The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540-1640. Robert TittlerThe Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850. Gerald MacLean , Donna Landry , Joseph P. Ward
writing, and we merely court frustration when our political agenda demands that we look for what is seldom to be found. Susan J. Wiseman writes fascinatingly on the "semi-subjective voice of echo" in Renaissance poems, which "can become another personality, even a disorderly personality, inhabiting the poem"; in cases of female echoes of male poetic voices, echo achieves what Renaissance women so often tried to negotiate: "the power of a female voice to reply while claiming silence" (221, 230). And Ros Ballaster writes of Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips, who as Royalist sympathizers wished for the restoration of the monarchy, but "as women . . . had experienced new agency and power in the Civil War and Commonwealth years," and wanted to keep it (234). Both of these collections brim with useful and thought-provoking essays, and make good additions to one's Renaissance library. LINDA WOODBRIDGE Pennsylvania State University