ABSTRACT
The expansion of the canon of early modern women’s writing to include many nonliterary prose works has allowed maternal advice to assume an increasingly important place. Dorothy Leigh’s ‘wildly popular’ conduct book The Mother’s Blessing (1616)1 is now regularly excerpted in anthologies and anatomized by scholars. Its new prominence is matched by new arguments about its political engagements: while Kristen Poole argued in 1995 for Leigh’s ‘creation of a liminal authorial space which is neither private nor fully public’,2 Catharine Gray more recently sees Leigh’s work as ‘a project of reform and dissent that self-consciously exceeds the bounds of the intimate sphere’.3 Both these important attempts to situate Leigh’s maternal voice in reformist public discourse work from the text’s origins in Leigh’s own private maternal identity, however, so that ‘[m]aternity is presented as an overflow of the domestic into the public’.4 Because, as Sylvia Brown points out, ‘Dorothy Leigh justifies her venture into the male sphere of book production by the authority of female reproduction, by an appeal straight from her woman’s body’,5 critics court the danger of essentializing her maternal voice and overlooking its political and social construction. In this chapter I consider two anonymous prose treatises that, unlike Leigh’s, offer maternal performances without access to any verifying essential maternal identity. While they appear to be, and have been considered as, different editions of a single text, I shall argue that a comparison of their strategies actually
1 Valerie Wayne, ‘Advice for Women from Mothers and Patriarchs’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 59.
