Mediatrix is about four interrelated communities in which politically influential women, or “mediatrixes,” played central roles, and the literary work they produced. The first focuses on Mary Sidney Herbert, the Sidney circle and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; the second on Margaret Hoby’s community of readers in recusant Yorkshire and the godly texts this reading kept alive; the third on the circle surrounding Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford, and John Donne’s verse letters, occasional poems and Holy Sonnets; and the fourth on Mary Wroth, the Sidney-Herbert alliance, and The ... More

Mediatrix is about four interrelated communities in which politically influential women, or “mediatrixes,” played central roles, and the literary work they produced. The first focuses on Mary Sidney Herbert, the Sidney circle and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; the second on Margaret Hoby’s community of readers in recusant Yorkshire and the godly texts this reading kept alive; the third on the circle surrounding Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford, and John Donne’s verse letters, occasional poems and Holy Sonnets; and the fourth on Mary Wroth, the Sidney-Herbert alliance, and The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. While many of these women are familiar figures in feminist literary history, Mediatrix looks at their contributions less in terms of their gender or seemingly discrete roles as writers, patrons, or readers, than in terms of their religious and political affiliations and commitments. The four communities were related to each other not only by birth and marriage, but by their engagement with the cause loosely identified as militant Protestantism, invested in a limited monarchy, and advanced in no small part by what has been called “practically active” humanism, particularly the production and circulation of literary texts. By looking at the work these communities produced, as well as the places in and the means by which they did so, I argue not only that women played a central role in the production of some of England’s most important literary texts, but that the work they produced was an essential part of the political, as well as the literary, culture of early modern England.