Over the past decade, important and exciting scholarship has emerged that examines single women in the early modern period, a demographic little appreciated by historians and literary scholars of England. Amy Froide has been at the forefront of this scholarship, bringing to our attention that single women—those who were unmarried, never married, and widowed—represented a significant proportion of the female population in England, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, she has stressed that we must fully appreciate and use marital status as a category of analysis in order truly to understand the history of gender, women, the family and the creation of the stereotypes of the spinster and the old maid in this period. Very recent research has done much to complement such work by taking a microhistorical approach or by producing case studies based primarily on life writings that reveal a great deal about the inner thoughts and worldviews of never-married women. Katharine Hodgkin does exactly this with her edition of the autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert.

An intensely godly woman and a member of the Oxfordshire gentry during the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, Fitzherbert chose never to marry and produced an autobiographical narrative of her life, three copies of which still exist. Of the three manuscripts, one is Fitzherbert's autograph text, while the other two are scribal publications meant for circulation. Hodgkin provides us with a full transcription of the autograph text in its original spelling and syntax, as well as a modernized version of the text for nonspecialists little accustomed to the eccentricities of early modern writing. Moreover, she includes a number of transcribed letters that Fitzherbert wrote, perhaps the most interesting being a letter to the Church of England that defends virgins who have turned away from the prospect of marriage to devote themselves to the cultivation of their piety, something that Fitzherbert indeed did in her life. Not only does Hodgkin give us an intimate view of this life with her transcription of the autobiography, but she also enhances the view with an extensive introduction that analyzes Fitzherbert's writing and historical context. In doing so, Hodgkin echoes many of her own interpretations found in some of her other publications that discuss Fitzherbert. Similar to these publications, the edition is a compelling read, and offers insights on singlehood, life writing, spiritual affliction, madness, and women's negotiation with existing early modern gender norms.

While Fitzherbert's extended kin had definite and clear ties to Catholicism, the members of her immediate family were conformist members of the national church, and she held extreme antipapal views and thought of herself as belonging to the godly community. Her antipapal sentiments are clearly evident throughout her autobiography, perhaps no better illustrated than by the pivotal theme that her life narrative revolves around—intense doubts about salvation and temptations to convert to Catholicism in her late twenties that created a personal spiritual crisis around 1608. It was a crisis that led Fitzherbert to have spectacular hallucinations and delusions that included her notion that she was the Antichrist, that the people she associated with represented physical manifestations of the devil, and that her family was part of a grand conspiracy to have her burned alive. Reviewing the seventeenth-century debates over the difference between madness and the afflicted soul, Hodgkin asserts in the introduction that Fitzherbert sought in her autobiography to present her crisis as a spiritual struggle that confirmed her elect status as one of God's saints rather than a bout of mental illness. The fact that Fitzherbert chose spiritual autobiography as the literary means to achieve this goal was in many ways creative since the genre only became a widespread and popular form of life writing in England after the Civil War. As Hodgkin, however, makes clear, Fitzherbert believed both in the concept of the exemplary life and that her experience could potentially assist others in the cultivation of their personal piety, a belief that she shared with her contemporaries who produced life writings like spiritual diaries or biographies. Consequently, Fitzherbert strove to have the widest possible readership for her autobiography in the 1630s, enlisting the services of scriveners and the librarian John Rouse to produce two edited versions of her original narrative and have them deposited at the Bodleian Library and Sion College Library. Upon her death in the 1640s, she bequeathed the autograph text of her life narrative to the Bodleian, ensuring that three manuscript copies would survive and allow us access to an immensely fascinating life of a never-married woman from early modern England.

Hodgkin deserves praise for attempting to increase our access even further with her edition, but there are aspects of her analysis and approach that she could have pushed a bit more. In particular, while it is true that Fitzherbert had a strong desire to present an exemplary life for others to read, Hodgkin tends not to discuss fully the possible spiritual benefits that Fitzherbert may have found from reading her own autobiography and using it as an aid to remember the active presence that she surely must have believed God had in her existence. Furthermore, an even more extensive discussion of Fitzherbert's godly piety and her views of the Church of England would have only enhanced our understanding of her life and the production of the autobiography. Finally, although a transcription in modernized language certainly removes barriers for nonspecialists, such as undergraduates, one wonders whether the cost of a printed edition serves as just another barrier that perhaps an online edition would not produce. Yet these are mere quibbles with an otherwise useful and worthwhile book. Indeed, Hodgkin has continued her demonstration that she is the leading scholar of Dionys Fitzherbert.