the status of Oroonoko as a work of fiction, Behn writes her story as an “unmediated transcription of her memories”—leaving a monument to those that history would have forgotten (189). As such, her text, like Rowlandson’s, participates in memory work that witnesses the crises and conflicts that forged the colonies in North America and the Caribbean.

Women's Writing in the British Atlantic World locates women's cultural production within the public transatlantic world that informs it. But Chedgzoy's larger accomplishment is to draw from an array of diverse materials, in various modes of transmission, and to pose a reading that structures them into a coherent whole. She shows how memory work became a female-identified practice in the early modern period. She then explores the volatile history that made the cultural memory work of women an urgent political task.