On Anthologizing Early Modern Women’s Poetry
On initial reading, it is easy to read Sarah Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann’s distillation of poetry by Hester Pulter, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, and Lucy Hutchinson in their anthology Women Poets of the English Civil War as, to use a term conjured from Susan Felch’s essay “The Backward Gaze” appearing in the same Editing Early Modern Women volume, ghettoizing women’s writing. Felch writes: “Are we committed to a thick description of local culture, which necessarily involves not isolating women writers into a gendered ghetto and which pushes us to describe affiliations and social circles, rather than succumbing to the alphabetized lists of names that still form our dominant biographical schema?” (39). On close examination, though, Ross and Scott-Baumann lay out their editorial processes for Editing Early Modern Women in such a way in this essay as to justify the distillation of women writers from a specific time period (more specific a context than, say, “Early Modern Women Writers” which spans early early modern and late early modern women writers) into one anthology. There still exist differences in how women writers are treated in scholarly editions, say, the Norton Anthology (namely, their work is not as prevalent as that of their male counterparts, according to Ross and Scott-Baumann), and the anthology remains a “powerful conceptual and economic means of redressing the paucity of women’s texts in the mainstream classroom” (Ross and Scott-Baumann 215). This realization—that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to editing, compiling, writing of early modern women; that even within the same volume of Editing Early Modern Women, two different viewpoints such as Felch’s and Ross and Scott-Baumann’s are presented, but not positioned against each other—shows that the editorial goals should, in my opinion, be made transparent both (1) to the editor and (2) to the audience (in such a way that Ross and Scott-Baumann exhibit in this essay and in their anthology). Goals, in turn, inform the approach. Ross and Scott-Baumann’s goal “to be able to introduce a non-specialist audience to these facets of the early modern woman’s poem” (217) informed their editorial decisions; likewise, when creating a digital edition in this class, it will be important to keep our goals at the forefront of our minds when making editorial decisions, and to document them transparently for our readers, as well.
Work Cited
Editing Early Modern Women, pp. 215-231
