Elizabeth Mazzola’s Women’s Wealth and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England concentrates on a kinship group of women: Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603); Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shewsbury, familiarly know as Bess of Hardwick and the richest woman in England besides the queen (1527–1608); Mary Stuart Queen of Scots (1542–87), the queen’s cousin, imprisoned by Elizabeth and guarded by the countess and her husband; and Arbella Stuart (1575–1615), granddaughter of the Shrewsburys, niece of Mary Stuart, and cousin of Queen Elizabeth and princess in line to the throne. All of these women were well educated but also were trained in women’s work, all left texts and embroidery, and all suffered vulnerability in their political power. Their relationships defined a large portion of Elizabeth politics, and so analyzing their texts and property is a good way to discover the political reach of early modern Englishwomen’s writing, from Elizabeth’s translation of Marguerite de Navarre to Aemilia Lanyer’s “To Cooke-ham.”

Using a dazzling breadth of interdisciplinarity, Mazzola examines these women’s texts in light of their wealth and gift exchanges and challenges the picture of the early modern woman writer as merely an exception, alienated and resistant. A record of what these women owned and circulated, from cloth to buildings, from bed hangings to texts, allows an exploration of ways women shared knowledge in kitchens, bedchambers, and sewing circles. Women’s letters are especially full of things, chronicling New Year’s gifts, recipes, and political news. Mazzola finds in this case study that the goods these women accumulated and presented to each other often signal dynastic claims and communicate political messages, and that women used their literacy to reinforce communal ties and the power they might accrue through them. A study of their texts—broadly defined—reveals “a larger world of maternal influence and female authority” (9).

Chapter 1 looks at women’s education not only as constraining but also as a means of discovering self or agency. The chapter is unified around Englishwomen’s responses to Marguerite de Navarre, from the Princess Elizabeth’s translation for Katherine Parr to the Hecatodistichon commemorating the French queen by Margaret, Jane, and Anne Seymour. Borrowing Navarre’s depiction of the writer as daughter, mother, sister, wife, these English writers establish a maternal history and depict themselves as grateful daughters. Chapter 2 looks at women’s wealth—linens, cloth, jewels, religious objects, medicines, prayers, advice—and the economic components of mothering. Drawing on anthropological theories of cloth gift exchange as binding and protective, and early modern Englishwomen’s participation in the genre of the mother’s advice book or mother’s legacy, Mazzola analyzes Elizabeth’s use of Mary’s coronation robes as her way of interpreting and disposing of Mary’s legacy. Elizabeth, Mazzola concludes, claim’s Mary’s inheritance and displaces her at once: Mary is divested. Chapter 3 reads Mary Stuart’s sonnets and needlework together, as products of the tension of political enclosure. Like needlework, which signals both women’s silence and creativity—because dutiful women sew rather than speak—Mazzola argues, other products of women’s artistry often obscure that artistry. Mary’s texts and embroideries similarly represent a queen both powerful and powerless, who uses the portrait of her captivity to summon support and who claims her right to rule by humbly forswearing it. Here Mazzola’s argument would have been strengthened by including Mary’s later meditative works, almost masochistic in their attempts to placate an unforgiving God. Chapter 4, perhaps the most intriguing, analyzes Arbella Stuart’s letters and the circulation of favors as gifts to be traded. Denied her material inheritance, Arbella fashions fantasies of kinship and queenship in her letters, trading her status as dutiful daughter to the queen or herself as valuable object (carrying a royal legacy) in marriage to William Seymour. Chapter 5 deftly sets the stage by an overview of Elizabeth’s New Year’s gift rolls, which record the kirtles, smocks, and pots of jam that women gave to the queen and the silverplate that Elizabeth returned to them. The chapter then surveys Bess of Hardwick’s building projects, embroideries, and letters to reveal the “rhetoric of debt, obligation, devotion, duty and abasement” (99) that generally characterized women’s letters during this period and the hoarding that Bess adhered to in order to build her own wealth and power.

Mazzola’s study concludes that early modern women’s writings are themselves material objects and frequently are about the circulation of material goods. It is a model of the use of interdisciplinary archival resources to interpret women’s texts and the place of those texts in early modern English culture.