This book is designed as an undergraduate textbook, but Amanda Capern also intends it to be “an extended exploration of the processes involved in the construction of femininity in early-modern England” (1), in which she argues that, by 1700, genuine change had occurred, primarily “in the wake of women's uptake and articulation of religious ideas and in the development of women's writing, especially for publication” (4). As a result, the book relies heavily on literary sources and gives considerable space to scholarly debate. For the most part, it succeeds both as a survey text and in proving its thesis, although it is better at the latter.
The book has many strengths, including clarity, comprehension, insightful analysis, and cogent argument. For example, not only is there a lucid and thorough introduction and conclusion, but each chapter also has an introduction and conclusion that clarify and reinforce the main points. The first three chapters—“Woman: Intellectual Foundations,” “Querelle des Femmes,” and “Femininity: Prescription, Rhetoric and Context”—ably deal with the mostly male intellectual construction of the ideal woman and, by comparison, her opposite. Capern then turns to the impact of social organization, political developments, and shifts in religion and education that helped to foster change in female gender construction. The first of these, “Law and Private Life,” considers the role of the church as well as secular law and covers not only women's rights, or lack thereof, in regard to marriage and property but also employment, crime, and witchcraft. This is an excellent chapter, containing some of Capern's most astute and nuanced analysis.
Yet this book has weaknesses that undermine its effectiveness, and it is at this point that one of them occurs. While the seventh and last chapter, “Education and Women's Writing,” is very good, chapters 5 and 6 do not work nearly as well as the others, mainly because of how Capern has chosen to organize them. Chapter 5, “Politics,” limits itself almost entirely to queens, both regnant and consort. There is some good work here, especially on Elizabeth, Anne of Denmark, and the relation of “public” and “private” in a post-Restoration society increasingly concerned with political debate. But women's political activities during the English Civil War and Interregnum are absent, as is any consideration of how women, both during the Civil War period and in the later seventeenth century, conceived of themselves in relation to the political community of England. Capern places all women's political action during the Civil War in the sixth chapter, “Religion and Civil War,” on the grounds that not only was religion fundamental in shaping women's (and men’s) political thought but the English Civil War was a “war of religion,” a phrase she invokes repeatedly, although there is far less unanimity among historians than she implies that this is how the Civil War should be primarily, much less exclusively, understood. While not in the least dissenting from the religious aspects of the English Civil War or the importance of religion in women's lives or the inseparability of religion and politics in early modern England, in the opinion of this reviewer, this organizational decision was a mistake. Certain women's political activities in the Civil War fit awkwardly, if at all, into Capern's categorization; surely compounding with authorities for sequestered estates was as much a matter of family loyalty, or sheer survival, as religious allegiance, and women petitioned Parliament for secular and personal causes as well as religious ones. Nor does the use of gendered language in political attack fit well under “religion,” and Capern eventually abandons the attempt to do so.
The determination to shoehorn all of the political into the religious also has the effect of overly politicizing religion. Perhaps predictably, women involved in radical religion are privileged. It also makes what would have been a long chapter in any case even longer since, despite the title, this chapter also covers women and the Reformation, Catholic women, Puritan women, godly motherhood, and prophecy as well as religion and women after 1660. The chapter is not only unwieldy but occasionally confusing; for example, Capern tends to conflate “Protestant” and “Puritan.” In a survey text, of course, sometimes the finer distinctions cannot be made, but, in a chapter that defines the English Civil War as a “war of religion,” this leaves begging the question, a war of what religions?
This points to another weakness, an occasional imbalance between detail and broad assertion. Capern often spends a great deal of time describing the contents of a text, the differing views in a historiographical debate, or a series of events—for example, there are several pages chronicling the marital fortunes of Henry VIII. Even though this can sometimes be a bit tedious, it is no doubt understandable and necessary in an undergraduate text. However, as with the above example of the religious sides in the English Civil War, Capern will sometimes make references to things without elucidation; if a reader needs to be told the well-known story of Henry's six wives, can that person really be expected to know, without being explicitly told, what were “Anglican ideas of women achieving a state of heavenly perfection” (253)?
Perhaps this weakness was due to a haste in publication that also resulted in the careless proofing throughout the book: word repetition, inconsistent spelling of names, occasionally erratic punctuation, and sentences that should never have been allowed to escape the word processor, such as “Mary of Modena was less tolerant of James's affairs than Anne Hyde had been of Charles’s” (189).
It is a shame that these weaknesses undermine what in other respects is an excellent book; many will no doubt find that its strengths are greater and that it serves them as a useful and much-needed textbook. However, given the book's flaws and its cost, I will reluctantly not assign it.
