Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern

Women’s Collaboration (Early Modern

Literature in History) 1st ed. 2017
Edition Patricia Pender
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GENDER, AUTHORSHIP,
AND EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S
COLLABORATION
Edited by
Patricia Pender

EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY

General Editors: Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield
Early Modern Literature in History

Series Editors
Cedric C. Brown
Department of English
University of Reading
Reading, UK

Andrew Hadfield
School of English
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
Within the period 1520–1740, this large, long-running series, with inter-
national representation discusses many kinds of writing, both within and
outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theo-
retical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest
in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive
cultures.

Editorial Board Members

Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford, UK
John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge, UK
Richard C. McCoy, Columbia University, USA
Jean Howard, Columbia University, USA
Adam Smyth, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield, UK
Michelle O’Callaghan, University of Reading, UK
Steven Zwicker, Washington University, USA
Katie Larson, University of Toronto, Canada

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14199
 Patricia Pender
Editor

Gender, Authorship,
and Early
Modern Women’s
Collaboration
Editor
Patricia Pender
University of Newcastle
Callaghan, NSW, Australia

Early Modern Literature in History

ISBN 978-3-319-58776-9 ISBN 978-3-319-58777-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58777-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944552

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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For Andrea Abernathy Lunsford
teacher, scholar, mentor, friend
 Acknowledgements

In many ways this book has been a pleasure to produce. The chance to
bring these scholars and these essays together has been an honour, and
I am grateful to all the contributors for the ways in which they engaged
with the volume and its concerns. In planning the collection, I was
motivated by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s provocative understand-
ing that “despite vigorous debates over theories and methods surround-
ing issues of subjectivity and authorship, ideologies of the individual and
the author have remained largely unchallenged in scholarly practice.”
The collection was conceived in response to their still-potent conten-
tion that academics who wish to “resist late capitalist tendencies of com-
modification will need not only to critique conventional understandings
of authorship but to enact alternatives as well.”1 The production of the
book was thus designed as an experiment in international collabora-
tion—in putting the theories of collaboration that are explored in the
volume into scholarly practice. I wanted to provide opportunities for the
scholars involved to not only discuss their essays online (which actually
didn’t happen—my understanding of Dropbox remains negligible) but
also be involved in face-to-face collaboration. Eight of the ten contribu-
tors were able to meet to discuss the collection and their work-in-pro-
gress at the 2016 Renaissance Society of America conference in Boston
and, assisted by some truly stupendous catering, the results were unusu-
ally stimulating and rewarding. I thank the Australian Research Council
for the Discovery Project grant which helped fund this event, along with

vii
viii Acknowledgements

the School of Humanities and Social Science and Faculty or Arts and
Education at the University of Newcastle.
I need to thank the members of the Early Modern Women’s Research
Network (EMWRN), Rosalind Smith, Paul Salzman, Kate Lilley, Sarah
C.E. Ross, Susan Wiseman, and Michelle O’Callaghan, who make pur-
suing this research so rewarding and enjoyable. Much of what I have
learnt about collaboration has come from our work and non-work time
together. Colleagues at the University of Newcastle, some of whom could
not be less interested in early modern concerns, also played their part in
keeping this ship afloat: for their gifts of sustenance and support I thank
Brooke Collins-Gearing, Dianne Osland, Keri Glastonbury, Caroline
Webb, Jane Shadbolt, and Rebecca Bierne. Much needed research assis-
tance and technological savvy was provided by EMWRN interns Amy
Dewar, Elizabeth McGrath, and Kelly Peihopa. Alexandra Day’s research
assistance has been simply invaluable, a fact recognized most obviously
but not only in our co-written introduction. My parents, Anne and
Gordon, my partner James warrant special mention for distracting me
with the real world and making it a good place to come back to.
My interest in collaboration was initially inspired by Andrea
Lunsford’s radical pedagogy and she remains my exemplar of generous,
ethical, and transformative scholarship. This book is dedicated to her.

Note
1. Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford. 2001. Collaboration and concepts of
authorship. PMLA 116 (2): 358–359.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern

Women’s Collaboration 1
Patricia Pender and Alexandra Day

Part I Literary and Intertextual Co-labor

2 Katherine Parr, Henry VIII, and Royal

Literary Collaboration 23
Micheline White

3 Collaboration in the Parliamentary Speeches of Queen

Elizabeth I 47
Leah S. Marcus

4 Conflicted Collaboration in The Mothers Legacy 71

Rebecca Stark-Gendrano

5 Collaboration, Authorship, and Gender in the Paratexts

Accompanying Translations by Susan Du Verger
and Judith Man 95
Brenda M. Hosington

ix
x Contents

Part II Collective Contexts and Material Co-production

6 Literary Gifts: Performance and Collaboration in the

Arundel/Lumley Family Manuscripts 125
Alexandra Day

7 The Clerics and the Learned Lady: Intertextuality in the

Religious Writings of Lady Jane Grey 149
Louise Horton

8 Paratextual Marginalia, Early Modern Women,

and Collaboration 175
Rosalind Smith

9 “All Fell Not in Pharsalias Field”: Lucy Harington

Russell and the Historical Epic 201
Julie Crawford

10 “A Veray Patronesse”: Margaret Beaufort and the Early

English Printers 219
Patricia Pender

11 Afterword: “Her Book” and Early Modern Modes

of Collaboration 245
Margaret J.M. Ezell

Bibliography 259

Index 283
 Notes on Contributors

Julie Crawford is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at

Columbia University. She has published widely on authors ranging from
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher to Anne Clifford and Margaret
Hoby, and on topics ranging from the history of reading to the his-
tory of sexuality. She is the author of a book about cheap print and the
English reformation entitled Marvelous Protestantism, and Mediatrix:
Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early Modern England. She
is currently completing a book called “Margaret Cavendish’s Political
Career.”
Alexandra Day is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Newcastle,
Australia. Her research project uses literary and materialist methods to
investigate early modern women’s writing and collaborative production.
She is also interested in both contemporary and historical performances
of early modern dramatic texts.
Margaret J. M. Ezell is Distinguished Professor of English and the
John and Sara Lindsey Chair of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University.
She is the author of Writing Women’s Literary History, Social Authorship
and the Advent of Print, and The Oxford English Literary History Volume
V: 1645–1714 The Later Seventeenth Century.
Louise Horton is a Ph.D. student at Birkbeck, University of London.
She is researching the material history of women’s writing and is cur-
rently working on collaborative practices within Katherine Willoughby’s

xi
xii Notes on Contributors

kinship and patronage network. She has previously published an essay on

gender and authorship in The Monument of Matrones.
Brenda M. Hosington, formerly Professor of Translation Studies
(Université de Montréal, Canada) and at present Research Associate
in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (University of Warwick,
UK), has published widely on medieval and Renaissance translation,
and particularly on women translators. She also specializes in Neo-Latin
translation and women’s writings and is the co-editor of Jane Weston.
Collected Works. Creator and principal editor of the Renaissance Cultural
Crossroads Online Catalogue of Translations in Britain 1473–1640, she
is currently co-editor of the forthcoming Cultural Crosscurrents in
Stuart and Commonwealth Britain. An Online Analytical Catalogue of
Translations, 1641–1660, and co-director of a funded research project on
translation and print.
Leah S. Marcus is Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt
University in the USA. She has had wide interests over a long career,
beginning with books titled Childhood and Cultural Despair, The Politics
of Mirth, Puzzling Shakespeare, and Unediting the Renaissance. She has
edited Shakespeare, John Webster, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, co-edited
with Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, and a volume of Autograph
Compositions and Foreign Language Originals, co-edited with Janel
Mueller. Her most recent book is How Shakespeare Became Colonial:
Editorial Tradition and the British Empire.
Patricia Pender is a Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at the
University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Early Modern
Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty and co-editor (with
Rosalind Smith) of Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing.
She is currently working on an Australian Research Council Discovery
Project on Early Modern Women and the Institutions of Authorship
(2014–2017).
Rosalind Smith is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Newcastle, Australia. She works on the politics of form and transmission
in the early modern period, and has published numerous book chap-
ters, articles, and books on early modern women’s writing, including
Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence
and, with Patricia Pender, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s
Writing. Her current research is as lead investigator on a collaborative,
 Notes on Contributors xiii

Australian Research Council-funded project on early modern women and

complaint.
Rebecca Stark-Gendrano, Ph.D is the Assistant Director of the
Campion Institute and Office of Prestigious Fellowships at Fordham
University in New York, where she also lectures in the English
Department. She has published on book history, editorial theory, and
material culture. Her current project is a book examining the literary
responses of early modern editors, adaptors, and sequel-writers to works
perceived as incomplete.
Micheline White is Associate Professor in the College of the
Humanities and Department of English at Carleton University in
Canada. She is the editor of English Women, Religion and Textual
Production, 1500–1625 and Secondary Work on Early Modern Women
Writers: Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Lock. She has
published on women and religion in venues such as the Times Literary
Supplement, Renaissance Studies, ELR, Modern Philology, and Sixteenth-
Century Journal. Her work on Katherine Parr has been featured in inter-
views with the CBC’s Tapestry, Radio Canada’s les voies de retour, and the
Anglican Communion News Service.
 List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Poem in the hand of Elizabeth I, in a presentation copy

of Myles Coverdale, trans., The newe testamente (Antwerp:
G. Montanus, 1538?). © The British Library Board.
C.45.a.13. flyleaf 9 verso 177
Fig. 8.2 Poem in the hand of Anne Poyntz, in a presentation copy
of Myles Coverdale, trans., The newe testamente (Antwerp:
G. Montanus, 1538?). © The British Library Board.
C.45.a.13. flyleaf 10 recto 178
Fig. 8.3 Poem in the hand of Elizabeth I, with a hand-drawn
armillary sphere on the facing page, in a French psalter
(Psaultier de David) held in the Royal Library at Windsor
Castle. Royal Collection Trust/All Rights Reserved.
RCIN 1051956 179
Fig. 8.4 Ink drawing of Windsor Castle (coloured), in a presentation
copy of Myles Coverdale, trans., The newe testamente
(Antwerp: G. Montanus, 1538?). © The British
Library Board. C.45.a.13. flyleaf 3 recto 185
Fig. 8.5 Title page, Dante Alaghieri, LO’NFERNO E’L
PVRGATORIO E’L Paradiso. Venice: Speranza, 1545.
Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, Indiana 193
Fig. 9.1 Michael Drayton’s dedicatory epistle to Lucy Harington,
in Matilda The faire and chaste daughter of the Lord Robert
Fitzwater. The true glorie of the noble house of Sussex (London:
Printed by Iames Roberts, for N[icholas] L[ing] and
Iohn Busby, 1594), A3. Reproduced by permission of the
Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery 204

xv
xvi List of Figures

Fig. 9.2 Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. Arthur Gorges (London, 1614),

p. 335. Reproduced by permission of the Henry E.
Huntington Library and Art Gallery 208
Fig. 10.1 Prologue to A full deuout and gostely treatyse of the imytacion
and folowynge the blessed lyfe of oure moste mercyfull sauyoure
criste, translated by William Atkinson (Books 1–3) and
Margaret Beaufort (Book 4). London: Rycharde Pynson,
1503. © The British Library Board. General Reference
Collection C.21.c.5 228
Fig. 10.2 Prologue to the Fourth Book, A full deuout and gostely
treatyse of the imytacion and folowynge the blessed lyfe of
oure moste mercyfull sauyoure criste, translated by Margaret
Beaufort. London: Rycharde Pynson, 1503. © The British
Library Board. General Reference Collection C.21.c.5 229
Fig. 10.3 Title page to a funeral sermon for King Henry VII:
This sermon folowynge was compyled [and] sayd in the
cathedrall chyrche of saynt Poule within ye cyte of London by the
ryght reuerende fader in god Iohn bysshop of Rochester, the body
beyinge present of the moost famouse prynce kynge Henry the.
Vij […], by John Fisher. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509.
© The British Library Board. General Reference
Collection G. 1201 233
Fig. 10.4 Title page to a sermon for Margaret Beaufort: Here after
foloweth a mornynge remembrau[n]ce had at the moneth
mynde of the noble prynces Margarete countesse of
Rychemonde [et] Darbye, by John Fisher. London:
Wynkyn de Worde, 1509. © The British Library Board.
General Reference Collection G. 1202 234
Fig. 11.1 Self-portrait of Esther Inglis, Octonaries upon the vanitie
and inconstancie of the world [manuscript], 1600/01 January
1 /writin by Esther Inglis. By permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library. MS V.a.91, leaf 1 verso 250
Fig. 11.2 Title page, “Her Book 1684,” Cookbook of Elizabeth Fowler
[manuscript]. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare
Library. MS V.a. 468, leaf 1 recto 252
Fig. 11.3 Elizabeth Cellier, Malice Defeated (1680). RB 72389,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 253
 List of Tables

Table 7.1 Grey first lines comparison with Becon 157

Table 7.2 Grey and Becon similarities in “An Exhortation.” 158
Table 7.3 Grey and Becon similarities in “An Epistle.” 158

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Gender, Authorship,

and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration

Patricia Pender and Alexandra Day

Interested as it has been in recovering the work of neglected writers, early

modern women’s studies has developed an understandably equivocal rela-
tionship to conventional notions of authorship. In ways that we are by
now exhaustively familiar with, the dominance of the “Dead White Male”
in Renaissance literary scholarship has been seen—not without reason—as
having relegated his female contemporaries to comparative oblivion. In
response, however, as Danielle Clarke astutely notes, by placing women
writers at the center of focus, scholars of early modern women have often
sought to establish them as authors in canonical terms, even according to
the same criteria that caused their neglect in the first place.1 Introducing
“collaboration” into this context is something of a critical double-edged
sword. From one perspective, viewing early modern women’s writing as
collaborative threatens to threaten, if you will, the hard-won legitimacy

P. Pender (*) · A. Day

University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia
e-mail: patricia.j.pender@newcastle.edu.au
A. Day
e-mail: alexandra.day@uon.edu.au

© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Pender (ed.), Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern
Women’s Collaboration, Early Modern Literature in History,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58777-6_1
2 P. Pender and A. Day

of the women writers we have already recovered, at least in terms of

the conventional categories of originality, autonomy, and authority.
Acknowledging the role that John Bale played in bringing Anne Askew’s
Examinations to print, for instance, could undermine Askew’s claim to
authorship—if this is conceived of in autonomous terms.2 But recon-
sidering Mary Sidney Herbert’s role in editing, revising, and publishing
her brother Philip Sidney’s works can conversely position her in more
authorial roles than previous centuries of scholarship have been willing
to imagine.3 Instead of trying to simply shift, disaggregate, or adjudicate
between competing claims for male or female priority in the production
of early modern texts, this volume aims to investigate, in discrete though
sometimes surprisingly simpatico case studies, the role that gender has
played—and might continue to play—in understanding early modern col-
laboration and its consequences for women’s literary history.
In her thoroughgoing survey of “Early Modern Collaboration and
Theories of Authorship” for PMLA in 2001, Heather Hirschfeld claims
that “the appeal of the topic of collaborative work—and perhaps the inevi-
table danger of this appeal—is witnessed in the number and diversity of
studies deploying the term collaboration to discuss not a precise mode or
form of composition and publication but the general nature of literary pro-
duction and consumption.” She suggests that “[c]ollaboration and collabo-
rative authorship are terms now used to designate a range of interactions,
from the efforts of two writers working closely together to the activities of
printers, patrons, and readers in shaping the meaning and significance of
a text.”4 Nevertheless, Hirschfeld argues that “[s]uch a wide definition of
collaboration—as any kind of cooperative endeavor behind a literary per-
formance—opens the field or function of the author to a variety of other
roles: commendatory poet […], patron, translator.”5 Particularly pertinent
for this collection is her claim that “[t]he roles of patron and translator are
particularly important for assessing the early modern woman writer.”6
Hirschfeld’s double move here is instructive in its clarity.
Collaboration as a concept, she suggests, may have been over-enthusias-
tically applied in our analyses of canonical male writers (“If we are going
to use collaboration to refer to the host of activities that support literary
production,” she writes, “we will need a new term to designate shared
writing”),7 but the same concept should nevertheless be energetically
pursued in response to early modern women’s writing: “It is incumbent
 1 INTRODUCTION … 3

on scholars who wish to reclaim lost or forgotten female voices,” she

argues, “to move beyond the dominant Romantic definition of the indi-
vidual author and to recognize, in the diversified processes of textual
production, alternative formulations or experiences of authorship.8 This
recalibration of scholarly standards is not new for the study of early mod-
ern women’s writing or indeed for difference-driven studies of literature
more broadly: in its ramifications it is not unlike Gayatri Spivak’s call for
strategic essentialism.9 On one level, Hirschfeld points to an asymmetry
between what we might think of as broad and narrow definitions of col-
laboration and advocates for a finer grain of specificity in deploying this
term. On another, she understands the efficacy of opening up “author-
ship” as widely as possible to writers and writing practices that have been
marginalized by canonical literary history.
Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration has
been produced at a juncture in early modern women’s studies marked
by increasing calls to investigate collaboration and authorship in produc-
tive tension, rather than (or in addition to) simple opposition. It is a call
that responds to the demands of the archives as much as from a theo-
retical orientation. For example, revising print-driven accounts of literary
history, Margaret Ezell argues strongly for the need to pay attention to
the social and material conditions of manuscript production in the early
modern period—a project she expressly theorizes as “a history of author-
ship.”10 And Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith, in their recent edited
collection, advocate “opening up” both “textuality” and “authorship” to
include processes of collective production.11 In response, this collection
examines some, but by no means all, of the many collaborative practices
that women undertook from the Late Middle Ages to the Restoration. In
doing so it aims to explore the benefits—and potential pitfalls—of devel-
oping our understanding of literary agency beyond capital “A” author-
ship, by considering the variety of roles women played in literary and
material collaboration. Collectively, therefore, the chapters in this volume
attempt to address two ongoing methodological concerns. How does
conceiving early modern texts as collaborations between authors, readers,
annotators, editors, printers, and other textual agents uphold or disrupt
currently dominant understandings of authorship? And how does recon-
ceiving women’s writing as collaborative illuminate some of the unre-
solved discontinuities and competing agenda in feminist literary history?
4 P. Pender and A. Day

Canonical Early Modern Literary Collaboration

Under Pressure: A Tale of Two Jeffries
“Collaboration” owes its current prevalence in literary studies generally
to its development in feminist and queer theory, and in early modern lit-
erary studies in particular to its useful application to the London stage
as well as to book history.12 The publication of Jeffrey Masten’s Textual
Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance
Drama in 1997 marks a significant moment in the life of the concept,
both for Masten’s innovative approach and the book’s subsequent
acclaim and notoriety. Masten draws on a number of understandings of
collaboration to make a series of complex claims about literary collabora-
tion in early modern English drama, and indeed literature more broadly.
Following Michel Foucault, he argues that authorship is an institution
with a history. Arguing for a slightly earlier development than does
Foucault, Masten nominates the second half of the seventeenth century
as the time of its emergence because, he claims, it is at this time that the
word “anonymous” takes on its current meaning in relation to literary
texts: “The author’s emergence is marked by the notice of its absence.”13
He then asks how literary creation was understood and practiced prior to
the emergence of the (single) author function, proposing in answer a re-
theorization of collaboration that does not focus on the contributions of
discreet authors, but rather on collaboration as a joint practice—as crea-
tive fusion.14 Like Wayne Koestenbaum before him, Masten aligns col-
laboration with male homoerotics, but focuses in contrast on a particular
historical moment, one that “insistently figured writing as mutual imita-
tion, collaboration, and homoerotic exchange.”15 Unlike Koestenbaum,
Masten also engages with collaboration in a broad, material sense,
pointing to the frequency with which dramatic texts were revised, sup-
plemented with new material (prologues, epilogues, songs, and charac-
ters), changed in the course of theatrical production, and censored, all
of which render the subsequent construction of “authorial univocality”
problematic.16 Thus while Masten acknowledges that qualitatively differ-
ent collaborative partnerships would certainly have existed in the early
modern theatre, his more pressing point is that “collaborative texts pro-
duced before the emergence of authorship are of a kind different […]
from collaborations produced within the regime of the author.”17 In this
respect, Masten suggests that attempts at early modern attribution are
 1 INTRODUCTION … 5

not only misguided but anachronistic—a view that puts him defiantly at
odds with scholars of attribution.
In his provocative 2005 article “What is a Co-Author?” Jeffrey Knapp
makes a spirited case against what he sees as the “current scholarly ortho-
doxy” that (to quote, as he does, Stephen Orgel), “most literature in the
period […] must be seen as basically collaborative in nature.”18 Taking
particular aim at the rapidly adopted scholarship on collaboration pro-
duced in the 1990s by scholars such as Orgel, Masten, and Richard
Helgerson, Knapp asserts that “an idealizing and therefore totaliz-
ing tendency in recent scholarship on authorship” has “overestimated”
the collaborative nature of literary production in the period.19 He sug-
gests that while, “[a]t the start, this scholarly insistence on the histori-
cal contingency of the author revolutionized the study of Renaissance
drama in several ways,” the narrative of authors supplanting collabora-
tors “has fostered a prejudicial image of the dramatic author as a funda-
mentally unethical creature, a high-handed misappropriator of communal
funds.”20 Knapp is Masten’s most vocal critic, contesting not only his
thesis in particular, but also more generally what he sees as the “new
orthodoxy” that views collaboration as a precursor to the seventeenth-
century emergence of authorship proper.21 Knapp’s concerns are mani-
fold, and range from accusations that Masten misrepresents (or at least
relies on incomplete) evidence, to critiques of an unblinking acceptance
of Foucault’s claims that authorship was something that developed only
in the seventeenth century. This leads to a misconception, according to
Knapp, of authorship as a theoretical rather than empirical concern.22
In some respects, Knapp’s critique does not sufficiently consider the
distinction, made both by Foucault and Masten, between the function
of literary authorship and authorship in general—an oversight that fuels
their conflicting views over the evidence. While Knapp cites numerous
examples from the sixteenth century of authors’ names on title pages,
this evidence does not directly speak to the argument he is trying to
counter, for Masten deploys the notion of anonymity to clarify a discur-
sive shift in the significance of the author. Nevertheless Knapp makes an
important point: to generalize that all Renaissance plays were collabora-
tions “is to erase the relative distinction of single from multiple authors
and with it the historically specific conception of collective playwriting
that recent scholars are aiming to recover.”23 In this respect Knapp’s cri-
tique is incisive: by framing collaboration as the norm in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth century, we do limit our ability to understand the
6 P. Pender and A. Day

specificity of particular writing partnerships. As noted above, Masten

himself acknowledges in passing that there would have been qualitatively
different collaborative relationships within this pre-authorship period,
and herein may lie the solution to this theoretical impasse. This work of
refinement has not yet been undertaken by any of the principal contest-
ants in this debate, although we argue below that recent work in feminist
scholarship is beginning to do just this. Knapp’s point therefore remains
a strong one. It forms the kernel of the heated contestation around attri-
bution versus collaboration in current literary scholarship.
It is an enduring debate. In Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical
Study of Five Collaborative Plays (2002) Brian Vickers includes a tenden-
tiously titled appendix, “Abolishing the Author? Theory versus History,”
in which he writes: “[t]he assumption governing my research, and that
of all the scholars who have worked in attribution studies, is that writers
have distinct and individual styles, both at the conscious level […] and
at the unconscious.”24 Strongly critical of the Foucauldian conception of
the “author function” and dubious about the postmodern turn in gen-
eral, attribution studies seeks to prioritize “empirical results” over “theo-
retical positions” and to uncover the hand of the individual, historical
author. With twentieth- and twenty-first century technological advances,
the opportunities for collecting such “evidence” apparently increases.
“Individuality in authorship” argues digital humanities scholar Hugh
Craig, “re-emerges through computational stylistics in a new form: not
a mysterious, ultimately theological interiority but a pressure to create
a distinctive identity in language, part cultural and part biological.”25
According to Craig, computational stylistics “can endorse the dethroning
of the older hegemonic author-subject and at the same time challenge
the newer absolutism of those who deny authorial style ex cathedra any
role in the functioning of the text.”26 In the opposing camp, Gordon
McMullan, a vocal advocate for collaborative conceptions of authorship,
lays down the consequences of postmodern editorial theory in the fol-
lowing terms: “it is essential to acknowledge that collaboration is the par-
adigmatic mode of textual production. It is the condition towards which
all texts tend, even if (or as) they aspire to unity and autonomy.”27 In
this view all authorship should be viewed as collaborative: “it has begun
to be clear that collaboration—in its insistent ‘impurity’ and multiplic-
ity—is a much more appropriate model for textual production in general
than is ostensibly ‘solo’ writing.”28 Our current period of history, writes
McMullan, heralds “the renaissance of the collaborative text.”29
 1 INTRODUCTION … 7

As these debates indicate, the concept of collaboration remains sub-

ject to strong disagreements, and perhaps nowhere more intensely than
in Shakespeare studies, where the struggle has most recently taken shape
around the representation of Shakespeare as “a literary poet-playwright”
as opposed to “a collaborative man of the theater.”30 A recent edition
of Shakespeare Studies edited by Patrick Cheney and dedicated to taking
stock of the authorship question under the suggestive title “The Return
of the Author,” places advocates from either side of this debate in con-
versation and so brings many of the issues discussed above to the fore.
As Cheney himself notes, however, the contributors are positioned either
“on one side of the divide or the other, whether individuation or col-
laboration, literary authorship or socially constructed theatricality. And no
one seems to be budging.”31 Clearly, this is not a “renaissance of the col-
laborative text” in a theoretically monolithic sense. No unified position
exists within the field, and the landscape is contoured by disagreement.32
Nevertheless collaboration seems an increasingly indispensable and ines-
capable topic in early modern studies and it is of particular significance
historically, theoretically, and politically for scholars of early modern
women writers.

Taxonomies of Early Modern Women’s Collaboration

When pioneering feminist scholars of the late 1970s and 1980s began to
“recover” women’s writing from the archives, they initiated what is still a
relatively new process of reassessing, and in some cases assessing for the
first time, works by early modern women writers.33 Given this context, the-
oretical issues of authorship have significant political, material, and practi-
cal consequences, since the status of the author is in some sense at stake.
This is not unfamiliar territory for feminist scholarship, where attempts
to meld High Theory with the political recovery of women writers can
seem to court contradiction. Danielle Clarke articulates the problem suc-
cinctly: “the assumption of female subjectivity as given and distinct on
the one hand, and the notion that the discourse of gender is just that on
the other, leaves us with two apparently irreconcilable positions. Either
women can be situated as historical subjects, or we interrogate gender in
such a way as to negate not only the specificity of the female subject, but
it’s very possibility.”34 Early modern women’s studies’ concerted interest
in gender—a category which demands the scholar take into account cul-
tural codes and norms outside the traditional liberal subject’s atomistic
8 P. Pender and A. Day

individuality—means that it is predisposed to finding ways to describe the

impact and operation of social forces. This can mean a focus on illuminat-
ing the limiting and oppressive operations of patriarchy in early modern
society, as in more traditional feminist critique; attending to the creative
ways women operated within their social codes, as in revisionist accounts;
or, as in several recent studies, a blend of both approaches. Significantly,
the notion of collaboration is a useful tool in each of these cases.
In addition, and sometimes opposition, to the terminology adum-
brated in debates about canonical collaboration, early modern women’s
studies is developing its own taxonomy of collaborative categories. Thus,
in order to overcome the theoretical limits of the single author para-
digm, Susan Frye and Karen Robertson’s Maids and Mistresses, Cousins
and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England (1999) extends
beyond the purely literary, and uses the term “alliance” to designate
“deliberate associations.”35 The term “family discourse” is coined by
Marion Wynne-Davies to denote the ways women writers worked within
and furthered their families’ interests36; “the intellectual family” is taken
up by Sarah Gwyneth Ross as a means of investigating male–female liter-
ary collaborations37; and “amateur, social literary culture” is the focus of
Margaret Ezell’s historical materialist approach in Social Authorship and
the Advent of Print (1999)—a description designed to refute both the
notion of authorship as a “universal, transcendent phenomenon” and
materialist assumptions that the relationships between writers and read-
ers are “governed only by commercial exchange or professional advance-
ment.”38 Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith’s Material Cultures of Early
Modern Women’s Writing (2014) adopts Matt Cohen’s conception of
the “publication event” to foreground the “networks of exchange” that
mark early modern women’s texts as emphatically “choral.”39 Further
heuristics for examining early modern women’s collaboration are pro-
vided in individual case studies, for example: Susan Felch’s study of
Anne Lock’s political “circle”40; Micheline White’s study of two early
modern “power couples”41; Patricia Demers’ investigation of Mary and
Phillip Sidney’s “deferred collaboration” on the Psalms42; Mary Ellen
Lamb on Margaret Roper and Thomas More’s humanist collaboration43;
Pender on Anne Askew and John Bale’s “contested collaboration”44; and
Deborah Shuger on the “multilevel, and largely female, collaborative
authorship” of the Collett sisters at Little Gidding.45
In addition, the last five years have witnessed the publication of
two substantial studies of early modern women’s writing that impact
 1 INTRODUCTION … 9

directly on issues of authorship and collaboration. Helen Smith’s metic-

ulously researched book history “Grossly Material Things”: Women and
Book Production in Early Modern England (2012) demonstrates that
women participated at every stage of book production in early modern
England. Her study “contributes to an understanding of book creation
as collaborative and contingent, and insists that all texts, not simply those
attributed to women, were marked and mediated by numerous agents,
rendering books more mobile and more complexly sexed than has been
allowed.”46 Smith’s theoretical approach considers material “things”
(objects and environments) not as simply reflecting or preserving
human-generated meaning, but as integral to meaning making in early
modern England.47 The human subject, in this account, is porous rather
than sovereign, and is positioned alongside objects in mutually affective
relations rather than in a hierarchical position over them. Such a perspec-
tive renders all human action collaborative in a very deep sense indeed.
Through an impressive collection of examples, Smith argues persuasively
not only that book production in early modern England was “collabora-
tive and contingent,” but that the various putatively menial or secondary
tasks associated with book production were understood as “co-labours
and granted a potent originary power” in their own time.48 We there-
fore need, according to Smith, “a more flexible language to elaborate the
dynamics of textual co-presence” in early modern literature.49
Julie Crawford’s Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production
in Early Modern England (2014) examines the roles that four fascinating
elite women (the Countess of Pembroke, Margaret Hoby, the Countess
of Bedford, and Mary Wroth) played in the literary and political machi-
nations of their time. Situating these women’s extensive textual engage-
ments (writing, reading, circulating, editing, and patronizing) in their
localized, national, and international contexts, Crawford’s research shows
the crucial roles such women played in the literary production and polit-
ico-religious activism of their networks: all (with the exception of Hoby)
used the production and circulation of literary works to support their
ascension to the role of key spokesperson for their Protestant network.50
Crawford, like Smith, intervenes in the traditional narrative of the history
of English letters as peopled by independent and individualized male
authors. Unlike Smith, she retains a notion of the individual agent in his-
tory, however hers is not the ahistorical subject of New Criticism, but
a thoroughly socialized iteration of a particular kind of individual agent
(i.e., the “mediatrix”). As such, “communities, coteries and alliances” are
10 P. Pender and A. Day

integral to her project. “Larger than the ‘little commonwealth’ of mar-

riage, and smaller than the body politic of the nation,” Crawford states,
“these structures of affiliation were at once heuristics of interpretation,
and materially real; indeed it is precisely this duality that makes them
such interesting subjects of study.”51
In spite of their divergent approaches, both of these signal contribu-
tions to the field open up new avenues of inquiry that this volume is eager
to address. “Grossly Material Things” and Mediatrix are deliberately dif-
ferent projects: Smith’s is a work of book history that ventures into liter-
ary criticism very rarely, while Crawford’s project is presented as “equal
parts literary history and literary criticism.”52 Alongside the terminology
of early modern women’s collaborative practices described above, these
works illuminate the interpretive possibilities that become available when
we take early modern women’s collaborations seriously. Collectively these
taxonomies provide an indication of the variety of ways feminist scholars
have and continue to utilize collaboration to different ends.
The chapters that follow divide into two categories: “Literary
and Intertextual Co-Labor” and “Collective Contexts and Material
Co-Production,” with the real interest, however, lying in the ways these
approaches are bridged within and across chapters. This productive con-
fluence of approaches is epitomized in Micheline White’s pioneering
investigation of the “royal co-authorship” of Henry VIII and Katherine
Parr, particularly in the construction of Parr’s Psalms or Prayers taken out
of Holy Scripture and the couple’s royal proclamations. White painstak-
ingly reconstructs the collective contexts within which these texts were
produced, and in doing so paints a startling new picture of the mate-
rial co-production of key Henrician texts. Arguably, however, it is in
bringing to light the unexpectedly extensive literary and intertextual
co-labor of Henry and Katherine and in foregrounding Katherine’s pre-
viously unacknowledged contribution to Henrician policy and propa-
ganda that White’s chapter makes its most incisive contribution. The
following chapter also examines sovereign co-authorship, this time
though the example of Elizabeth I’s speeches. Leah S. Marcus revisits
her groundbreaking editorial work on Elizabeth’s corpus to foreground
the variety of textual processes involved in the material co-production of
these often famous texts, including oral performance, audience report-
age, revisions, emendation, editing (both authorial and otherwise), and
circulation in manuscript and print. Marcus effectively demolishes any
lingering notion of Elizabeth’s sole authorship of the speeches and yet
 1 INTRODUCTION … 11

she resists any vacuous conflation of the individual agencies involved.

The different types of collaborations she thereby reveals are historicized
and differentiated.
Rebecca Stark-Gendrano’s chapter is similarly concerned with textual
emendation and editing—in the form of Thomas Goad’s posthumous
publication of Elizabeth Jocelin’s Mother’s Legacy. Stark-Gendrano’s
detailed consideration of differences between the original manuscript
and later printed versions of this text contributes an unusually extended
example to the study of male editing of female-authored works. Her
analysis of the intertextual frame of reference within which Goad worked
moreover provides valuable fresh insights into his editorial rationale. The
final chapter in Part I is Brenda M. Hosington’s examination of the para-
texts accompanying two lesser-studied early modern women translators,
Suzanne du Verger and Judith Man. Translation represents a particularly
fertile field for the study of collaboration, and Hosington extends her
important work in this area by considering the textual apparatus through
which these women’s works were presented to the public. Dedicatory
addresses emerge from this analysis as important sites of meta-textual
commentary on gendered authorship and collaborative relationships.
The first chapter in Part II of the volume, “Collective Contexts and
Material Co-Production,” is Alexandra Day’s archival investigation of
manuscripts associated with the sixteenth-century Lumley/Fitzalan
schoolroom. Most of these texts are translations, and in analyzing their
dedications to Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, this chapter provides
a useful complement and counterpart to the previous one. Day exam-
ines the literary and intertextual co-labours that inform these works
through the lens of the literary gift, in which the materiality of the book
is invoked in the performance of a surprising variety of collaborative
connections. Louise Horton’s chapter makes a highly original contribu-
tion to the scholarship on Lady Jane Grey. Excavating the complex cir-
cuits of transmission through which the texts attributed to Grey came
to be published—and revised—in print, Horton reveals a range of extra-
authorial agents who are likely to have participated in their material co-
production. As with Marcus’s analysis of Elizabeth’s speeches, Horton’s
research poses a decided challenge to ideas about sole authorship, and
speaks directly to the conundrum, broached at the beginning of this
introduction, about the potentially volatile consequences of bringing
concepts of collaboration to bear on the canon of early modern women’s
writing.
12 P. Pender and A. Day

If Horton’s chapter poses one kind of challenge to traditional under-

standings of this canon, Rosalind Smith’s chapter on early modern wom-
en’s marginalia poses another, in this instance by introducing writing not
previously considered part of this corpus. Analyzing relatively neglected
examples of Elizabeth I’s marginalia that circulated in devotional works
prior to her accession to the throne, Smith mounts a persuasive case that
the princess’s marginal annotations are unexpectedly revealing testaments
to the strategic intertextual, interpersonal, and political negotiations she
undertook in the last years of Mary’s reign. The final two chapters in the
volume address more directly a recurring interest in the collection with
the issue of patronage. Julie Crawford expands in her chapter on her
demonstrated understanding of Lucy, Countess of Bedford’s poetic and
political machinations as “Mediatrix” by considering printed appeals to
Bedford’s patronage as versions of “virtual” collaboration, focusing spe-
cifically on instances of dedications to historical epics. Patricia Pender’s
chapter extends the volume’s interest in royal textual production by
examining Lady Margaret Beaufort’s patronage, focusing on her collabo-
ration with the first English printers, as represented in paratexts to books
they produced together. Pushing against the traditional demarcations of
the early modern period, Pender argues that Henry VIII’s grandmother
provided an important precedent for the collaborative relationships
established by the royal Tudor women who followed her, including sev-
eral of the writers discussed in previous chapters.
As the preceding synopsis should make clear, Gender, Authorship
and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration does not prioritize one way
of viewing collaboration over another: approaches are blended in dif-
ferent proportions in individual chapters. Indeed, the collection as a
whole deliberately sets out to place in implicit dialogue more “literary”
and more “material” analyses of this topic, with the aim of creating a
space for future studies to uncover new points of contact and illumina-
tion, or—equally importantly—points of departure and disagreement.
Collectively, however, the collection does ask that we consider the variety
of different ways that the concept of collaboration has been—and con-
tinues to be—deployed in literary scholarship, and it advocates for the
application of a kind of “due diligence” analysis of the historical, ideo-
logical, and practical consequences of this term when it is deployed in
early modern women’s studies. The chapters in this volume are brought
together to further that process.
 1 INTRODUCTION … 13

Notes
1. Danielle Clarke, “Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early
Modern Women’s Texts,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual
Studies 15 (2002): 187–209.
2. See Elaine Beilin, “Anne Askew’s Self-Portrait in the Examinations,”
in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and
Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Hannay (Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1985), 77–91; and “Anne Askew’s Dialogue
with Authority,” in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and
Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and
France, eds Marie-Rose Logan and Peter Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1991), 313–322. See also Kimberley Anne Coles,
Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 17–44; and Patricia Pender,
“Reading Bale Reading Anne Askew: Contested Collaboration in the
Examinations,” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and
American History and Literature 73, no. 3 (2010): 507–522.
3. See Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production
in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
30–85; Coles, Religion, Reform, 75–112; Patricia Demers, “‘Warpe’ and
‘Webb’ in the Sidney Psalms: The ‘Coupled Worke’ of the Countess of
Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney,” in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples,
Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, eds Marjorie Stone and
Judith Thompson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006),
41–58; Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric
of Modesty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 92–121.
4. Heather Hirschfeld, “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of
Authorship,” PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 3 (May 2001): 609–622, 610.
5. Ibid., 614–615.
6. Ibid., 615.
7. Ibid., 620.
8. Ibid., 615.
9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing
Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds Ranajit Guha and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 13.
10. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 12.
11. “Introduction: Early Modern Women’s Material Texts: Production,
Transmission and Reception,” in Material Cultures of Early Modern
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1196

Paretic dementia of alcoholism,

633

Paroxysms of epilepsy, characters of,

478

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818

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586

anatomy of acute alcoholism,

595

Pathology of athetosis,

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1014

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744

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689

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699

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1096

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196

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708

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996

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475

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779

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438

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978

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