Pamela S. Hammons’s Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse succeeds in achieving two objectives that are often imagined as mutually exclusive; it both synthesizes and attends to particulars. Offering evaluative overviews of men’s and women’s lyric in light of all things material, Hammons’s exceptional book reveals the extent to which gender and sexuality inflected early modern England’s poetic conceptualization of subjects and objects, of people and things. Hammons has read widely and well; this book moves easily across a variety of verse forms and depends for its assessments on an impressive array of primary texts and writers.
Revisiting familiar lyric works from the likes of Margaret Cavendish, John Donne, Robert Herrick, and Aemilia Lanyer, Hammons also looks to manuscript verse from writers further afield: George Aglionby, Richard Andrewes, Eleanora Finch, and Mercy Harvey. The sheer number of poets and works that Hammons engages allows her to draw careful distinctions both within and across categories. That attention to detail permits this book to qualify as much as it does pronounce. Noting difference across socioeconomic background, religious and political affiliation, and domestic status (single, married, widowed), Hammons is able to weigh diverse social and cultural pressures independently and to see which categories seem most foundational when they bump up against the very solid materiality of Renaissance “things.”
The book opens with a theoretical discussion of material culture in early modern England that outlines the problem of gift exchange and usefully details the kinds of objects that get described within the lyric, from poesy rings to castles. Hammons divides her book into two parts—both focusing on different material artifacts, the first movable and the second real—replaying in miniature the divide between those things in early modern England that women might own and those they could not.
In part 1, Hammons explores the particular resonance that “movables” (love tokens, here ranging from poesy rings to locks of hair) carry in verse. Chapter 2 opens by identifying the commonplace strategies that male poets used to objectify and devalue both the women they wrote about and the material markers that often replaced them, the rings, bracelets, gloves, and fans that came to stand in for sexual exchange. Hammons moves from these more conventional figurings to consider an antitype. Herrick’s gift poems in “Hesperides” and “Noble Numbers” provide us with a surprising alternative. In at least two poems, “The Carkanet” and “The Bracelet of Pearle: to Silvia,” Herrick dramatically inverts gender stereotypes to portray his own objectified passivity before a now active female beloved. Hammons not only notes this discrepancy but uses it to probe the very idea of exchange in the period: Herrick’s inversion “exposes [the] limits … [of the masculine] ability to imagine consistently a heteronormative male subject independent of and master over objects” (27).
Chapter 3 turns to female heteroerotic gift poetry, noting both the ways that female poets reveal their own knowledge of poetic decorum (their familiarity with and dependence on masculinist convention) and also the extent to which they are able to desaturate those innate gender hierarchies by severing the bond between object and body, between love token and lover. Acutely aware of the social risks that came with a poetic detailing of exchanged love tokens (their allusions to sexual coercion and bawdy language), female poets from Jane Cavendish to Anne Vavasour developed innovative and often poetically precocious strategies to navigate the uncertain domain of gift exchange.
In chapter 4, Hammons continues her focus on female poets but looks now to their homoerotic and homosocial verse. In these more intimate and safe settings, female poets like Francellina Stapleton and Elizabeth Cromwell more readily display agency-driven subjectivity, creating at times “complex fantasies of self possession, escape, freedom, power, and dominance over male suitors and husbands” (28). Borrowing from key theorists on friendship (notably Valerie Traub and Laurie Shannon), Hammons usefully reminds us of the very real connection that chaste friendships had to classically based doctrines of stoic fortitude.
In part 2 Hammons directs our attention toward a material landscape that carried substantially more weight in Renaissance England than did love tokens—the houses and lands that comprised real property. It is no surprise that this section focuses on one of England’s most materially explicit genres—the country house poem. Chapter 6 outlines the legal parameters of property law, exploring its evocation first through male writers such as Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Flecknoe and then through the works of women like Isabella Whitney, Margaret Howard, and of course Lanyer. Noting the near ubiquitous claim that male poets make in relation to property, that they are masters and possessors (even where the poet himself is simply a visitor to his patron’s estate), Hammons juxtaposes this to the rather more narrow and often estranged relationship we see in the women: “counter-intuitively,” Hammons tells us, “the more socially and economically powerful a female poet, the greater the distance she creates between her speaker and the property she depicts” (136).
Working past such limitations, chapters 7 and 8 offer interesting parallel readings of two of the most prolific and capable female participants in the genre—Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson. What Hammons discovers here is both sobering and surprising. Despite the fact that both poets might seem likely to counter tradition, dependence, and constraint, neither is able to comfortably claim an estate in her own right. Both imagine possession at several removes, throwing the authority of ownership firmly onto husbands, either living or deceased. Strikingly though, Hutchinson, often ignored by feminist scholars because of her too-willing submission to traditional patriarchical values, is able, by virtue of her widowhood, to offer the most explicit claim to ownership that Hammons has been able to find.
My complaints about this book are stylistic rather than substantive. Because Hammons continually positions her analysis in relation to other critical voices (we always know where she is going and how her points differ), we are sometimes apt to lose her voice in the cacophony. Still, this is a lovely book that repeatedly reminds us of the many and insoluble ties that early modern poetry had to England’s rich material culture.
