Review of English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, volume 9, edited by Peter Beal and Margaret J.M. Ezell, The British Library, 2000, 314 pp. £45. ISBN 0 7123 4674 0 to be published in Antiquarian Book Monthly.

This volume brings together thirteen articles relating to 'Writings by Early Modern Women'. The need to find relevant material for such a theme evidently has both benefits and disadvantages. Confuscius, he say: stone should be solid and suitable for sermon.

As with volume 8, reviewed in these pages in February, the first piece is one of the best and the second the least satisfactory. Others would have benefited from editorial intrusion, one or two might have been reduced to footnotes and another, 'Swansongs: Reading voice in the poetry of Lady Hester Pulter', while inventive, really should not have been included in English Manuscript Studies at all since its sole concern is with literary criticism and historical exegesis of a text that just happens to survive in manuscript, but discussion of the manuscript as evidence does not enter into the author's consideration.

The first article, 'Women, Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century', contains some splendidly sane and real revelations: that of the fifty English and Scottish women who wrote some kind of verse before 1600 'about half printed at least some of what they wrote', that 'women and print in the sixteenth century is at least as important a topic as women and manuscripts', and, moreover, that 'women's use of both print and manuscript, like men's, was flexible, and reflects not so much a greater or lesser degree of authorial confidence, but an accurate sense of the socially appropriate channel through which to reach the intended audience.' We should be particularly grateful for the evidence that contemporaries were aware of the differences between the writing and spelling habits of men and women - 'Shee wrote a hand far better than most weomen usually write, and (which in ye sex is strange) exact ortography.' There are other marvellous examples quoted particularly in relation to the use of occasional verse in wooing and of one for glossing over an attempted rape and others to the odds against the survival of any sixteenth-century manuscript on paper ('the martyrdom of jakes and fire'). The author refers to the famous case of John Warburton's cook using manuscripts to line baking dishes and might like to add Sir Walter Greg's article 'The Bakings of Betsy' to her sources.

The second article, 'Princess Elizabeth's Hand in The Glass of the Sinful Soul', does not take heed that Hypothesis is only the starting point of History. It begins and ends with it. No contemporary, or later, evidence is advanced to support the notion that as a teenager Elizabeth I produced translations of texts in manuscript as 'synecdoches' (a word that barks eight times) for their creator as a commodity, a marriageable princess, for actual use in marriage negotiations. It is unlikely that the manuscript in the title would in any case have proved beneficial in this way since, as the Princess herself noted, it was 'all vnperfytte and vncorecte...and...rude'. As likely an explanation is that Elizabeth, who was not liberally provided for as a child, was reduced to manufacturing by her own hand the New Years' gifts that she gave to her family - and all the examples quoted were given to her step-mother Katherine Parr, her father Henry VIII and her brother, later Edward VI, not suitors. Doubtless, also, Elizabeth took some natural and some childish pride in her skill and achievement. Marriage negotiations were going on at the time, but there is no evidence at all that these manuscripts were used or considered for use in them.

There are two articles on the attractive calligrapher Esther Inglis which skilful editing might, however, have conflated into one. A surprising omission in the first is the author's failure to comment on the similarity of the decoration on Inglis's bosom in the portrait illustrated in the article to the floral embellishment of the manuscripts which is the burden of the title 'Dame Flora's Blossoms'. The emphasis of the first of these articles (the better of the two) on the practical purposes of Inglis's craft - patronage and paying the rent - is preferable to the descent into gender politics towards the end of the second, 'Hand-Ma[i]de Books', which begins, incidentally, with the novel suggestion that William Blake would have loved computers.

'Two Unpublished Letters of Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke' takes up ten pages with a largely inconsequential commentary on two new but fairly unremarkable letters. It transpires that nothing can be found about the circumstances that prompted the letters, the significance of which is nonetheless puffed up as 'instructive because they concretely demonstrate her readiness to use her influence on behalf of social inferiors.' To which is added the fantasy that she 'may well have elicited dedicatory epistles from such proteges as Spenser and Breton with epistles of her own on behalf of such as those she addressed to Thynne in 1595 and 1603'. The other article involving the Countess, 'Elizabeth Ashburnham Richardson's Meditation on the Countess of Pembroke's Discourse' unerringly demonstrates 'the scribal tradition of reading as rewriting' and the interest of the manuscript 'as a rare example of an early modern woman's reflection on printed work by another woman.' Elizabeth Ashburton Richardson subtitled her version of the Discourse 'Instructions for my Children'.

The other article about her in this volume concerns her 'motherlie endeauors' in two manuscripts, one of which is also headed 'Instructions for my children'. They relate to her printed work A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters (1645) and predate 'most other examples of the genre'. This essay demonstrates 'how one woman treated both her manuscript and printed texts: as sites for continual revision.' The two examinations of Elizabeth Ashburton Richardson's writing, and rewriting, practices take up thirty-one pages.

Another 'mothers legacye', this time to an unborn child, and described as 'arguably the genre's most poignant example', because the author died in the birth of the child, is the subject of 'The Approbation of Elizabeth Jocelin'. The articler opines that the manuscript copy in the British Library is autograph, that the differences between it and the printed version are significant and that they can be put down to 'male gatekeeping' by the Archbishop of Canterbury's chaplain, Thomas Goad, who oversaw the publication in 1624 and wrote an introductory preface which he called 'The Approbation'. On these bases a case is erected that Goad's interventions represent an important example of 'the silencing of women's words' by a man motivated by 'gender ideology' and his own political and religious agenda. Before accepting these conclusions as sound footings for constructing any edifices of their own, readers need to satisfy themselves on a number of fronts:

i) That the manuscript is actually autograph - there is no independent witness to Elizabeth Jocelin's handwriting and therefore the notion of it being autograph depends entirely on interpretation of the nature of the revisions, the one adopted being not entirely shared, as the author admits (footnote 2), by the person who has probably looked at more scribal manuscripts than anyone else in the field. This cautionary remark should not, however, be taken to imply that this reviewer knows the manuscript not to be autograph.

ii) That Goad was actually the person who made the alterations 'twixt hand and press - no changes are made on the manuscript in hands other than the main scribe and no other manuscript of the text or printed proofs bearing changes in Goad's hand are known to exist. The author allows herself the tiny escape route: 'He appears also to have changed her text'.

iii) That, as the writer of the article herself suggests (but rejects) in footnote 3, 'a scribe copying Jocelin's manuscript for Goad [was not the one who] introduced the changes found in the printed version'; or, as the author does not consider, that Jocelin herself might not have prepared a later version of the text that has not survived.

iv) That more than three, at most, of the twenty-four of the examples of the differences between the manuscript and the printed text quoted in Select Collations at the end of the article (purposely selected, we are told, 'with a view towards supporting the issues raised in the essay') are such that would have raised any eyebrows had they appeared in Jocelin's own text, since most of them seem to add up, on close consideration, to no more than verbal rearrangements and other changes that do not materially affect meanings, if they in fact do so in any degree.

Perhaps, if it was Goad at all, he merely corrected Selected Collations 15, 16 and 20 (the only ones that have any real substantive changes) because he thought Jocelin was in some error and in the other twenty-one was doing no more than making her meanings clear, without having a major manipulative and religious and political agenda that he was imposing on Jocelin with a view to silencing her or making her a passive and unwilling advocate of his own opinions. It is also perhaps worth reflecting on the writer's own observation that 'the drift of Goad's changes is anticipated in some of the manuscript's corrections.'

'Monument of Endless Affection' is a charming study of an unusual textual and domestic collaboration between Lady Anne Southwell and her second husband Captain Henry Sibthorpe (with him taking somewhat Dennis Thatcher-like advisory, deferential and reverential roles) which is pithily described as an 'uncommon commonplace book'. 'Scribal Hands and Dating of Lady Falkland: Her Life', is a thoroughly scholarly unravelling of the identities of the probable main scribe of the manuscript and two of the emenders and of when it was written and corrected. 'Elizabeth Jekyll's Spiritual Diary: Private Manuscript or Political Document?' is an ingenious piece of detective work which certainly establishes that the manuscript is not autograph. Beyond that, while persuasive, one cannot entirely get rid of the suspicion that some of its speculative deductions as examples of political spin, even by a 'master-strategist', and made more powerful for being represented as the work of deceased female author, are not just a bit too pat. The author of 'Lucy Hutchinson and Order and Disorder' is equally elaborate and inspired, but perhaps rightly more cautious in his conclusions.

As expressed in my review of volume 8, the last item, 'Manuscripts at Auction [and in booksellers' catalogues]', suffers from its self-acknowledged lack of exhaustiveness. It would have been instructive, for instance, had the compiler followed the progressions in price for the Swan Roll c.1500 within a twelve-month from Lawrence's of Crewkerne via Christie's to purchase (courtesy of the Reviewing Committee) by Norfolk Record Office, though none, according to reports in the press, reached the £43,700 given here. The other deliberate omissions give the mistaken impression that most post-medieval manuscripts on the market are heraldic ones.

Too many of the illustrations in this volume are poor. Apart from generally being too small and therefore virtually useless, they mostly lack all contrast and would seriously have been better produced on a photocopier gasping for toner.

Roy Davids