In Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing, Kimberly Coles takes on the ambitious task of revising the generally accepted narrative of English literary history in the sixteenth century. Rather than exploring women writers as marginal figures, she argues instead that “some women writers were instead central to the development of a Protestant literary tradition” (1). In her introduction, five chapters centering on works of individual women writers, and brief afterword (considering the increasing politicization and masculinization of literary culture in the seventeenth century), she by and large accomplishes her goal persuasively.

Coles's introduction traces the processes by which the figure of the religious woman becomes both “an authorising figure and a literary tool” (2). She asserts that the movement of the Reformation is of earlier, and quite possibly greater, significance in England than the movement of the Renaissance. She correspondingly argues for the need to attend to religious writing in understanding the nature of English literary culture.

Chapter 1, “The Death of the Author (and the Appropriation of Her Text): The Case of Anne Askew's Examinations,” considers Askew's autobiographical account of her examinations (as best we can access it through extant texts) alongside the versions of her story presented by John Foxe and John Bale. Askew strategically denies access to her voice and her body, embracing “silence as a form of resistance” (18). Her belief is a “privately erected system” (25), and her account is characterized by instability. Both Bale and Foxe engage in editorial interventions that transform Askew's narrative for their respective purposes. Bale engages in “invasive annotations” (31) that “distort” her meaning (32) and shape Askew's text to the ends of Protestant polemic, while Foxe, who “needs spectacular bodies” (37), reintroduces a focus on the very material body that Askew herself elides.

In the second chapter, Coles turns her attention to Katherine Parr, a figure “central” to the reformulation of her period's theological debates (45). Coles analyzes the transitional nature of Parr's faith, which blends Catholic and Protestant elements, and discusses Parr herself as a figure of transition in her own writings. Her careful attention to the complex, mixed nature of early modern English religion is particularly welcome, given that one still far too often sees “Catholic” and “Protestant” treated as a hard binary. Much of the chapter examines the textual influences on Parr's writings, elaborating the roles of both Catholic and Protestant texts in the structure and formation of Parr's Prayers or meditations and Lamentacyon of a synner. Coles's exploration of Parr's use of and revisions to The Imitation of Christ is especially nuanced and interesting.

Chapter 3, “`[A] pen to peynt’: Mary Sidney Herbert and the Problems of a Protestant Poetics,” posits that Mary Sidney Herbert is “instrumental at the moment when religious debates concerning figurative language drove the definition of the literary category itself ” (75). The chapter sets the stage with a lucid survey of the histories of hermeneutics during the English Reformation and English Protestant thought concerning rhetoric. Coles's central claim is that in taking up the culturally provocative project of the Psalter, Mary Sidney Herbert not only embraces the literary ideals her brother Philip Sidney posits in his Defence of Poetry but in fact advances those ideas, making an argument of her own to “highlight the moral and religious application of lyric poetry” (101). In doing so, Herbert develops her own poetic style quite different from her brother’s, producing a project that “is essentially hers” (109) and one that emphasizes female production.

In her fourth chapter, Coles considers Anne Vaughan Lok's sonnet sequence, a composition she joined to her translation of John Calvin's sermons. In this work, Lok creates what might initially seem something quite unlikely: a lyric sequence that promotes Presbyterianism and imitates Calvinist rhetoric. Coles focuses especially on the complex voice of Lok's poetry, in which the individual and the collective are joined. She closes the chapter with a discussion of Anne's son Henry Lok's Sundry Christian passions, “the second English sonnet sequence to take religion as its subject” (144), a work in which Henry Lok adopts “both structure and strategy” from his mother (147).

Coles's final chapter moves beyond sixteenth-century writers to the seventeenth-century poet Aemilia Lanyer, considering the ways in which sixteenth-century “tradition of female-authored religious texts” shapes Lanyer's poetic self-representation (149). From this tradition, of course, the figure of Mary Sidney Herbert looms large in Lanyer's Salve deus rex judaeorum, and Coles devotes a significant part of the chapter to exploring Lanyer's engagement with the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter. As she does in her reading of Anne Vaughan Lok's poetry, in her account of Salve deus Coles again focuses closely on voice. She argues that Lanyer's “proto-feminist voice” is “not authentic” (150) but rather represents part of a deliberate market strategy to advance Lanyer's efforts to obtain patronage, efforts in which she was in close competition with male writers of devotional poetry, particularly Breton and Fraunce. Just as women have “special affiliation with Christ” (172) in Salve deus, so too Lanyer claims as a female poet the ability to “perceive (and depict) the Passion of Christ with greater clarity than her male counterparts” (173).

Coles's innovative arguments are forcefully articulated and developed with attention to a variety of forms of evidence ranging from close reading of passages to analysis of publication histories. This book represents an important addition to a by now well-established scholarly conversation concerning early modern women's writings. My only real objection to the book in fact concerns the ways in which other voices in this conversation sometimes take over. Coles is of course right to engage with other scholars who have made important contributions to her field and to situate her arguments in relation to theirs. However, she has a tendency to devote what is, to my mind, a bit too much time disagreeing with other scholars (see, for instance, her discussion of Hannibal Hamlin's work on Psalms in chap. 4 and John Rogers's work on Lanyer in chap. 5). Coles's disagreements and corrections are often quite apposite but might be better articulated in the notes. Doing so would allow the reader to focus more readily on Coles's main arguments, which certainly merit close attention.