Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England offers a series of “case studies of the ways in which groups of non-aristocratic women responded to an assortment of assumptions about (and interdictions or prohibitions against) female participation in the pamphlet culture of revolutionary England” (1). Challenging the methodology of recent studies like Katherine Gillespie's Domesticity and Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2004) and Hillary Hinds's God's Englishwomen (Manchester, 1996), which tended to read “stylistic or verbal features in isolation” and thereby risk “transforming agency into a privilege of the rhetorically gifted or prophetically inspired” while denying it “to those innumerable other women who were engaged in different varieties of goal-oriented action but have been effaced (or effaced themselves) from the historical record,” Nevitt offers his readers an account that reveals the “material and rhetorical barriers that women encountered when participating in revolutionary pamphlet culture” (4). This he rightly views as an important corrective to studies of women's agency in seventeenth-century Britain that have tended to produce “only partial, blurred, or anachronistic pictures of female agency” (4). Nevitt's central point that agency may be measured in terms other than rhetorical skill is well taken, and he proves particularly adept at drawing out the ways in which women's various participations in print culture, even when they have appeared not to be participating at all, nonetheless constitute illocutionary acts. Indeed, silence, enforced and voluntary, proves to be Nevitt's enduring interest. He often proves quite adept at outlining the cultural contexts that made women's silences meaningful.

As potentially powerful as Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England is, it often falls short of realizing its potential. For all Nevitt's claims to redirect attention to the material exigencies that shaped women's lives during the revolutionary period, he relies too often on rhetorical analysis. A prime example of this tendency is Nevitt's first chapter. Nevitt applies with mixed results Bakhtinian theories of dialogism to Katherine Chidley's long-running debate with Thomas Edwards over the question of religious toleration, as he reveals the complex interlocutive modes that dominated public debate during the mid-1640s. Pointing out that Chidley's primary rhetorical idiom was animadversion, Nevitt contends that her writing draws in “an anonymous yet actively participating print readership who are free to weigh the profundity or levity of repeated words in multiple texts for themselves” (44). The point is valid and interesting, and Nevitt is right to point out that Chidley's engagement with Edwards presupposes an audience that is capable of and engaged in making their own evaluations of the debate. What remains unclear is how the Chidley/Edwards debate instantiates Bakhtinian dialogism more or less than any other debate during any other time.

If Nevitt's affinity for Bakhtin diverges from his otherwise shrewd observations, the chapter nonetheless stakes a provocative claim that in many ways propels this project beyond the narrow confines of traditional textual analysis. Nevitt contends that the most important feature of nonelite women's engagement with the pamphlet culture during the revolutionary period was its ability to appropriate and transform the cultural demand for female silence and self-effacement into the “means and form through which [women’s] texts participate in dialogue with the [historical] record” from which they were otherwise erased (26).

Chapter 2 is more successful and arguably the most interesting of Nevitt's “cases,” elaborating this fascinating argument and addressing how women “wrote” the regicide or manipulated the symbolic economy of the regicide trial to comment on the “political state of the nation” (84). Nevitt begins with Charles I's refusal to enter a plea against the charges he faced. The king's silence led to his conviction under the principle of pro confesso, but it also established a paradigm for women's commentary on the regicide. Examining the writings of Lady Fairfax, Elizabeth Poole, Mary Cary, and Mary Pope, Nevitt argues that those few women who commented on the regicide in 1649 did so by appropriating the king's silence as an illocutionary model that simultaneously deferred questions of their personal agency and enabled them to claim “public-sphere space” (84). For these women, commenting on the king's execution was less about tendering personal political opinion than about transforming themselves into spokeswomen for God's divine plan.

Chapter 3 draws on fairly conventional sociological observations, that women's lives in early modern England were collaborative, to illustrate how revolutionary England resisted those collaborations. Nevitt explores how women articulated their agency in midcentury print culture, not only by writing but also by gathering news. In this capacity, women helped to solidify the “news trade” as fundamentally “collative and collaborative.” Nevitt's primary focus is Elizabeth Alkin, also known as “Parliament Joan,” who he claims used the espionage networks in which she was involved to supply newsbooks of the period with information. The combination of the two ultimately proved untenable for Alkin as consumers preferred newsbooks with a clear editorial autograph and presence.

Chapter 4 reveals the way nakedness functioned as a means of signification in revolutionary England. Nevitt describes an incident in mid-July 1652 when a woman, stripped bare to her waist, entered a congregation in Whitehall listening to a sermon by Oliver Cromwell's chaplain Peter Sterry. Shortly after the congregation noticed her, she was summarily removed by soldiers. For Nevitt, the incident epitomizes the complex tensions in revolutionary England surrounding female agency. The incident offers a striking illustration of his claims: soldiers sought to silence a woman who was not speaking. Ironically, though, this is also Nevitt's weakest chapter, largely because he misses an opportunity to press his investigation of women's revolutionary agency in interesting ways.

On the one hand, Nevitt claims that contemporary commentators treated both the naked woman's body and Sterry's unwillingness to comment on or respond to her as exceptional illocutionary acts. On the other hand, Nevitt devotes much of the chapter toward demonstrating the long tradition in early modern culture that understood nakedness as a method of signifying identity. Indeed, as Nevitt and others have shown, copious pamphlet evidence suggests commentators in revolutionary England understood nakedness as a signifier, specifically of social dissidence. Nevitt's argument thus collapses in contradiction, as the unnamed woman's body cannot be both significant and inscrutable. The revelation of the woman's naked body, it seems to me, is less that she exposed hitherto implicit rules of interpretation but that she challenged those rules that sought to silence women by treating writing and speaking as the only means of signification.

The remainder of Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England is devoted to an unremarkable chapter on Quaker women's participation in the tithe debate and their emphasis on the material hardship families endured paying them and Nevitt's equally unremarkable conclusion. Nevitt nearly abandons his book's most provocative insight that silence, textual and verbal, cannot be interpreted as a failure to signify. He concludes with the admonition that “a number of literary scholars have written upon the rhetoric of self-effacement in sectarian women's prophecy and polemic, but clearly, attention to the rhetorical struggles alone does little to assess or engage with the work and struggle of those countless women whose every day lives were the most material expressions of self-effacement” (181).

For all its shortcomings, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England is an important contribution to ongoing discussion about the role of women during the revolutionary period. Not only does it offer readers some important case studies, but its insistence that silence cannot be dismissed as meaningless stands to alter what we deem evidence of cultural participation during the period.