Mediatrix

Mediatrix has to be one of the best titles for a book on early modern women, and indeed on social literary authorship conceived across the bounds of gender, in recent years. John Donne uses the term in a letter to Sir Henry Goodere, wondering if Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford, might be the most effective intermediary between himself and the right people in early Jacobean cultural and political circles. The author, Julie Crawford, picks it up in this deft and detailed study of women in the Sidney alliance, using it to interrogate women’s roles of multiple kinds in textual production and in socio-political activism: as patrons, muses, dedicatees and addressees, and as spokespeople, active readers and annotators, participants in particular dialogic exchanges, privileged audiences, and keepers and decoders of meaning. Working in the vein of recent work in women’s writing and in social conceptions of authorship more widely, Crawford pushes the concept of authorship into women’s ‘constitutive involvement’ in textual production and the making of meaning, as well as in the sites of texts’ production and consumption. The idea that ‘texts and their textual meanings are produced by both writers and their addressees, and in moments of consumption as well as creation’ (p. 4) is central to her argument about women’s religious and political power, and the politicised social relationships instantiated in textual exchange

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Consumption (sociology · Dialogic · Epistemology · Literature · Meaning (existential · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Early Modern Women Writers · Irish and British Studies · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy