Abstract
This book argues for women's indispensable yet neglected place in early modern genealogy. Its approach to the topic entails, however, sensibly widening the remit of genealogy from the records of ‘biological’ descent (pedigrees, armorial roles, and family trees) to the rich plurality of overlapping genres and discourses, spanning from the heraldic, antiquarian, and funereal to the elegiac, literary, and mythographic. Marie H. Loughlin achieves her stated goal of contributing ‘to the present critical reformulation of early modern genealogical discourses’ (p. 17), positioning her project within its scholarly lineage, which includes scholars like Daniel Woolf, Frank Whigham, Michelle M. Dowd, and Erin Murphy (p. 13). Such critics have recognised the cultural work performed by early modern genealogy while countering dismissive claims that reduce it to a rearguard exercise reinforcing male authority; for example, heraldry, far from being an irrelevantly eccentric sign system that indulges class pretensions, provides fertile material for understanding identity formation, both familial and societal. Loughlin advances the field further by fully considering how Mary Sidney Herbert (henceforth MSH) and Mary Sidney Wroth (henceforth MSW), the focal figures of her study, participate in the engendering of descent – as her punning title suggests. With the double focus, she profits from the genealogical friction between biological and literary inheritance insofar as MSH and MSW shape their writerly relationships and, in turn, have them shaped through the dynamic legacy of Philip Sidney. Loughlin marshals a pliable and expressive critical vocabulary for parsing genealogy's nuanced discursive manifestations around gender. Key concepts such as ‘origin, descent, inheritance, debt, bequeathal, reproduction, and affiliation’ (p. 18) enable her to demonstrate how MSH and MSW cooperate with, revise, and challenge their age's ‘lineal thinking’ about kinship bonds. Their involvement in engendering descent requires an analysis sensitive to grey-scale distinctions, rather than steered by stark political binaries, since genealogy, notwithstanding its, at times, rigid representations and applications, belonged to family narratives that were open to interpretation and, for these women, fostered ‘writing and reading communities within and beyond their families’ (p. 17–18).
This book is divided into two relatively equal sections, the first five chapters devoted to MSH and the next four chapters to MSW. Loughlin creates further symmetry by highlighting a series of common perspectives in the chapter titles for each women. The initial chapter of each section dwells on ‘Genealogical Cultures: Family, Household, Community’. Chapter 1 positions MSH within the Sidney and Herbert families and explores how she facilitated her kinship networks for herself and her loved ones, having learned from her father and older brother how to exploit ancestral affiliation. Building on the research of Margaret P. Hannay, Loughlin then examines MSH's involvement with two commemorative artifacts, the Sidney Family Psalter with its marginalia of family birth and marriage dates and the communally produced copy of her translation of A Discourse of Life and Death, which marks the deaths of Sidney-Herbert family members. In chapter 6, Loughlin considers how MSW, unlike MSH, would have experienced with her husband's and, shortly afterwards, her son's death the ‘erasure’ of her marital family's line – that is, the termination of any dynastic future for herself, perhaps explaining the reason why she took up ‘a position in the Sidney literary genealogy’ (p. 140). MSW would have learned about the power of curated ancestral affiliation from not only her father Robert Sidney but also her mother Barbara Gamage Sidney, who had commissioned in 1608 a pedigree roll of her birth family's descent in order to assert her status as ‘daughter and sole heir’ to her father's estate (p. 151).
The next main perspective, ‘In the Hands of Others’, deals with representations of MSH and MSW in the genealogical imaginary of coeval writers. According to chapter 2, poets such as Michael Drayton, John Donne, and Thomas Churchyard struggle to displace or efface the genealogical problem of squaring the brother-and-sister kinship of Philip and Mary with their literary relationship as ‘poet-progenitor-ancestor and post-descendent-heir’ (p. 59). Chapters 3 and 4 continue the inquiry into the genealogical figurations and tropes of MSH's status as author and patron in relation to her brother as well as other male poets: in The Countess of Pembroke's Ivychurch, Abraham Fraunce implements Ovidian mythography to voice anxieties over the ‘female patron-as-artist to masculine modes of poetic production’ (p. 84), whereas the more generous Thomas Moffet, in The Silkewormes and their Flies, stresses the literary collaboration between Philip and Mary, rather than their kinship relation, by invoking the silkworm's non-linear life-cycle. In chapter 7, Loughlin notes that, in the wake of sibling and cousin deaths, dedications to MSW shift their focus from celebrating her Sidney inheritance of virtues to acknowledging her as ‘Philip Sidney's belated poetic heir’ (p. 165). Nevertheless, male elegiasts, most notably Josuah Sylvester, tend to claim for themselves Philip's laurel for their poetic agendas while ascribing to MSW the role of patron. It is only Ben Jonson who consistently regards her as inheriting the ‘Sidneian family legacy of granting patronage, inspiring writers, and producing poetry’ (p. 174).
Narrowing her scope from the status of the Sidney women in their respective pedigrees to the depictions of their natal and literary descents in the work of male writers, Loughlin finally examines their self-conceived encounters with genealogical issues, signalling this last perspective with the phrase ‘In Her Own Hands’. Chapter 5 provides a close reading of the genealogical tropes in MSH's ‘To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney’, a dedicatory poem that prefaces one of the manuscripts of the Sidney-Pembroke Psalmes. In Loughlin's reading, MSH relies on a variety of feminine bodily images to rethink traditional male authorship in terms of the collaboration of a mixed-gender community of creators and translators. In chapters 8 and 9, Loughlin turns her attention to MSW's romance Urania, which she ingeniously describes as a great ‘meta-genealogical archive’ (p. 183), in which women's places are often confused and forgotten, even as they work to preserve their family lines and restore other women to communal memory. The female characters are the protectors and producers of ancestral memory, particularly through oral storytelling, although forgetting in its dialectic with remembering can also lead to new enabling identities, particularly in the case of the eponymous protagonist, who is reborn at Leucadian Rock after her rejection by Parselius.
The space given to each of these perspectives reveals the key differences in Loughlin's treatment of MSH and MSW. Loughlin devotes three chapters to what others say about the former, while the latter's romance receives two chapters. The eighth chapter, the longest in the volume, stands out as the strongest, for Loughlin brings to the romance a sophisticated critical apparatus for explaining how its narrative structure, naming conventions, and chivalric discourses promote genealogical agendas motivated by fears and desires over remembrance. If I could add anything to the study, given Loughlin's concern with articulating the gender implications of descent, I would have liked to see a comparison between the genealogical vision of Philip Sidney's Arcadia and that of Urania. How might MSW revise or contest her uncle's vision? More illustrations of artifacts, such as the Guilford and Dudley hangings, a pedigree roll, and the Sidney Family Psalter, would have enhanced the reader's experience as well.
This book makes an important and intelligent contribution not only to the scholarship centred on the members of the Sidney family and their circles but also to the growing field of commemoration, which synthesises memory studies with death studies. Just as significantly, its achievement consists in making a compelling case for further research into the new field of ‘critical genealogy’. Loughlin's meticulous parsing of female relationships caught between familial and authorship affiliations helps us infer how the Sidney women and their fellow writers sought to transform those affiliations into meaningful communities and how they struggled to be remembered by perpetuating those communities, ensuring that future generations would not forget them.